The new Sri Lankan hiking trail that leads to the heart of the hill country

24.09.2023 - 08:07 / nationalgeographic.com

When I reach Galaha in Sri Lanka’s central highlands, the sun is high in the sky and the streets are clouded with dust. Tuk-tuks rattle around women in red saris flecked with gold, narrowly missing the one-eyed dog sleeping in the road. Amid the honking and coconut selling, I hear a familiar sound — Beethoven’s Für Elise — moving closer, crackling from a tuk-tuk selling fish buns, and bringing with it the smell of freshly baked bread. 

This is where, 12 miles south of Kandy, my journey along the new Pekoe Trail — Sri Lanka’s first long-distance hiking route — begins. Its name refers to the high-grade black tea made from young leaves — a speciality of the country’s central highlands. Spanning 185 miles from Kandy in central Sri Lanka to Nuwara Eliya in the heart of the hill country, it links, with US and EU funding, an existing network of footpaths created when the British established a tea-growing industry here during colonial rule in the 19th century. 

At that time thousands of stone and dirt roads were cut into the forest to transport plantation workers and cargo between tea fields, factories and the newly built railway line, so that hardwood boxes branded ‘Ceylon Tea’ could travel to Colombo’s harbour for export to Britain. It’s hoped that the new trail, which passes through dozens of remote villages and tea estates, will encourage visitors away from the country’s well-trodden Cultural Triangle and into Sri Lanka’s less-visited interior. Many of its 22 stages are now open, with the remaining ones due to follow by December.

Rather than completing the route in its entirety, my plan is to experience it in manageable sections. My guide, Ramli Raban, and I are first headed nine miles southeast to Loolecondera, where the Scottish tea planter James Taylor established Sri Lanka’s first tea estate, via the market town of Deltota. Passing a Hindu temple painted in pastel yellows and blues, we swap Galaha’s tarmacked road for a dirt track lined with pepper plants and papaya trees. 

The footpath crosses the Deltotte Tea Estate, where rows of parakeet-green tea bushes — each exactly a metre apart and pruned to waist height — carpet the undulating hills. When we arrive, women are walking silently between the bushes, plucking young tea buds at lightning speed and depositing them into tarpaulin sacks. We accompany them to a weighing station, a wooden shelter where their sacks are hung from hooks to assess their morning’s work. A man in knee-high socks and side-slicked hair — the assistant superintendent, Ramli tells me — scribbles the weight of the bags in his notepad. The quota for the day is 20kg per picker, says Ramli, which will earn the women around 600 Sri Lankan Rupees — or around £1.50.

“Many of my school