Entries about waterfalls

When I met my Airbnb hosts Natalija and Jure on my first morning at Lake Bled, they strongly encouraged me to visit Vintgar Gorge, a ravine several kilometres north of Bled town. They did warn me, however, that there was no public transport there, the shuttle bus to the gorge only runs in summer, and that I would have to seek alternative means of getting there.

I had a lazy Monday morning, I had some leftover snacks I had taken with me on yesterday’s hike at Lake Bohinj for breakfast, and I spent a couple of tedious hours at a laundromat just up the hill. Being the first weekday after a four-day long weekend, the town was suddenly D-E-A-D dead dead dead. I could have lain down in the middle of one of the main streets for hours and not get hit by a car.

I had lunch at a bakery-café opposite the bus interchange near my apartment. While I was having my coffee and pastries for lunch, I saw something I had never seen before – sunshine in Slovenia. Sun, glorious sun! I revelled in it, I turned my chair slightly at my outdoor table so my face could get the full force of that weird yellow object in the sky I hadn’t seen for a week since I was in Hungary.

In Australia I avoid the sun like the plague. Being of mostly British heritage, I have extremely fair skin and I burn to a crisp after a few minutes in the harsh Australian sun, even with sunscreen. I schedule my outdoor activities to late afternoons or after dark or days forecast to be cloudy in order to avoid the dreadful excoriating Australian sunlight. I hate being out in the sun and I simply don’t understand what goes on in the brains of Australians who love spending their days at the beach or playing sports or doing other activities that require being scorched by that blinding fireball in the sky. But in Europe, things are different. The European sun is gentle and golden and reassuring and wholesome. The European sun is simply nice. After a week of being denied the innocent joy of having my skin tickled by those life-giving rays, sipping my coffee in the sun was just too marvellous.

There was a small tour agency inside the bus interchange that advertised tours to Vintgar Gorge, I think for about ten euros they would drive you in a van out there and back and entrance was included in the price. I went inside and asked if I could go that afternoon. The tour agency owner sighed and said, yes, he would take me. He made it clear through his body language and tone of voice that he rather wouldn’t. I guess that having only one person in the van wasn’t very economic.

He told me to meet him at the tour office at three, when he picked me up in a van from the bus interchange and drove me north to Vintgar Gorge. The van travelled through gloriously green countryside in the sunshine. Slovenia looks even more bewitching when the sun is out. The Karavanke mountain range to the north, a forbiddingly solid range of mountains topped with snow, loomed in front of the windscreen. The top of the Karavanke range is the Austrian border.

After about ten minutes I arrived at the Vintgar Gorge car park. The driver said he would meet me back there at five o’clock. I showed my ticket to the park ranger at the entrance and entered the canyon.

Vintgar Gorge is a mile-long ravine carved from the rock by the Radovna river through a ridge that separates Lake Bled from the Sava valley around Jesenice. There is a path the entire way, much of it on a timber boardwalk suspended over the rushing river swollen by the heavy rain of the past week. The opaque river was the colour of turquoise, rushing down the gorge like liquified gems. The water bounced form rock to rock, over logs, through whirlpools, down flumes and into caverns along the side of the gorge. Above the river were limestone cliffs and trees at the seasonal pinnacle of riotous autumn colours.

About three-quarters of the way down the gorge was a beautiful bridge, a high stone arch span so far above I had to crane my neck to look at it. I opened Google Maps on my phone. It was a railway bridge on the famous Bohinj Railway. I opened up the Slovenske železnice website and looked up the timetable. A train was coming in eight minutes! Should I wait around to take a video of a train going over the bridge high above the rushing rapids? Well, duh! So I did.

At the downstream end of Vintgar Gorge, the gorge ends in a waterfall, Slap Šum, where the Radovna river falls down to the plains of the Sava valley. It wasn’t a very high waterfall but it was loud and powerful and very pretty. If Margaret & David At The Movies reviewed waterfalls rather than films, they would have given Slap Šum four and a half out of five stars.

It’s such a pity that I had to meet the driver back at the car park at a fixed time because I could have spent forever in Vintgar Gorge. It was just what I needed with my cold, an easy stroll in the pure mountain air along a stupendous white-water canyon on a brilliant autumn afternoon. So I walked back up the gorge along the boardwalks and rocky paths.

The driver met me back at the car park, drove me back to Bled town as the sun began to set, and I farewelled Bled with another stroll around the east end of the lake. I had one more kremšnita, this time at an open-air restaurant on a terrace looking over the lake opposite the castle. This restaurant claims to have invented the kremšnita back in the 1950s. It was very nice, but I still maintain and I don’t care what Slovenes think – the kremšnita is nothing but an Australian vanilla slice with a layer of whipped cream between the custard layer and the top crust.

After doing some packing and another hearty dinner at a traditional Slovenian restaurant – farmer’s sausage, stewed apples, baked millet porridge – I went back to the gostilna near my apartment. This pub is awesome, and not only because the walls are completely covered with licence plates from all around the world, including several from my home state of New South Wales. I had a stimulating farewell conversation with the bartender, the geography nerd whose company and conversation I had thoroughly enjoyed a few nights earlier. I did a very stupid thing – I forgot to ask if we could add each other to social media. I only dimly remember his name. So if anybody meets a friendly, talkative and somewhat awkward bartender with a slight lisp and a tremendous memory for geographic facts at a pub near the Lake Bled bus interchange, tell him that the fat bearded Aussie guy with glasses who used to live in Bathurst and told him all about Australian licence plates says hello and that I want to send him a jar of Vegemite because I found it difficult to explain what it tastes like.

Sun, glorious sun!

Karavanke mountains and countryside north of Bled

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Vintgar Gorge

Bohinj Railway bridge over Vintgar Gorge

Karawanks from the top of Slap Šum waterfall

Slap Šum waterfall

Kremšnita and Bled Castle

Farmer’s sausage, baked millet porridge and stewed apples

I am the kind of person who likes to have everything planned in advance. This includes holidays. I might not plan exactly what I am doing on every single day, but before leaving Australia I like at the very least to know how many nights I will be spending in each destination.

But I have learned from previous trips. Sometimes I have given myself far too little time in a place I ended up falling in love with (*cough* Taiwan *cough*), and spent far too much time in a place that I found less than pleasant (*cough* South Korea *cough*).

I have fallen in love with Slovenia in a way I had not anticipated and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had already booked my flight home from Italy months before leaving home, I would have been perfectly content to spend the rest of my time in this magical alpine republic.

With my blasted cold accompanied by persistent coughing, I had not been able to do all the things in the Lake Bled region I had intended to do. Also, Slovenia is full of Italian tourists. In contrast to the rather more congenial Slovenes, many of the Italians I encountered were quarrelsome, rude, disorderly, can’t drive for shit and can’t queue for shit. Motorists on Slovenian roads are on the whole very competent, safe drivers, but every time I nearly got killed by a driver going the wrong way down a one-way street or not stopping at a zebra crossing while going thirty kilometres an hour over the limit, the car always – ALWAYS – had Italian plates.

