Where to stay

Amaya Hills Located high in the hills above Kandy, with architecture that recalls an ancient palace, this large, modern and well-appointed hotel has excellent facilities. Doubles from £87. 16 Heerassagala, Kandy,
00 94 81 447 4022, www.amayaresorts.com

Grand Hotel This former governor’s mansion is nowadays the best place to stay in Nuwara Eliya, with comfortable rooms and Indian and international dining options. Don’t miss its historic public bar and billiards room. Doubles from £125. Grand Hotel Road, Nuwara Eliya, 00 94 52 2222 8817, www.tangerinehotels.com

Helga’s Folly This utterly singular and whimsical hotel is the home of Helga de Silva Blow Perera. Decorated in her inimitable style with paintings created by guests and visiting artists, a host of notable names down the decades have stayed here. The excellent restaurant sources locally and organically wherever possible. Doubles from £125. 70 Mahamaya Mawatha, Kandy, 00 94 81 223 4571, www.helgasfolly.com

Kandy House A palatial villa built in 1804 by the chief minister of the Kandyan kingdom, today Kandy House is a beautiful small hotel in a lush, tropical setting. Doubles from £175. Amunugama Walauwa, Gunnepana, Kandy, 00 94 81 492 1394, www.thekandyhouse.com

Queen’s Hotel A hotel since the end of the 19th century, the Queen’s today is a listed building that evokes the colonial era when it was the house of the governor. Rooms and fittings are rather old-fashioned in style but to stay here is to be part of the history of Kandy. Located directly opposite the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Doubles from £58. Dalada Veediya, Kandy, 00 94 81 223 3026, www.queenshotel.lk

Tea Bush Ramboda On the mountain road from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya, below the Ramboda Falls and overlooking tea plantations and a valley far below, this modern hotel is designed in a sort of starkly functional industrial chic and makes a good base for walking and exploring the tea country. Doubles from £62. Pahala Kada Veediya, Ramboda, 00 94 522 259787, www.teabushramboda.com

The Governor’s Chalets A small collection of Scandinavian-style, wood-panelled log cabin chalets on Lake Gregory, complete with modern comforts, from rainforest showers to free wi-fi and fully stocked fridges. There’s also an informal restaurant whose produce comes direct from neighbouring farms. Chalets from £95. Lake Gregory, Badulla Road, Nuwara Eliya, 00 94 52 223 4967, www.governorschalets.com

Tree of Life Nature Resort An ayurvedic retreat that boasts a gorgeous, isolated location in the hills above Kandy. Rooms are clean, comfortable and quiet, and anyone staying here will surely appreciate the sumptuous Sri Lankan breakfasts that start the day off just right. Doubles from £86. Yahalathenna, Kandy, 00 94 81 249 9777, www.hoteltreeoflife.com

Travel Information

Sri Lanka lies in the Indian Ocean off the south-eastern tip of India. The capital of the island state, formerly known as Ceylon, is Colombo, which is situated on the west coast. Kandy is the second-largest city and located about a two- to three-hour drive away, in the Central Province. Climbing south from here into the tea plantations and mountainous landscape of Hill Country you reach the city of Nuwara Eliya. Sri Lanka is five and a half hours ahead of GMT and its currency is the rupee. The climate is tropical, with wet and dry seasons that arrive at varying times across the country. Dry season in Kandy runs from May to September.

GETTING THERE

Oman Air (www.omanair.com) flies three times a week from London Heathrow to Colombo via Muscat. Flight time is from 13 hours 20 minutes.

Sri Lankan Airlines (www.srilankan.com) flies direct from London Heathrow to Colombo every day.

RESOURCES

Sri Lanka Tourism (srilanka.travel). The official tourist board website contains a wealth of ideas and itineraries for planning a trip to the country, including suggestions for the best beaches and wildlife areas.

