Taxi in Hatton, private transfers at a fixed price

We collect at the door: hotels in Hatton and Dickoya, the bungalows around Castlereagh and Norwood, guesthouses in Maskeliya and Nallathanniya. On the estates, give us the estate and bungalow name rather than an address: the lanes are single track with passing places, unsigned, and everyone here navigates by factory and division. Arriving by train, you are met on the approach road below Hatton station rather than in the forecourt, which fills with tuk-tuks the moment a train is announced. For Adam’s Peak, pick-up is usually around midnight; the driver waits at Nallathanniya or drives back up after sunrise, whichever suits.

From Nuwara Eliya it is 35 kilometres and about an hour and a quarter on the A7, dropping through Talawakele (St Clair’s Falls three kilometres beyond the town, Devon Falls three kilometres further again) and then Kotagala; the average speed tells you everything about the bends. From Colombo airport, count 140 kilometres and three and a half hours by Avissawella, Kitulgala and the Ginigathena pass, the climb out of the rubber and into the tea. Hatton station sits on the main line, and the leg up from Kandy takes close to three hours for little more than sixty kilometres. Buses reach Maskeliya and Nallathanniya, but they stop everywhere and never at the hour the mountain requires.

January to March is the dry, clear window, and also the Dimbula quality season, when cold dry wind gives the best cup of the year. From May to September this is the windward slope of the south-west monsoon (Watawala, just down the hill, is among the wettest inhabited places in the country) and cloud sits on the ridges for days. Bring a fleece: at 1,270 metres the evenings are cold and heating is rare. Do not build a day around St Clair’s Falls; since the river was tapped for the Upper Kotmale power scheme they run thin outside heavy rain.

Castlereagh is the centrepiece: a reservoir dammed for the Laxapana hydro scheme, ringed by tea, with planters’ bungalows on its shore and on the slopes above it (Summerville and Dunkeld near the water, Norwood and Tientsin higher up) several of which take overnight guests. Christ Church Warleigh, on the water at Dickoya, was built in 1878, and its graveyard is the shortest history lesson on the British planting era anywhere on the island. A working factory tour takes about an hour and is better on a small estate than in a purpose-built show factory. Higher up, the Maussakelle reservoir drowned old Maskeliya in 1969; the town you drive through is its replacement.