So despite my preference to have things planned beforehand, I am prepared to be flexible. Italy could wait. Thus it was with very little regret that I sent Natalija and Jure a message on the Airbnb app to ask if I could book another two nights at their holiday apartment in Bled. They joyfully agreed.

Not that I was planning to spend the extra two days in Slovenia moping around in the apartment. It was time to go chase waterfalls. Of course, perhaps going on a long hike in torrential rain on an 8 °C day isn’t the wisest course of action for someone recovering from a respiratory infection. But I have spent a lot of money on this holiday, I only get four weeks a year off work, and damned if I’m going to let some stupid microbes stop me. Also, the weather forecast for Slovenia showed rain every single day for the foreseeable future – it had barely stopped raining since I crossed the border with Hungary. If I wanted to see stuff, I had to brave the rain and suck it up.

I packed my daypack with some drinks and groceries I had bought the night before from the Mercator supermarket, zipped up my Macpac hooded rain jacket, tightened the straps on my daypack, and walked across the road to the bus interchange. The bus to Lake Bohinj arrived on time and took me around the southern shore of Lake Bled then west up the Bohinj valley along roads lined with thick layers of autumn leaves.
Bohinj is a basin-shaped east-west valley surrounded by the soaring peaks of the Julian Alps. As the valley gets higher towards the west, the valley walls get narrower and steeper. The jewel of the valley is Lake Bohinj in the valley’s upper reaches, a perfect gem of a lake fringed with pines, framed by kilometre-high cliffs studded with waterfalls.

The most famous waterfall is Slap Savica – “slap” being the Slovene word for “waterfall” - at the westernmost extremity of the valley, where water collected across the Triglav plateau tumbles down to the lake far below. The bus terminated at Zlatorog, a campground at the western end of the lake. It was a four kilometre walk from the bus terminus up the valley to the waterfall.

The rain had been steady yet bearable all morning but a few minutes after disembarking from the bus it became almost indescribable. I used to live in Brisbane, a city with a humid subtropical climate notorious for its summer afternoon thunderstorms. Many afternoons around four o’clock in summer the heavens would open and rain would not fall from the sky as individual drops, but as sheets of water. At least the saving grace of Brisbane thunderstorms was that they were always over within fifteen minutes. The rain here in Bohinj was like a Brisbane storm, but it didn’t end.

Despite my rain jacket and wrapping things up in my backpack in plastic grocery bags and wearing good hiking boots, I got soaked to the bone within minutes. Every part of me, even the bits under three layers of clothing like my upper body, every single possession, were utterly saturated. My Lonely Planet guidebook for Slovenia was turned into mush. I am lucky that my passport was stored in a ziplock sandwich bag inside a passport pouch around my neck, it stayed dry.

Muttering self-admonitions under my breath along the lines of “I’m a f#$%ing idiot” and “what the f@#k was I thinking?”, I walked up the wide gravel bushwalking track from the Zlatorog campground. It paralleled the Sava Bohinjka river, a swollen cloudy grey torrent, the water impatient to reach the Black Sea off the Romanian coast via the Sava and Danube rivers.

After about forty-five minutes I reached a car park, this was the entrance to the Slap Savica in Triglav National Park. There was a small two-storey guesthouse and restaurant only open to guests, and a tiny little kiosk – a cabin that sold lollies, soft drinks and souvenirs. The lovely lady who operated the kiosk saw me trudge up the track dripping wet. I sought shelter for a little while under the tiny verandah at the front of the kiosk hoping that the rain would ease a little. Without me even asking for it, she offered me an umbrella. I love Slovenia.

The rain wasn’t getting any lighter, it was no use waiting any longer. I continued on my way up the steep track with plenty of stairs and tree roots to negotiate. About twenty minutes later, my efforts were copiously rewarded. Slap Savica is not the most powerful or majestic waterfall I have ever seen – thank you, Iceland, for spoiling every single waterfall I will ever see henceforth – but what a magical place nonetheless. It is one of the more unusual waterfalls I have encountered. My ears were nearly deafened by the enormous roar of water falling – no, not merely falling by mere gravity alone, but shooting – through a narrow limestone chute from the top of the Triglav alpine tundra plateau down into the Bohinj valley. The water was being ejected down the chute with such force that the spray assaulted my face like pins and needles. I guess you could call it a Slap in the face.

The sound was so uncomfortable and the spray was so annoying that I kept walking away, I couldn’t tolerate it for more than a minute at a time. But every time I started to walk back down the hill, I kept being drawn back. There was something almost magnetic about Slap Savica, it had a preternatural quality that I could not quite put my finger on.

There wasn’t much else around. The viewing platform was a small platform with a timber roof that did nothing to stop the spray attacking visitors. Inside the platform was a stone tablet erected in the nineteenth century commemorating the visit of some minor Austrian royal. Whoop-de-doo. Has there ever been a royal household so pompous, so narcissistic, as the Habsburgs?

I walked back down the hill and handed in the umbrella to the lady at the kiosk. I was so grateful that I bought some drinks even though I had brought plenty with me from Lake Bled. I even bought a Slap Savica fridge magnet which now graces my refrigerator. I then went back down the same track along the Sava Bohinjka to the Zlatorog campground and walked about another kilometre east along the south shore of Lake Bohinj. This lake is one of the most spectacular I have ever seen. It looked magnificent even in the low cloud and driving rain. I can’t imagine how great it would look on a sunny day. Lake Bohinj stretches east-west along the line of the Bohinj valley and on either side of the lake to the north and south the Julian Alps soar into the sky. The lower parts of the slopes are full of pine trees and autumn colours while the upper slopes are sheer limestone precipices with waterfalls rushing down the sides. It’s the kind of scenery Australians only ever see in deodorant commercials.

On the highway just east of Zlatorog on the south shore is a cable car station. I bought a ticket and didn’t have to wait too long for a cable car to take me up to Vogel, a ski resort in the southern Julian Alps.

The cable car ride up to Vogel was a tad scary thanks to the wind and rain. The view over the lake and valley was magnificent – what little I could see through the raindrops on the windows of the cable car was magnificent, I mean – but about two-thirds of the way up there was no view at all due to cloud. After a few minutes I arrived at Vogel. Being November there was very little snow on the ground and no skiers, I had the place to myself. I went outside to explore but lasted all of five seconds before I rushed back into the main building to hide from the dreadful wind and cold.

I spent about an hour up there, drinking coffee in the empty resort bar and restaurant. I tried to dry off. Downstairs there was an enormous public toilet, presumably with enough room for all the people to change in and out of their ski clothes. There was a bank of electric hand dryers along the wall. Since I had pretty much the entire resort to myself I stripped off to my underpants and tried to dry my clothes. I wrung my clothes out as best as I could but it was no use – the dryer was no match for my saturated clothing and footwear.