FURTHER READING

The Teardrop Island: Following Victorian Footsteps Across Sri Lanka by Cherry Briggs (Summersdale, £8.99). Retracing the travels of eccentric Victorian James Emerson Tennent. Sent to Ceylon by the government, he traverses the Sri Lankan backcountry, journeying along pilgrimage trails and onto tea plantations. Delving into the past, the book uncovers a wealth of insight into contemporary culture via meetings with local tribes and stories of cricket, mystics and battle-scarred war zones.

Where to eat

All meals are for three courses without wine, unless otherwise stated.

Annapurni On the road from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya, not far from the Glenloch Tea Factory, this large hilltop restaurant is run by the Chinmaya Mission and serves deliciously cleansing and pure Tamil vegetarian temple cuisine, including thaali and dhosas. Less than £10.

Sri Baktha Hanuman Temple, Ramboda, 00 94 712 855 520

Bake House This big, popular eating house is the place to come to sample Kandy’s ‘short eats’ – savoury pastries, pies or breaded meats, washed down with tea or coffee. Less than £10. 36 Dalada Veediya, Kandy, 00 94 81 494 0801

DJ’s Restaurant Authentic local restaurant, not far from the Mahaweli River, serving a menu of classic Sri Lankan rice and curry dishes. DJ’s always has a good selection of freshly prepared dishes made with whatever is in season. About £10. 74a Deveni Rajasinghe Mawatha, Kandy, 00 94 81 222 5738

Grand Indian Located just in front of the Grand Hotel, this is a good option for those who prefer a break from the usual dinner buffets found in most hotels. Excellent and authentic Indian cuisine. About £15. Grand Hotel Road, Nuwara Eliya, 00 94 52 222 2881

Maladine A street-side joint where you can watch the chefs slice, griddle and chop your kottu roti, as it’s made to order. Eat it inside or take it away to have by Kandy’s lovely lake. Less than £5. 60 Dalada Veediya, Kandy, 00 94 81 493 9399

The Hill Club To come to this glorious private gentlemen’s club is to enter an age when Nuwara Eliya was known as ‘Little England’. Non-members are now (one senses probably a little reluctantly) welcomed for both accommodation and dining. Jackets and ties or Sri Lankan national dress must be worn in the main dining room for dinner. The food is in a time warp but that’s all part of the experience. About £20 for set dinner menu (includes temporary joining fee). 29 Grand Hotel Road, Nuwara Eliya, 00 94 52 222 2653

White House This is another popular Kandyan eating house that serves traditional Sri Lankan food alongside international fare, from south Indian to Chinese. Downstairs is modern but the first-floor colonial dining room is the place to be. Try the lamprais (rice, curry, fish cakes, boiled egg and more, wrapped in a banana leaf). About £10. 21 Dalada Veediya, Kandy, 00 94 81 2 232 765, www.whitehouse.lk

Food Glossary

Coconut roti

Flatbread made with grated coconut, cooked on a hot griddle and accompanied by spicy sambol.

Hathawariya

Wild asparagus. Often cooked with rice and coconut milk.

Hopper

Rice flour pancake cooked in a small wok so that it emerges hat-like in shape, sometimes served with a fried egg cooked with it.

Kiribath

Rice pudding made with coconut milk.

Kottu roti

Thin flatbread roti, griddled, cut into noodle-like strips, mixed and chopped up with vegetables, chicken, spices.

Lamprais

Rice, curry and meat or fish wrapped in banana leaf.

Pittu

Rice flour, grated coconut and coconut milk mixed into grains and cooked in a special cylindrical steamer. Eaten with curry.

Sambol

Chilli-based sauce. There are many different types and a variety will accompany almost every meal. Usually spicy and fresh, often made with coconut, Maldive fish and lime juice.

Short eats

An array of savoury baked goods, pies and pastries, to enjoy in teahouses or to take away.

String hopper

Nest of rice noodles usually eaten for breakfast together with fish or chicken curry and sambols

Watalappan

Crème caramel-style pudding made with coconut milk.

