The afternoon we arrived in Ella I checked the forecast in my weather app. It literally said “torrential rain”. I’ve never seen that before, I’ve seen “heavy rain” or “thunderstorms”, but never “torrential rain”, that’s not good. Also major rain was forecast for the entire time we planned to be here. Oops, we should’ve checked the weather earlier.
The next morning at 8am it was overcast but not raining, with even a bit of blue sky peeking out here and there. We decided to hike up Little Adam’s Peak right after breakfast while the weather held. The trail started quite close to our hotel. There is an Adam’s Peak in another area of Sri Lanka, so this must be named after that one. Anyway it promised to give a nice scenic overview of the city and a good view of Ella Rock, which is the largest mountain here. Supposedly sunrises and sunsets are beautiful from the top. I had considered trying for sunrise, but when I woke up at 5am I could hear it raining, so I figured then sunrise wouldn’t be visible.
The trail is well established and paved for most of the way, and it was full of tourists. Part of it passes through a tea plantation where we could see workers having a break. Yanmei took a picture with some of them.
Ella rock.
Time lapse video of the climb. These don’t seem to turn out well because they are too shaky. At one point there was a guy launching a drone.
Finally we made it to the top.
By the time we came back down it was lunch time and we stopped at the same restaurant where we’d had dinner the previous night. It wasn’t as good, but the previous night we’d been starving from a 6.5 hour train trip with no lunch. While we were having lunch it started raining, although I’d call it moderate rain, not torrential rain. We got back to the hotel and had another surprise, no power. Apparently they have scheduled power outages periodically, and there was no power from 9:30am to 6pm. No power means no WiFi, so that sucked. That is one reason for two wordy blog posts yesterday, we had nothing to do but write since it was raining and there was no Internet.
David