After about thirty minutes I thought I was making progress – at least my socks were semi-dry. It was no use for my pants or shirt or boots. As I was waving my clothes in front of the dryer the door to the restroom suddenly burst open. A whole army of garrulous Chinese tourists barged in and marched past while I was standing there almost naked waving my wet clothes in front of the hand dryer like a madman. Christ almighty.

There was absolutely nothing to detain me at Vogel so I caught the cable car back down to the lake. I hung around in the equally desolate base station waiting for the next bus back to Lake Bled. The bus was very empty at the lake but filled up at each little village the bus stopped at further down the valley, mostly university students returning to Ljubljana on a Sunday evening after a weekend at home. It was well after sunset when the bus got back to Lake Bled.

I went back into my apartment, spread out all my clothes on every single piece of furniture I could find, had the hottest, longest shower – I am amazed that I didn’t break the apartment building’s hot water system – and ate an enormous yet unsatisfying pizza at a nearby gostilna. I returned to my room coughing my lungs up, hoping that I hadn’t given myself pneumonia.

Bohinj valley at Zlatorog campground

Track from Zlatorog campground up to Slap Savica waterfall

Sava Bohinjka river downstream from Slap Savica

Slap Savica

Slap Savica

Slap Savica

Slap Savica

Sava Bohinjka river

Sava Bohinjka river

Lake Bohinj

Lake Bohinj

Vogel cable car

Zlatorog campground and Lake Bohinj from Vogel cable car

Lake Bohinj from Vogel cable car

Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

Monday, 11 February 2019

When I was five years old my aunt gave me a battered old hardcover school atlas, presumably one that she had used at school circa 1970. It immediately became my most jealously treasured possession. I devoured the information in that atlas. I learned the names of all the world's capital cities, I taught myself how to draw every nation's flag from memory, I could recite by heart which languages were spoken in each country. I knew that one day I would see these places.

I grew up on a low-income public housing estate in southwestern Sydney. My family was better off than most of our neighbours - at least one of my parents was always in work, usually both of them had jobs - but money was always tight. Interstate travel was usually out of the question, let alone international travel. Holidays consisted of a week spent in a grotty caravan in Forster-Tuncurry or nothing. I am not complaining - those holidays form bright spots of light in what was sometimes a bleak childhood - but even as a child I knew that travel must consist of more than eating fish and chips from paper wrappers on picnic tables under scrawny Norfolk Island pines next to a fishing harbour while being mobbed by greedy seagulls.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I was prosperous enough to travel overseas. Australia is very far from the rest of the world, international air fares tend to be very expensive compared to other parts of the planet, it takes a long time in the air to get anywhere from Australia and even though air fares are becoming more affordable a very large proportion of Australians still don't have a passport and have never been overseas. I have many friends and relatives who have never been outside Australia or have only travelled overseas once.

I was thirty-two when I landed at Changi Airport in Singapore one morning after an excruciating red-eye flight from Brisbane via Brunei. I had gotten maybe half an hour's sleep and my mind was racing. I presented my passport to the silent poker-faced immigration officer, she scanned it, stamped it and handed it back to me. I was free to proceed. I spent the next two hours stumbling around Changi's impressive terminals in a confused daze. I was finally overseas! I finally did it! Wow! I'm overseas! I can't believe that I am actually overseas! Am I really overseas? Is this a dream? No! I am actually overseas!

Perhaps it is because I do not take international travel for granted, because I am grateful to have the opportunity to go overseas, because I am aware that there are so many people back home who have never had that opportunity, because I had yearned for so long to explore this world but couldn't, that I feel this urge, this irresistible duty, to share what I do, what I see, what I hear, what I taste and what I learn with people who read this blog. Perhaps it is narcissism. Perhaps it is altruism. Perhaps it is some combination of the two. In any case, I do hope it is entertaining and I thank the hundreds of people who have read this blog for coming along for the ride. I am honoured.

Speaking of rides, the day began leisurely until my vehicle for the day arrived in the late morning. My guest house had arranged my own personal tuk-tuk for the day for three thousand rupees. The little black tuk-tuk, obviously much better maintained and loved than your typical dusty taxi tuk-tuk, was driven by Susantha, a mild-mannered, softly-spoken middle-aged man who instantly made me feel at ease. This old cobber was no greasy little scam artist.

The tour took in two tea factories and three waterfalls strung out along the A5 highway from Nuwara Eliya in the direction of Kandy. Susantha wasn't like any other tuk-tuk driver I have seen. He drove safely, courteously and mostly obeyed the law. Until now I had assumed that it was a prerequisite to obtaining a Sri Lankan driver's licence that one must drive like a psychopathic methamphetamine addict.

About ten kilometres out of town along the twisty highway was our first destination, the Damro Tea Factory. This was a busy place nestled in a ravine surrounded by terraced tea plantations with a congested car park out the front full of tour coaches and tuk-tuks. Above it all was a big sign, "DAMRO TEA", in big white letters on the hillside like the Hollywood sign. I went on a quick twenty-minute group tour of the factory where a knowledgeable guide taught us how tea was made.

Tea production is not an especially complicated process. First, the freshly picked tea leaves are laid out on long wire racks and under the racks are high-powered fans that force air through the leaves to dry them. Twelve to eighteen hours later, the leaves are crushed and rolled in a large machine with a rotating blade to chop them into smaller, flatter pieces. Then the crushed leaves are spread out thinly on large stainless steel tables for three hours to ferment. "Fermentation" is strictly not the correct word, there is no yeast or bacterium involved. "Oxidisation" is the correct word; being exposed to air oxidises the compounds in the leaves, develops their flavour and turns the leaves black. (Green tea popular in East Asia does not go through this oxidisation process; the dried and crushed leaves are immediately sealed in air-tight containers.)

The tea leaves are then fired for twenty-one minutes at ninety degrees Celsius to stop the oxidisation process and to completely remove all moisture from the leaves. Next, the tea leaves are graded. The product from the ovens consists of a heterogeneous mix of different leaf types and particle sizes and fragments of stems which are worthless. The dried leaves are then sifted through a series of electrostatic rollers that attract the lighter, smaller particles. The larger whole leaves are of higher quality and attract a premium price on world markets. The smallest particles, called "fannings" or "dust", are the strongest, most bitter tea grade and are often used in cheaper tea bags.

After this tour we were shown the gift shop where we all bought souvenirs. For some reason there were a lot of visitors from Britain and the former British Dominions. I am shocked.

A short distance further down the highway was another tea facility, Blue Field Tea Factory. I went on another guided tour. I was the only visitor on that tour and I got to ask a lot of questions from the guide, Farhasan, about the details of the procedures that I wasn't able to ask on the more popular tour at Damro. While being led through the factory I saw me first tea plantation workers, two Tamil women in saris loading oxidised tea into the drying oven.