Food and Travel Review

Carrots and cauliflower are reassuringly familiar. They’re the tried-and-true companions of the Great British roast, down to earth and dependable. But spike them with curry powder, chilli, turmeric and cinnamon, then simmer them in coconut milk, and these humble vegetables are roused from the routine – transformed into something vibrant and fiery. The same goes for leeks taken up a notch with curry leaves, chilli flakes, fermented Maldives fish, mustard seed and lime juice – sharp, salty and hot. Or English runner beans, dry-fried with spices; a sambol made with cubes of beetroot, garlic, onion, grated coconut and chilli…

We’re at the Grand Hotel in the highland city of Nuwara Eliya. This former British governor’s mansion, built in the late 19th century, recalls an age when the city was known as Little England. At over 1,800 metres above sea level, the climate here is cool and temperate, a relief from the steamier, humid and hot conditions below in the city of Kandy. Nuwara Eliya became a home for British tea planters who settled here, bringing with them a way of life that included going to the races, fox hunting, polo, golf, tennis and cricket, as well as frequent balls and socials.

But the British didn’t just bring their lifestyles. They sought to transform the land itself to remind them of home. As early as 1832, they began to cultivate European varieties of vegetables, fruits and flowers, plants that could be grown successfully here and nowhere else in Sri Lanka due to the cool, high-altitude microclimate.

We visit the Grand’s eight-acre farm in the hills that rise behind the hotel, from where many of the vegetables served in the Barnes Hall Restaurant come. Executive sous chef A. Chaminda Attanayake explains that compost from the kitchens is used to fertilise the farm organically, while scraps and waste go to feed the pigs. Vegetables are picked fresh and brought to the kitchen sometimes as frequently as three to four times a day, depending on the hotel’s requirements. We see fields of lettuce, celery, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, carrots and more. There is a garden redolent with rosemary, sage, thyme and oregano. These European vegetables and herbs – so commonplace back home yet unfamiliar within the context of a faraway tropical island – shape and flavour the cuisine of Sri Lanka’s Hill Country.

We had driven up from Kandy, the country’s second city and cultural capital, the previous day. It’s only a distance of some 80km but the journey takes you to another world. Out of Kandy, one-street villages sprawl seamlessly into each other, the road a continuous line of tin shacks that stand behind mounds of pineapples, coconuts, guavas, avocados, jackfruit, breadfruit, tamarind and hanging bunches of yellow, green and red bananas. Shacks-cum- shops sell vivid textiles, clay cooking pots, spices, automotive spares, piles of worn-out tyres, groceries, household goods, lottery tickets, wood carvings and gems. ‘Wine shops’ offering arrack, beer and other strong drinks sit alongside metal workshops, cobblers, tailors and more. The shacks are endless, the traffic incessant: whining, brightly coloured, three-wheel tuk-tuks trundle here, there and everywhere; motorcycles dart past on the right and the left; lorries are piled high with tottering mountains of fruit; cars, mini- buses and coaches compete for space on the pot-holed road.

Soon, though, the traffic thins out as the steep, winding route climbs out of the tropical forests of the lowlands to enter a world of deciduous trees, then conifers. The sheer mountain slopes are transformed. Every strip of land, however vertiginous, is manicured with rows of low-lying, bright-green tea bushes that stretch as far as the eye can see. Sri Lanka is the fourth-largest exporter of tea in the world and these are the legendary plantations of Ceylon. Their British and European names reveal the colonial origins of the tea estates: Glenloch, Rothschild, Mackwoods, Inverness, Delta.

The intensive monoculture of the plantations brings to mind the single-mindedness of isolated, majestic wine regions, while single- estate teas from high-altitude plantations are truly the ‘grands crus’ of the tea world. At the Glenloch Tea Factory, we taste Golden Flush, a black tea made exclusively from the choicest, youngest buds, so delicate and complex that the thought of adding milk or sugar is akin to blasphemy: bright, ethereal and persistent, with a crisp, invigorating astringency and delicate citrus and floral aromas. Even rarer is Silver Tips, a white tea made only from the unfurled central bud, processed carefully so that it doesn’t oxidise. It is reputedly high in health-giving properties.

