Nuwara Eliya

The British built Nuwara Eliya as a hill station in the nineteenth century and made it look as much like home as the climate allowed: a racecourse, a golf course, a boating lake, hedges and rose beds, and a post office in red brick. Locals call it Little England, and while the name is laid on thick for visitors, the bones of it are real.

The surrounding slopes are tea country proper. Some of the highest-grown and most valuable Ceylon tea comes from these estates, and the plantations run right up to the edge of town.

A factory visit is the thing to do here, and it is more interesting than it sounds: withering lofts, rolling machines, the sorting and grading, and the smell of the place. Most estates run short tours ending in a tasting, and the difference between grades is obvious once someone puts them side by side.

The plantations themselves are photogenic and worth an hour's walking. The pluckers are almost all Tamil women whose families were brought from southern India by the British in the nineteenth century — a history worth knowing before you photograph anyone at work.

Horton Plains is a high plateau of grassland and cloud forest about an hour and a half away, and the walk there is the best in the country: a nine-kilometre loop taking in Baker's Falls and World's End, an escarpment where the plateau drops away vertically for the better part of a kilometre.

It has to be done at dawn. By mid-morning cloud fills the valley and World's End is a wall of white — this is not an occasional disappointment, it is what happens most days. That means leaving Nuwara Eliya around five in the morning, in the cold, and it is still worth it.