Travel Diaries: Ella, Sri Lanka

And a rant about how social media is ruining travel

Remixes of 90s dance tunes reverberated across the bar, a raucous group of girls were snapping selfies in the pool, and a steady stream of hikers wound their way up a neighbouring trail. A woman in a red gown and flower crown swung through the air, ATVs buzzed across the rolling tea fields, zipliners whizzed through the panoramic sunset. Just below their screaming silhouettes, caught in an ephemeral beam of golden light, an elderly woman in a saree walked along a dirt road to a rustic farmer’s cottage – like a ghost of a long-gone past.

Ella, the tourist hub of Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, is a mass of contradictions. Here, natural beauty and quiet culture meet unbridled development and almost manic tourism. I recently gaped at an Instagramer’s ‘perfect’ itinerary, which packed a sunrise hike, cooking class, train ride, karaoke bar, brunch, forest sky-walk, tea-tasting, and of course, the aforementioned ATV rides and ziplining, into just two days. For a checklist traveller, Ella really does have it all.

We took a slightly different approach.

Sunrise view from Golden View Villa in Ella

Our guesthouse teetered on the highest ridge looking across at Ella Rock. The owner welcomed us with a large pot of tea, and we watched as the clouds poured into the valley, immersing us in a chilly sea of thick fog. Just the excuse we needed to grab dinner nearby and get to bed early.

The next morning, instead of joining the sunrise crowds on Little Adam’s Peak, we soaked it in from the comfort of our cosy balcony. Gentle birdsong twinkled through the twilight silence, and we were completely alone, apart from a dog perched outside the farmhouse below, its alert gaze trained on the horizon.

Ella’s main town is bustling and slightly gritty, with a long row of cafés and restaurants advertising meal deals and happy hour. We cut through the mayhem and slipped into the shade of a forest path, eventually coming to the Nine Arch Bridge. This colonial-era railway viaduct, made entirely out of stone, brick and cement, overlooks a gorge filled with steep tea fields. It’s a marvel from every vantage point, and one of the most photographed sites on the island. We stopped to take a couple of obligatory shots before carrying on along the tracks.

We’d chosen a section of the Pekoe Trail, Sri Lanka’s first long distance walking route, to get us through till lunch. There are two sections that are easily accessible from Ella, and take just a few hours each. The one from Ella to Demodara promised fewer crowds and gentler climbs.

Nine Arch Bridge in Ella, Sri Lanka

This is where I realised that just outside of the main tourist sites, this area is mostly gentle and bucolic – worlds away from the live music and two-for-one cocktails. We walked for hours, encountering just a few other hikers, several good-natured dogs, and a gang of noisy goats grazing on tea leaves. Halfway through, just as I was starting to moan about the heat, we came across a little house on the side of the road advertising a toilet and some refreshments. The owner rushed out with a couple of plastic chairs and a wide, toothless grin, and we bought bottles of water and a pack of coconut biscuits. While we were glugging thirstily away, he beamed at us intently, his gaze unwavering. “Which country?” He asked, and when Adam said England, he babbled excitedly about cricket, and patted him affectionately on the arm as we took our leave.

As we neared Demodara Station, where this section of the trail ended, a tea worker draped in a red shirt waved from the shadowy hills of a distant plantation. We waved back, and she kept waving and waving until the trail dipped and she was gone. A tuk tuk spend toward us, then rounded a corner and disappeared behind the stout little shrubs. In the distance, a train hooted, and we scrambled down the hill to get back to Ella for a chicken curry.

The next day, we hiked up Little Adam’s Peak and back down within an hour. After such a grueling trek, we thought we deserved a treat at a nearby resort and spa we could never afford to stay in. We booked in for Ayurvedic massages and steam baths (which felt a lot like being trapped in a coffin and slowly boiled alive), followed by a soak in a tub overlooking more tea fields. Then we decided, what the hell, why not round out the day with a drink at the resort’s panoramic bar? We’d given up on culture – we were in Bali now. We spent the rest of the afternoon sipping cocktails and pondering which dress we’d rent to wear on the ‘Ella Swing’ next door. (A buttery yellow for me, red satin for Adam.) As we drained our drinks and took our leave, a gaggle of middle-aged Russian women flooded the patio, shouting along to Abba and posing for photos.

The next morning, we lugged our bags to the train station and jostled our way across the crowded platform. The tracks from Kandy to Ella were damaged in Cyclone Ditwah, but the train was still running between Ella and Nuwara Eliya, and nothing was going to stop these people from getting their train photos.

If Sri Lanka has made it into your social media algorithm, you know the shots I mean – people hanging out of the train doors, the little blue and red train rounding a curve behind them.

As soon as our train huffed into the station, there was a frantic scramble – people running between cars seeking out unoccupied doorways, grabbing window seats, arguing over which side to be on, strategising over who would pose first. The few locals on the train quietly found seats and looked out the window, ignoring the chaos around them.

Fortunately, most people had gotten their shots by the time we rolled into the next station, (maybe ten minutes later) and shuffled off in a large, happy pack to get tuk tuks back to Ella.

We carried on to Badulla with almost an entire car to ourselves as the last stragglers loitered between carriages, I gazed out the window and felt a gristly rage for the little screen pressed into my hand. Warm, as if it were alive, and calling to me even when I didn’t hear it.

Travel is supposed to make us see outside of ourselves, bring us closer to others, to illuminate how small we are in the world and chip away at our egos. This is yet another thing social media is quietly stealing away from us. While we look for the best spot to pose, fussing over our bodies and clothing and hair, we miss the little houses and quiet lives passing by. We miss the women hanging laundry and the children waving. We look at our phones, see ourselves preserved on a screen, and lose everything else. The moment is gone, and we are no better for it, but we have a souvenir that we can share with the world. “I was here”, it says, but were you?

We want to be seen as adventurous and worldly, and that’s quickly becoming more important than actually being those things. Our phones are supposed to connect us, expand our capabilities, but in that moment I saw how small they were making our lives – small enough to fit in the palm of our hands.

It would be all too easy to roll my eyes and disparage these ‘kids today’, but that wouldn’t be honest or fair. First of all, there were all ages hanging out those doors. And of course I’ve wanted to get good photos for Instagram. I’ve become obsessed with likes and discouraged by silence. I’ve also chosen destinations based on dreamy reels and influencer recommendations. Since coming away on this trip, I’ve realised just how deep my addiction runs – and I don’t like it. This isn’t a generational defect or a cultural phenomenon, this is quickly becoming the undercurrent that dictates our lives.

I had been rattled into a sour mood. It was the ‘Ella Swing’, the pool selfies, the day drinking, the DJ, the ATVs, the zipliners, the crowds and construction. But Ella was also the little dog watching the sunrise. It was the old man selling tea by the roadside. It was the little woman wrapped in red, standing out in the tea fields, waving down at us. I felt like we were losing something that was right there, real, tangible, but so far apart, and slipping by like a leafy green blur.

Thank you for joining me on this tangent, I hope it wasn’t too depressing! Ella really was so beautiful in parts, but it struck an unexpected chord that I felt compelled to tease out. We spent the next four nights holed away in a little cottage in nearby Narangala, and it was heavenly. I’ll write about that in a separate post.

Did I miss something about Ella that you absolutely loved? Did I get it totally wrong? I’d love to hear your thoughts – please share your thoughts in the comments.