Higher up still, the tea plantations eventually give way, here and there, to the terraced fields of Nuwara Eliya’s European market gardens. All along the road, vegetable sellers set up stands that would not look out of place in the Vale of Evesham. Meanwhile, men stripped to the waist wash and trim leeks, cabbages and carrots in fast-running mountain streams, preparing the harvest to be sent across the country as well as to markets and hotels in the likes of the Maldives. The vegetables of Nuwara Eliya are a regular feature of the diet down in Kandy too, but there they take their place alongside traditional and indigenous plants and foods. This is an island of great natural abundance. Food falls from its trees. We see men in sarongs in the high branches above us, lobbing down jackfruit and breadfruit. Roadside stalls are everywhere, offering food that the vendors have gathered for free. It’s the monsoon season, hot and sticky with ferocious spells of warm rain that don’t cool things down at all. During a lull in the downpours our driver, Thili, pulls over to a thatched hut. Its tables are heaped with smooth, red coconuts. ‘These are king coconuts,’ he explains. ‘Very refreshing.’

The stallholder expertly slices off the tops with a small machete, cuts through the white flesh and inserts straws. We drink deeply: the whitish coconut milk is thin, only lightly sweet, and incredibly quenching. Later we pull over for a bag of sweet tamarinds. We split the soft, velvety pods with our fingers to reveal the gooey, sharply sweet flesh. At the wholly authentic DJ’s Restaurant outside Kandy, near the Mahaweli River, we enjoy a fascinating range of local foods. The young chef, Pubudu Amarasinghe, explains quietly to us the way recipes are adapted to what the land provides: ‘Our curries vary with the seasons. We use whatever is available. In September, for example, it’s right for banana flowers.’

Look up into a banana tree and you may notice a largish, dark- purple flower dangling just below the bunch of fruit. This is harvested, finely shredded, mixed with a paste of onion, garlic, mustard seed, turmeric, fresh chillies and coconut, then quickly stir-fried. Over a sumptuous lunch at DJ’s, we try breadfruit curry, manioc root curry, two different types of chicken curry (one spicy red, the other mild green), a curry of dried Maldive fish (cured tuna, a staple of Sri Lankan and Maldivian cuisine), a curry leaf sambol, a white radish sambol and sides of okra, green beans and dhal.

We place a mound of white rice in the middle of our plates, then a spoonful of the various curries and sambols around the rice. We mix and knead the curries into the rice with our right hands, so that all the flavours intermingle, then scoop up a bite and, with our thumbs, push the mixture into our mouths. Eating in this manner is a slow, sensuous, mindful experience. It engages the touch as well as taste, smell and sight, and connects you directly to the food.

At Kandy’s Tree of Life Hotel, I start the day with a typical Sri Lankan breakfast. First a mug of hathawariya, a sort of fine, grass-like green that’s boiled with rice and blended with coconut milk. It’s nourishing, satisfying and cleansing. I sample kiribath (milk rice), which is red rice boiled in coconut milk, served on a banana leaf. I can’t resist trying a hopper – a thin, hat- shaped pancake made from rice flour, with a fried egg cooked in the middle – and a spoonful of seeni sambol made from caramelised onions cooked with tamarind and jaggery, a sort of brown sugar that comes from the sap of the kitul palm. I also try a string hopper, which is a nest of rice noodles accompanied by a light vegetable curry, alongside a spoonful of fiery chicken curry, and some green chilli and coconut sambol. After this first-thing-in-the-morning feast, I’m replete yet invigorated, my mouth tingling from the chilli and spices.

Throughout Sri Lanka, the consumption and enjoyment of food is linked to the health-giving properties that it imparts. Hathawariya, we are told, is very good for the liver as well as for giving energy. A fishmonger in Kandy’s lively Central Market tells me that shark is particularly healthy for those who have just given birth: ‘Shark makes mother’s milk more nourishing.’ At the Susantha Spice and Herbal Garden, Mr Krishnamurthy, a herbal doctor, explains to us the principles of ayurvedic medicine and how Sri Lankan spices and herbs each have their own beneficial, health-giving and healing properties. Indeed, the spices used in traditional Sri Lankan cooking are not only what give it depth and complexity of flavours; they are also what makes the cuisine so healthy. Cinnamon, we learn, lowers blood-sugar levels; pepper is warming; ginger relieves nausea; turmeric is purifying and balancing.