Tea production in Sri Lanka has an imteresting history. The Hill Country was originally virgin rainforest inhabited mostly by hunter-gatherer tribes called the Veddha. After the British conquered the interior in 1815, the colonists found that the cool highland climate was perfect for growing tea, that substance George Orwell called the Englishman's opium. So the British cleared thousands of acres of hilly rainforest to plant tea bushes.

There was only one problem - nobody wanted to work on them. The Sinhalese had their ancestral villages, their inherited plots of land, their fishing boats that allowed them to reap the infinite bounty of the sea. Why would they give that up just to work for British capitalist pigs on some remote tea farm for a pittance?

So the British did what they often did - import people from elsewhere in the British Empire. In this case, they brought in thousands of starving, landless Tamil peasants from the Indian mainland to do the dirty work.

The Tamils are still there picking tea. They are distinct from the Tamils who live in the north and east of Sri Lanka who have been on the island for many centuries. It is no exaggeration to say that the Plantation Tamils, as they are called, are among the most oppressed peoples in Asia. One of the first things newly independent Ceylon did in 1950 was to strip these poor souls of their Ceylonese citizenship. The government in Colombo claimed they were Indian. India didn't want them back or to grant them citizenship - why would they, generations of Plantation Tamils had lived in Sri Lanka for a century and now had few ties to India - effectively rendering the tea workers stateless.

Many NGOs and charities are working hard to improve the lot of these exploited tea workers. Still, the conditions of these workers are absurd. They live on the plantations in long, ramshackle, rusty shacks called "lines". The lines are divided into a series of segments, each segment being home to one family. The typical pay of a tea picker is eight hundreed rupees a day - about six Australian dollars. To put this in perspective, at Cargill's white rice is Rs. 79 a kilogram, bananas are Rs. 75 a kilogram, potatoes are Rs. 170 a kilogram, a small frozen chicken is Rs. 500, a twin pack of bar soap is Rs. 99, a 1.5 litre bottle of safe drinking water is Rs. 70 and apples are a whopping Rs. 500 a kilogram. The plantation workers might not have to pay for their on-site accommodation, but it is clear that eight hundred rupees does not go very far.

To earn this majestic amount of eight hundred rupees, the pickers have to pluck twenty kilograms of tea a day. I don't know if you've ever seen a fresh tea leaf but they are feather-light. Only the small, young, tender leaves are picked. It must take all day to reach that quota. It takes five kilograms of fresh leaves to make one kilogram of final product. I calculated in my head - twenty kilograms of fresh leaves make four kilograms of final product, eight hundred rupees divided by four is two hundred rupees per kilogram of final product - about A$1.60 per kilogram, a tiny fraction of what tea costs in Western supermarkets. Keep that in mind when you next make a nice cup of tea.

I had an excellent rice and curry buffet lunch at the Blue Field factory, bought some more tea souvenirs, and got back in the tuk-tuk with the ever-patient Susantha. The A5 highway descends from the Hill Country plateau to the central plains around Kandy, we had descended by about nine hundred metres from Nuwara Eliya before we arrived at the next stop, Puna Ella Falls. The Hill Country plateau is fringed with waterfalls on all sides of the plateau where streams plunge off the highlands onto the surrounding plains, and Puna Ella is one of the smaller waterfalls that can be seen from the highway at a distance.

A short distance down the hill was the next waterfall, Ramboda Falls. This is actually a complex of two waterfalls, Upper Ramboda Falls and Lower Ramboda Falls, one above the highway bridge and one below. The upper falls are magnificent enough but Susantha led me to the lower falls.

It was a bit of a hike. First you have to walk down from the highway along a very steep switchbacked driveway to the Ramboda Falls Hotel. You then have to walk down three storeys of stairs, then exit the hotel, and walk down the steepest, narrowest staircase I have ever seen.

It was worth it. In some respects, the Lower Ramboda Falls are more awe-inspiring than the Ravana Falls at Ella. The Ravana Falls are much higher but quite narrow. The Lower Ramboda Falls are wider and more powerful.

Then we had to climb back up. My goodness, those stairs! They were more like ladders. They were so narrow that whenever people came from opposite directions one person had to risk breaking their neck to let the other through. After an arduous climb, we got to the hotel. There is an elevator but it is for guests only. Everyone else has to buy a ticket. Susantha and I climbed the three stories but right outside the exit at the top of the hotel, there was a rude, loud, French-speaking woman smoking an extremely strong cigarette that smelled like burning tyres.

I had an asthma attack, the first of my trip. Susantha looked curious as I administered by Ventolin puffer to my aching lungs, I don't think he had seen an asthma puffer before. He promised me that we would take the driveway up to the highway where the tuk-tuk was parked nice and slow, he even offered to carry my daypack for me. What a legend.

The next feature of the tour was the Ramboda Tunnel, a piece of infrastructure that enabled the Hill Country to be connected to Kandy by a direct road. Sri Lankans are so proud of this tunnel that it appears on the front of the one thousand rupee note.

We stopped at a lookout perched above a souvenir shop a bit further on, from here all three waterfalls were visible, as well as a lovely prospect over the Kotmale Reservoir towards the mountains near Kandy.

It was time to return to Nuwara Eliya. Scattered in the hills through all the terraced tea bushes are small vegetable farms worked by impoverished smallholders. They stand on the side of the A5 holding their produce in their hands offering them to passing vehicles. I asked Susantha to stop at one and bought a punnet of strawberries from one old lady for three hundred rupees. They were the reddest, sweetest, juiciest strawberries I have ever eaten. What is it about Sri Lanka and its divinely inspired fruit and vegetables? This is how fresh produce should be everywhere.

Soon we were back in Nuwara Eliya and it was time to say goodbye to Susantha and his marvellously well-polished black tuk-tuk. Visiting Sri Lanka is a study in contradictions. One minute its people's inability to give accurate advice about anything, the feckless inefficiency, the chaotic lack of planning, the scamming tuk-tuk drivers and the fact that nothing quite works almost sends you into a nervous breakdown. The next minute, the genuine warmth of its people, the gentle soft-spokenness, the friendly smiles and the incredible politeness restore your faith in the country. Sri Lanka never ceases to surprise and to amaze and to challenge and to inspire.

Susantha dropped me off at Victoria Park. One of the good things about the British Empire is that wherever the British colonists went, they built magnificent parks modelled on those back in Britain. Of course this doesn't justify the theft of whole continents from innocent indigenous peoples, the exploitation of farm and mine and plantation workers for the benefit of British capitalist interests, the divide-and-conquer philosophy that to this day seems ethnic groups in former possessions of the Empire at each other's throats, or the countless bloody wars to maintain Britain's grip on one-quarter of the world's land area. But the parks the British built are at least something in their favour.

I paid the three hundred rupee admission fee to Victoria Park and was shocked. This was not Sri Lanka! If it wasn't for the ceaseless honking of horns from all the buses and tuk-tuks on the surrounding streets, I would have thought I was in Bowral or Orange back in New South Wales.

