After the south coast we headed inland to the high country, in search of slightly cooler weather and tea! Sri Lanka is famous for its tea and we were keen to learn a bit more about it and try some too. There are many large tea factories you can tour but we found a little, family tour just outside of Ella that had good reviews (but not too good reviews!).

The difficultly for this place was transport. It was about 20 mins by tuk tuk outside of Ella, not easy to find, up a bit of a hill and outside of mobile coverage so getting back is tricky. Therefore, we organised ahead with our Airbnb host to get a large tuk tuk (the four of us in the back is very squeezy in a standard tuk tuk and only ok for short rides) to take us there and back.

Even with our “Good Luck” tuk tuk (note the licence plate surround!) we still had to walk the last section

The little hut was nestled amongst the tea plants looking very pretty.

We started with some tea picking, which Esti was keen to join in with, despite his lack of opposing thumbs.

You’re supposed to pick the new growth, and only the first two leaves, to get the best flavour. Then we took our leaves back to the hut to learn about rolling and drying them.

I honestly can’t remember all the steps for each type of tea – we talked about green tea, BOP, pekoe, silver tips (the champagne of tea) and got to try them too.

To go with the tea, they had a selection of Sri Lankan snacks, some spicy and some sweet for us to try. And they even climbed a tree to get down a jackfruit for one of the families who had not tried one before ❤️

We were pretty happy with the friendly, clearly very local tour. And even happier that our tuk tuk was down the road waiting for us – even if M did have to walk up the small hill while the rest of us got to sit inside (we might have been gloating just a little).