If you would like to read my full Sri Lanka travel blog click on this link

Bogawantalawa is one of the most breathtaking and spectacular tea valleys of the world; the area is also known as The Valley of Saints, The Golden Bowl of Ceylon Tea, or simply The Golden Valley. Located between 1,000m and 2,000m above sea level it offers distant views of gently rounded ridges covered with tea plantations and dotted with graceful shade trees. Under an improbably deep blue sky with not a trace of cloud, picture the best hilly English or Welsh landscape you can think of, replace the grass with tea bushes, throw in a profusion of temperate-climate flowering shrubs and bougainvillea, add the most perfect morning imaginable with an air temperature of 19ºC, but with the sun warming your face to a point where you want to move into the shade: this is daybreak in Bogawantalawa.

At Horton Plains, a National Park comprising an undulating plateau about 2,000m above sea level, a very pleasant walk takes you to World's End where the plateau stops abruptly at a vertiginous escarpment dropping perhaps 800m down to the valley below, and from where, on a clear day you can see the sea over a hundred kilometres to the south.

Ceylon tea is famous the world over, but it was coffee that was the primary highland crop until the last quarter of the nineteenth century when disease destroyed the industry. The British planters switched to tea and today the plantations cover over 2,200 square kilometres, some 3 - 4% of the country's land area. Since the Sinhalese refused to work for them, the planters imported Tamil workers from Southern India who have always been regarded as a separate community from the Tamils of northern Sri Lanka, the Jaffna-Tamils. These high-country Tamils still provide all the manual labour on the plantations. Only women do the picking, the men carry out pruning, planting and maintenance. They live an extremely hard, poorly-paid life with little or no prospect for advancement, although some of the bright kids may go on to further education and end up working in larger towns or cities.