Rustic paths weaved across emerald green lawns, a rose garden was laid out in a series of geometrically perfect concentric circles, ducks danced on lily pads on green ponds, and mock-Tudor cottages and glasshouses dotted the landscape. There are parks just like this all over Australia, especially in highland towns with cooler climates in New South Wales. There was a large children's playground with a miniature railway just like some parks back home. What made it feel even more Australian were all the Australian trees - Norfolk Island pines, bunya pines, hoop pines, she-oaks and most importantly, eucalypts, the most common type of tree all over Australia.

There are so many eucalypts, which Australians colloquially call "gum trees", not just in Nuwara Eliya but all the surrounding countryside. I pointed them out to Susantha, huge stands of tall gums on the ridges above the tea plantation slopes. He never knew that those trees were Australian, he told me that they were grown to make paper and people called them "paper trees".

It was starting to get dark so I decided to explore a nearby neighboirhood full of nineteenth-century mock-Tudor hotels built by the British when Nuwara Eliya was the colonists' favourite place to get away from the horrible tropical climate of the lowlands. There are a series of these hotels, one larger than the next, until one reaches the famous Grand Hotel, an imposing peach-coloured edifice with half-timbered walls and bay windows.

I decided to see the inside and stop for a drink. I went up to the front portico and the doorman told me that yes, sir, there is a public lounge bar inside, if sir would be pleased to follow me? I'm a working-class boy. Being treated like some business tycoon doesn't sit well with me. Just speak to me like a normal human being.

We went through chambers full of timber panels and chandeliers, past a grand piano, past an expensife jewellery store, and the doorman showed me through to the public bar, a cosy little chamber of dark heavy timbers and soft, comfortable armchairs.

Most of the patrons in the bar, about eighty percent, were older, gammon-faced, bossy, upper-class English Home Counties twits of the sort who voted for Brexit and write indignant letters to the editor of the Daily Mail signed "Disgusted of Royal Tunbridge Wells". The other twenty percent were their equally arrogant and entitled Australian counterparts, the kind of people who I cross the street to avoid back home. Needless to say, I did not introduce myself to my fellow Australians.

I was astounded by just how rudely and contemptuously they treated the hotel staff. I guess they were under the mistaken impression that the British Empire still exist and the locals are still their lackeys. It was disgusting. I don't care what colour the hotel employees are, I don't care how wealthy you are, you say your pleases amd thank-yous like everybody else.

I ordered a drink, a mint gin, a bright green Incredible Hulk-like concotion of gin, lime juice, mint syrup and soda water. It was very nice. It was also very expensive, sixteen hundred rupees. As I sipped my drink and ate the complimentary soybean snacks I was overcome with self-disgust. Here I am, sitting in a posh hotel surrounded by bourgeois pigs, sipping a drink that would cost a tea picker two day's wages. How on earth is this fair? I'm a socialist, and a proud and active member of my trade union, for crying out loud!

I would like to think that I work moderately hard. I endure the well-paid sedentary drudgery of an often mind-numbingly soporific job in the Public Service. When I am not bogged down in trivial administrative minutiae, it is often a very stressful job. I am in a position with some responsibility, there are many competing demands on my attention, and I am required to train and supervise people who could most leniently be described as "bloody difficult".

But I don't have to work from dawn to dusk, my back bent over double, a hessian sack slowly getting heavier on my shoulder, performing the intellectually stimulating job of looking at a tea bush and trying to figure out which leaves will keep the foreman happy, picking, picking, picking until my fingernails bleed, just so posh twits in Britain and elsewhere can sip on their Earl Grey in centrally-heated conservatories in Berkshire and feel oh-so-sophisticated while I get paid a wage that is enough to buy a small frozen chicken, two kilograms of rice and two kilograms of bananas for my family. Stuff it. This world is not fair and it bloody well should be.

Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

Saturday, 9 February 2019

I take back all those kind words I said about Sri Lanka's street dogs yesterday. After I had finished chilling out and getting my blog up-to-date at the bar down the street from my guest house, I said good-bye to Jumpy. Jumpy is a cute little thing who looks like a Jack Russell terrier but with the Sri Lankan curled-up short tail. She is a bit smaller than most street dogs, has a shy sensitive temperament, and was adopted as one of several pet dogs by the Western female bar owner who rescues dogs off the street, feeds them, vaccinates them and turns them into doggies that customers love as they roam the premises. For some reason, Jumpy chose me as her companion for the two nights I went to that pub. She would jump up onto the wicker couch and curl up next to me as I gently patted her. The bar owner told me that Jumpy has trust issues and is wary of humans and that I should be proud that Jumpy took a liking to me.

The street dogs are a bit jealous of the dogs in that pub. Throughout the night, several would come in and raid the pets' dishes. One nasty dog picked on Jumpy and the other bar dogs would gang up on the intruder and scare it away. Several times fights broke out between the dish raiders and the bar dogs.

I left the pub and walked up the hill back to my room. First, one dog jumped into my path and snarled at me. I told it to get lost, then some resident came out and said that it was her pet. "Don't worry, it is not biting," she faintly assured me.

I walked a few metres further then another two street dogs assailed me. They circled me while barking and snarling and drawing ever nearer. "Oh, just go away, you mangy mongrels! What did I ever do to you? Just f#$@ off!" I just so happened to be carrying a small plastic bag full of rambutan seeds and skins; I was looking for a suitable bin in which to dispose them. There was a resident's rubbish bin a few metres away full to overflowing. I threw the bag onto the mound of rubbish to distract the dogs and it worked. They were curious about what I had just thrown and were eagerly digging at it, probably expecting juicy bones. I walked away briskly before their disappointment turned to anger.

I finally reached the entrance to my guest house when the Big Bad One confronted me, the one who had been harassing Jumpy and the other bar dogs earlier. The Big Bad One was a solid, angry, muscular mass of snarling rage and spring-loaded muscles just waiting to lunge at my neck and bite into my carotid artery. For Christ's sake. It was like a bad video game where you fight one enemy, then you have to go and slay an even stronger enemy, and then finally you have to defeat The Ultimate Enemy, after which you are the winner.

A stand-off ensued. The dog was standing between me and the staircase down to my room. As I edged closer to the stairs, he became even more alert and aggressive.

"Rack off! Get away from me, you stupid mutt! I'm no threat to you or any other dog on this street. You hear me? Now there's a good bo-- No! Don't you dare come any closer!"

By pure chance another backpacker was walking down the street from the station. The Big Bad One was momentarily distracted by his passage. I took the opportunity to run around the dog in a wide circle, into the sunken forecourt of the tourist information centre next door, and across to the steep stairs leading to my room. The dog just stood at the top of the stairs barking impotently. He was too bloody chicken to go down the stairs! Hahahahahaha! Who's the Big Bad One now, bitch?

I guess that all those dogs targeted me because they were jealous of how I gained Jumpy's affection. Haters gonna hate! Jumpy is such a good little girl and I won't have a bad word said about that doggie.