At the Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genetic Resources Centre in Gannoruwa, I meet with Mr Liyanage, head of exploration, who catalogues and safeguards the immense biodiversity of Sri Lanka in a gene bank that conserves the country’s domestic and wild crop varieties. It is an immense undertaking – hundreds of varieties of rice and wild rice alone have been identified and catalogued – but it is important work. ‘After the tsunami of 2004, we lost a great deal of biodiversity,’ he says. ‘There is no way ever to restore this loss. It’s not just a question of putting seeds in a bank. Traditional knowledge must be preserved as well as plants. We must value the knowledge source in order to pass it on from one generation to the next.’

Our visit coincides with a full moon which means, in this country where 70 per cent of people are Buddhist, that it is a Poya day. Once a month, shops and offices close, no meat or alcohol is allowed to be sold, and people make their way to the temples. Kandy is the site of the country’s most important Buddhist shrine, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, located in a moated, former Kandyan royal palace beside a lake. People light candles and incense, pray and meditate, sometimes for 24 hours or more. Amid the incredible bustle of a country where people must work long, hard and fast just to survive, there is a sense here of a collective pause to appreciate the inner peace of the present moment.

After visiting the temple, some people relax by the lake. The children run around and play on the swings, and great picnics are broken out. Others make their way along Kandy’s main drag, Dalada Veediya, popping into bakeries such as the Bake House or the Delight Bakers & Sweet House to buy ‘short eats’ to take away: savoury pastries stuffed with curry, fried dhal cakes, breaded fish or meat cutlets, mutton pies, vegetable pastries, sausage rolls, fish or egg rolls. And who can resist a kottu roti from Maladine? This small, street-side restaurant makes this local speciality before your very eyes, the thin, doughy flatbreads skilfully swung until transparent, quickly griddled then sliced; the mixture of vegetables and spices fried and seasoned with hot curry sauce; the sliced strips of bread added and chopped and mixed all together with special rectangular knives. The syncopated rhythms that the roti makers beat out as they chop and mix is one particularly pleasant street melody that rises above the general cacophony of the city.

Kandy was once the seat of a kingdom, and in the 19th century, under the British, it became a colonial capital. The Queen’s Hotel, built as a governor’s residence, evokes this era. The Dutch and the Portuguese were here too, and also left their influences, not least on the cuisine. The Portuguese brought chillies and tomatoes, along with their penchant for sweets made with eggs and sugar, resulting in a range of pastries, cakes and desserts. Watalappan is an intriguing example of how food evolves: it’s a sort of Sri Lankan crème caramel made with eggs, coconut milk in lieu of cream, and in this case, a richly dark caramel made from kitul jaggery, flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves. At Helga’s Folly, in the hills above Kandy, we sample lamprais, a Dutch-inspired concoction consisting of rice, curry, fish cakes, boiled egg and more, all wrapped up in a banana leaf and cooked in a low oven.

Dutch, Portuguese and British settlers stopped for a while on this idyllic island known as ‘The Pearl of the Indian Ocean’, but today’s visitors come from all over the world: Europeans, North and South Americans, Indians and, increasingly, visitors from China and East Asia, as well as the Arab world. Back at the Grand Hotel, chef Chaminda explains that catering for this international clientele brings its own demands. ‘We have to satisfy the tastes as well as the very specific dietary requirements of guests from all over the world,’ he says. Thus in Nuwara Eliya and Kandy, international food is on offer alongside traditional Sri Lankan. But like the British vegetables that, long ago, were transplanted to the rarefied highlands and which today are transformed into wonderful local dishes, these world cuisines are made with indigenous produce and doused in fresh and fragrant spices. In Sri Lanka, even everyday cooking refuses to hew to the humdrum. You’ll never look at a carrot the same way again.