After that adrenaline rush I had great difficulty winding down and getting to sleep, but I still got up at five o'clock for my next railway adventure. I woke up feeling very sore. I switched on the bathroom light and saw this hideous thing staring back at me in the mirror. I had turned into the Facebook "angry" reaction icon. Every imch of bare skin above the neckline of my T-shirt was glowing bright red. The sooner I find a hat that is fit for purpose, the better.

The portion of the Main Line between Ella and Badulla is renowned as one of the world's most beautiful railways. I had planned to catch the down Night Mail that had travelled overnight from Colombo; that train was timetabled to arrive at 06:05. It was scheduled to arrive at the Main Line's terminus at Badulla at 07:10. The next train back to Ella, the up Podi Manike, was advertised as leaving Badulla at 08:30 and arriving at Ella at 09:23, leaving over half an hour for me to pack my bags and check out by ten o'clock.

I got to the station forecourt at half past five. The forecourt festures a statue of Buddha that is enclosed in a glass case; between sunset and sunrise the statue is illumimated with a discotheque of flashing coloured lights. It all seemed very tacky and unseemly, not at all in keeping with a country where tourists with Buddha tattoos are deported, and wouldn't have looked out of place in the poker machine room of a typical leagues club in Western Sydney.

Tickets for the Night Mail go on sale half an hour before arrival. I and a few other hardy souls stood in the morning mist waiting forever for the ticket office to open. The loudspeakers on the platform blared Buddhist prayer chants. Finally at six o'clock the ticket window opened. I bought my single ticket to Badulla - unfortunately it is not possible to buy returns in Sri Lanka, only singles - and also reserved a first-class seat on a train to my next destination in the afternoon. The ticket seller told me that the Night Mail was about an hour late.

I saw Jason and his wife and two young daughters on the platform waiting for the first westbound train of the day. We exchanged our farewells, he gave me his Instagram account name and I gave him this blog's web address. (Don't worry Jason, I do remember your name, I just change most people's names slightly on this blog to protect their privacy.)

The first westbound train of the day to Colombo left at about 06:39 leaving me nearly alone on an empty platform from which I enjoyed the misty sunrise. The down Night Mail, headed by a forty-year-old M6 locomotive and an ancient M2C locomotive named "Vancouver" donated to Ceylon by Canada in the 1950s under the Colombo Plan, finally arrived at 07:30. This made me nervous - would there be enough time for me to get the train back from Badulla?

The Night Mail was a long train of classic red carriages - sleepers, sitting cars, mail vans. The train headed off through the mist clinging to the sides of mountain ridges, terraced tea plantations fuzzily visible through the fog.

Soon we reached one of Ella's most popular attractions, the Nine Arch Bridge. This is a high, curved stone viaduct similar to those common on the New South Wales railway network - Bowenfels, Zig Zag, Stonequarry Creek, Stanwell Park - and was probably designed by the same engineering firm such was the resemblance. It was so photogenic that even at half past seven there was a crowd of tourists photographing our passage. Most of the tourists get to the bridge by walking along the tracks from Ella, a route that includes a tunnel. They're braver than I am.

The Night Mail progressed through stunning valleys. As the sun rose most of the mist burned off revealing a steep, twisting dale with a frothing rocky river far down below. We passed small little stations serving tiny mountain villages, the station master leaving his little hut to exchange section tokens with the driver. Small peasant cottages with lichen-covered roof tiles and lines of washing stretched beside the line crawled past my window at 25 km/h.

The train reached the provincial capital of Badulla at 08:20. That gave me ten minutes' leeway until my next train. I raced down the platform to the exit gate, handed my ticket to the collector at the gate, and raced up to the ticket counter. Thankfully there was no queue. The ticket back to Ella cost a hundred rupees. I opened my wallet - I had a couple of Rs. 5,000 notes, one Rs. 1,000 note, an Rs. 500 note and an Rs. 20 note.

I tendered the Rs. 500 note. "Do you have smaller change?" the ticket seller grumbled.

I showed him my open wallet. "Nope."

The railway employee sighed and dawdled off to a back room to obtain the correct change. It seemed like an eternity. Just what is it about Sri Lanka and everywhere having a shortage of change? Do cashiers in this country not understand the importance of maintaining an adequate float? Even a fifteen-year-old Australian working at McDonald's has a better understanding of the need to ensure there is enough change in the till. Because even though customers like me do our best to ensure we have enough smaller coins and notes in our wallets, there will always have to be someone who has to break a larger note after the smaller cash runs out. It's simple mathematics.

The ticket reseller finally returned with my Rs. 400 change. I presume he took so long because he had to fill out a Till Float Maintenance Authorisation Form signed in triplicate and approved by the station master, district inspector and chief railways commissioner.

I greedily grabbed my change and my ticket, showed it to the pedantic gate attendant who carefully examined it to make sure it was actually a valid railway ticket, then ran down the platform to the footbridge at the far end, over the bridge and down the stairs with three minutes to spare.

My train back to Ella was named the Mani Podike (Little Maiden). It was a modern Class S12 push-pull diesel multiple unit built in 2012. It was certainly far more comfortable than any Sri Lankan train I have been on so far but I was surprised that a train only seven years old would have so many torn vinyl seats and extremely worn floors.

I got the same view back up the hill, perhaps even better now that the fog had lifted. We ascended from Badulla up onto the plateau where Ella is situated. The train curved through the Demodara spiral. Spirals are fairly common on the world's railways, there are two in New South Wales, and they are a genius solution to the problem of railways ascending steep grades. However, the Demodara spiral is unique because there is a station at the point where the upper part of the spiral passes over the tunnel directly beneath the station. You can stand on the platform and see your train approach from beneath you.

I got back to Ella on time at 09:23, walked across the road to the Up Country guest house, quickly packed my things and checked out. I said goodbye to Sandu the owner and her sister who helped her run the hotel. I cannot praise my hosts highly enough. Friendly service, amazing food, and if you're going to Ella I order you to stay there. The fact that it is across the street from a delightfully cute railway station is just an added bonus.

I had four hours until my next train so I left my luggage and most of my valuables with Sandu and caught a bus down to Ravana Falls on the A23 road six kilometres to the south. I don't like swimming at surf beaches very much but I do love swimming at lakes and waterfalls. I put on some swimmers under my jeans, took a travel towel, a bottle of water, a small amount of cash for the bus or taxi fares and boarded the bus south.

Ravana Falls is a magnificent cascade coming down the side of the Ella plateau just south of Ella Rock. It is certainly one of the tallest waterfalls I have seen, though it isn't a single drop but a series of drops. I am a massive waterfall fan and I spent an hour just admiring the majesty of the place, listening to the loud but soothing white-noise roar of the rushing water. I didn't go for a swim though. I had seen plenty of photos of foreign travellers going for a refreshing dip in the large pool next to the highway bridge with towels draped over the smooth boulders on the banks. But there were plenty of signs at the waterfall warning people that this is not a good idea, thirty-six people had died, and consequently nobody was going for a swim. There was a small area off to the side where two pipes diverted some of the water onto a flat concrete area with the pipes issuing strong flowing water about two metres above the ground which locals were using as public showers. But that's not quite the same.

I caught the bus back into town, collected my luggage, said my final remorseful goodbye to Sandu and her sister, and waited for my next train to Nanu Oya, the Super Secret Weekend Express.

The Super Secret Weekend Express isn't the train's official name, it is just my name for it. As far as I know this train has no official name. It doesn't even appear in the timetable search function on the Sri Lanka Railways website or on Malinda Prasad's much more user-friendly timetable webpage. The Super Secret Weekend Express is a reserved first-class-only train with five air-conditoned passenger cars and a restaurant car that runs only on Saturdays and Sundays. It leaves Kandy in the morning and reaches Ella in the early afternoon, where it lays over for a little while before returning to Kandy arriving in the evening. I only found out about the Super Secret Weekend Express by looking at the timetable display next to the ticket window at Ella station.

The Super Secret Weekend Express is very expensive by Sri Lankan standards. The 64 kilometres from Ella to Nanu Oya cost me Rs. 1,200 (about A$9.60). A second class ticket would have cost me Rs. 150 (A$1.20). It is not surprising that every single passenger was a foreign visitor.

The Super Secret Weekend Express left Ella three minutes late at 14:18. Between Ella and Bandarawela the line goes mostly through deep cuttings and thick forests with few great scenes or photo opportunities. The train pulled into Bandarawela four minutes late at 14:45 and then the "fun" began.

A conductor walked down the aisles telling everyone that the section of single track ahead was blocked, a train coming from the other direction couldn't get through the blockage and clear the section, and that the Super Secret Weekend Express will be delayed by two hours. Oh well. Two hours isn't that bad. I've been through much worse delays on the New South Wales railways. The train was due to arrive at Nanu Oya at 16:56, Nuwara Eliya is a nine kilometre bus or taxi ride away, and this would mean that I would arrive at my guest hoise at half past seven. Not very late. I promised myself I would wait until 5pm before I would start looking for a bus.

I took the opportunity to get out of the train, get some fresh Hill Country air, stretch my legs and explore Bandarawela yard with its antique rolling stock that wouldn't have looked out of place in Thirlmere railway museum. I checked out the station itself. It was a typical Sri Lankan railway station of medium importance with a long, rustic, peach-painted stucco building, well-kept gardens, a ticket hall full of heavy old timbers, and yet another fish tank. I do not know why so many Sri Lankan stations have fish tanks. I guess it gives people something to look at while they are stuck for hours due to delays.

What followed can only be described as breathtaking staggering incompetence. At 16:45, two hours after the Super Secret Weekend Express pulled into Ella, the conductor came through the train and told us that it would only definitely be another hour and that whatever was blocking the train would be cleared very, very soon.

All the passengers were faced with a dilemma. Do we stay and wait it out, or do we seek alternative transport arrangements? About half the train chose the latter, leaving the station to go search for buses or taxis. I heard one passenger say that he had found a taxi that would go to Kandy for thirty thousand rupees and would anyone like to split the bill? Another person went down to the bus station some distance away only to report that he couldn't find a bus that went through to Kandy.

The conductor said the train would definitely be moving within an hour and I was stupid enough to be reassured by this. Buses in Sri Lanka are very frequent during the day but after 7pm most routes either stop or turn into short workings. In the end I decided to stay put for a little while longer. Hope springs eternal.

Tempers were starting to fray. The station master's office was a heaving mass of irate tourists. Some people had given up and were claiming refunds of their fares through some arcane bureaucratic procedure involving lots of forms and the showing of passports.

The delay wouldn't have been so frustrating if the station staff were able to give accurate information or honestly say they didn't know when the line would re-open. Instead all we got was useless conflicting information from station staff. The train would start moving in five minutes! Tomorrow! One hour! The line was blocked by a fallen tree! A landslide! A track failure! A train defect! It was obvious that the useless station staff were talking out of their hats.

By this time the sun had set and heavy rain was falling. The last thing I and others felt like doing was hauling our backpacks in the rain all the way to a bus station only to find there were no buses to our destination or to end up paying through the nose for one of the few car taxis in this area. I looked at Google Maps; the forty-five kilometres from Bandarawela to Nuwara Eliya would have taken a car ninety minutes. A bus would have taken at least two, maybe three, hours on a twisty Hill Country highway. And there was also the risk that as soon as we left the station, the train would depart. The die was cast, we were all staying on that damn train.

Soon some people lost their patience. Some started looking for accomodation in Bandarawela but there wasn't much. It's not the kind of place travellers visit. A Finnish couple walked into town to grab dinner and said the selection was slim and it was the most awful food they had in Sri Lanka. As for the rest of us, the only food was the restaurant car that was selling small plastic bags of stale samosas for three hundred rupees, tiny cups of tea for two hundred rupees (the going rate everywhere else was fifty), and bags of potato chips and popcorn. The kiosk on the station platform was only selling much the same thing. So I had stale samosas and tea for dinner. Bon appetit.

Even more passengers crowded into the stuffy station master's office. A small number were still claiming refunds and everyone else was trying to get information, any information, about what the hell was going on so they could make an informed decision about what to do. But trying to get a straight answer out of Sri Lankans is like trying to pull hen's teeth. If you ask ten Sri Lankans the same question, you will get ten different answers.

At 7pm I knew that I would reach the guest house in Nuwara Eliya very, very late. I called their number. An employee promptly answered.

"Hello, my name's Urban Reverie and I have a Booking.com reservation for four nights. I'm just calling to let you know that my train is delayed and I will be very late tonight."

"Oh. So you want to cancel?"

"No, I don't want to cancel. I am just letting you know I will be very late."

"So when will you be coming?"

"I don't know, the railway staff won't tell us when the train will move, my train is stuck in Bandarawela. It hasn't moved in four hours."

"So you want to cancel?"

"No, I do not want to cancel. I am just giving you the courtesy of informing you that I will be very late."

"So you will be coming at ten-thirty?"

"I don't know, it depends when this train will start moving again!"

"So you want to cancel?"

"No! I. Do. Not. Want. To. Cancel! I. Am. Just. Telling. You. That. I. Will. Arrive. Very. Late. Tonight!"

"So you are coming at ten-thirty?"

I almost threw my phone down the aisle. "Yes. Yes. I am coming at ten-thirty if that answer makes you happy. OK? Thank you. Good bye!" I hung up the phone and stormed out of the train fuming with rage.

I went back into the station master's office which was a seething hive of angry passengers and duplicitous, obsequious, prevaricating railway lackeys. I saw some ancient safeworking signalling equipment off to one side of the office and I decided to check it out. It was a pair of antique Tyer's Electric Tablet System signalling machines. These red boxes with brass dials and levers and bells date from the late nineteenth century. You only see these sorts of instruments in railway museums in Australia where they haven't been used for decades.

I looked at the instrument controlling the down section Bandarawela-Heeloya back towards Ella. The indicator on the front of this box said "LINE CLOSED" (that is, there was no train currently occupying that section of line). The indicator on the second instrument controlling the up section Bandarawela-Diyathalawa towards Colombo displayed "TRAIN APPROACHING" - that is, there was a train heading in the opposite direction to ours currently occupying that section. There was nothing to say that the train was moving or that it would arrive soon, the train was probably still obstructed, it just proved that there was one train in that section somewhere headed towards us.

I relayed this information to another passenger and then I was instantly surrounded by a crowd of people anxious to know what I could tell them. All I could say was that there was a train in the section of single track ahead of us but I couldn't say whether it was moving or not or when it would arrive at Bandarawela, thus clearing the track ahead for us.

Everyone thanked me even though I couldn't tell them much. They were grateful just to get a straight answer from somebody who sort of knew what he was talking about.

Meanwhile a conductor or a station employee would sometimes roam up the train or down the platform constantly shouting "fifteen minutes! This train is definitely moving in fifteen minutes!"

"But that's what you said fifteen minutes ago, and an hour before that, and an hour before that," people would say.

"Oh no, this time the train is definitely moving in fifteen minutes!" the simpering moronic railway employee would respond.

At 20:20 the train started suddenly moving back towards Ella without any announcement or word of warning. We went a short distance then shunted onto the passing loop away from the platform. I was on the train but plenty of passengers were on the platform. They had to jump off the platform onto the tracks and cross one track and climb the rungs of the ladders below the doors to get on board.

All of us passengers were stranded on the train away from the platform. The air conditioning was turned off and the train became very stifling. At least we had the camaraderie of mutual suffering to see us through. We told jokes, talked about our travels, laughed at our misfortune. It wasn't quite the esprit de corps of troops in the trenches on the Western Front but it was close.

I did notice something - everyone who decided to stay was from Northern Europe, the United Kingdom, the former British Dominions and Japan. Everyone else had left. Here's my theory, it's only a theory. Those countries are known for their orderliness, their law-abiding citizenry, their reasonably trustworthy government officials and their regimented efficiency. In those cultures, and this includes Australia, fifteen minutes means fifteen minutes. One hour means one hour. When someone asks a question, a direct, honest answer is expected. If a person does not know the answer to a question, they honestly say that they do not know. People in those countries generally tell people what they believe to be the truth and not what they think the other person wants to hear. When an authority figure like a station master tells us that there will only be a two-hour delay, we believe them.

I have never, ever been so grateful to have been born in the West. A Westerner simply cannot appreciate what good fortune we have, how trustworthy and honest and efficient and relatively well-governed our societies are, until you visit an underdeveloped country. We have won the lottery of birth, quite unfairly. The opportunities in life we have, the fact that the average citizen in the West and especially the countries I mentioned has a fair shot at building a decent, dignified life for themselves, should be available to every human being. I look forward to the day when Sri Lanka and other poorer countries get on their feet and something as simple as an obstructed railway line isn't dealt with in such an incompetent, inefficient manner by government functionaries who lie through their teeth to affected passengers. But I feel that is quite some time away.

Australian railways are not perfect, they are well below world's best practice. But if this happened on the New South Wales railways I could look at the official railway accounts on Twitter or listen to the announcements on the train or on the platform, see what was causing the delay, get reasonably accurate information about when it will be resolved, see what alternative arrangements such as buses were being made, and make an informed decision about what I should do. Here at Bandarawela the passengers were just mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

We waited and waited. We were now denied even the small mercy of getting fresh air on the platform. Finally at 21:15 the down train bound for Badulla finally arrived at Bandarawela! Hallelujah! The section ahead was finally clear! Four minutes later our train finally departed into the night after waiting six hours and thirty-four minutes.

The Super Secret Weekend Not-So-Express squealed through an unending succession of sharp curves; there didn't seem to be a single metre of straight track. Dimly lit villages and rainy level crossings passed the windows. Most of the people on the train were asleep. I was too agitated and anxious to do likewise. I was worried about transport from the railway station at Nanu Oya to my guest house in Nuwara Eliya. I knew the buses would certainly not be running that late but would there even be a taxi?

Sitting across the aisle from me were a young French couple, Stephan and Adrienne. They were also going to Nuwara Eliya. Throughout the long, long wait the passengers had by instinct searched out others going to the same place to discuss options and to share our sorrows. I spent much of my time with them. The train finally drew into Nanu Oya at 23:15, only six hours and nineteen minutes late.

Five people got out at the surprisingly modern station at Nanu Oya. There was one tuk-tuk taxi in the station car park. The driver explained that he was the only taxi in the district still in service so late in the night. He said it would take too long to take Stephan and Adrienne to their lodgings and then come back to fetch me and the other two Japanese girls. So he offered to take the three of us. He quoted a thousand rupees for me and fifteen hundred rupees to the French couple because they were going a bit further. Deal.

The three of us got into the back of the taxi. The back seats of tuk-tuks are wide enough only for two people so Adrienne sat on Stephan's lap. Our three backpacks were stuffed onto the narrow rear shelf behind our heads. We took off from Nanu Oya in the rainy mountain fog and we started climbing the steep mountain pass on the A7 highway. Nanu Oya is 1600 metres above sea level and Nuwara Eliya is three hundred metres higher. The tuk-tuk struggled up the steep grades with three people and three backpacks in the back. The tuk-tuk engine kept spluttering, it was obviously struggling for sufficient aspiration in the thin high-altitude atmosphere. On one steep corner the backpacks shifted load and pressed against my head, the only thing keeping the backpacks in place was my head pressing back against them.

At a quarter to midnight I reached Sapu's Mountain Breeze in central Nuwara Eliya, I was dropped off first. I said goodbye to the French people and tried opening the gate. It was locked. I rattled the gate and knocked on it. No response. I tried calling their phone number again. After about twelve rings the guest house employee finally answered. I told him I was outside.

He came out wiping the sleep from his eyes and he had a shot at me because I said I was going to arrive at ten-thirty. Somehow, I don't know how, I refrained from smashing his face in. I must have superhuman self-control.

Scenery between Badulla and Ella

River rapids between Badulla and Ella

Ravana Falls

Between Ella and Badulla

Bandarawela Station

Night Mail crossing the Demodara Iron Bridge

Second class on Class S12 train from Badulla to Ella

Technicolor discotheque Buddha

Podi Manike train from Badulla to Ella

Ravana Falls

Second class car on the Night Mail from Ella to Badulla

Ravana Falls

1st class car on Super Secret Weekend Special from Ella to Nanu Oya

Podi Manike crossing the Nine Arch Bridge

Scenery between Ella and Badulla

Tyer’s Electric Train Tablet equipment at Bandarawela station

S12 class train at Ella

Podi Manike crossing the Demodara Iron Bridge

Restaurant car on Super Secret Weekend Express