Im not sure where the rest of my pictures went, but if I dont write this up it already its never going to happen so this will have to suffice..
The next morning we went to the small tea processing facility on hotel premises where we suited up in sarongs and got a crash course with a native tea picker before heading out to the hills of the tea plantation to pick some leaves. They actually process the leaves you bring back and package it up for you by checkout time.
Part of the onsite plantation.
As this was the Sinhalese New Year and Nuwara Eliya is the center of it all we asked around for some local festivals or celebrations and were directed to Lake Gregory Park, a nice patch of greenery on the banks of a lake. There they had car, jeep, motorbike, boat and horse races spread out over the morning. They also had assorted food stalls and carnival booths scattered around. I stopped by a rifle target practice setup and proceeded to drop their jaws with my skills. There were people there who had never seen a white child before, we had people in full burkas asking if they can just touch the white baby.
We drove around for a little just exploring. There is so much to see and do and I would have loved to have more time.
Every little while on the road there are fruit stands selling the freshest fruits and vegetables grown a couple hundred feet away and picked the same day.
I stopped by a kiosk selling stones from a local mine, he insisted there were diamonds in all of them.
We passed groups of men with towering piles of coconuts husking them one by one.
And countless more plantations.
A quaint roadside rest-stop with thatched roof and homemade bricks.
A random overlook.
Im not sure what this was, it was some sort of a small,sketchy, shopping center filled with unsavory characters located under a large manhole.
CMB is a backpackers dream. Every other kiosk and store also manages a hotel upstairs or out back with prices as low as $1 a night.
CityBus backing off the road to allow us to pass.
Not a car or license plate I was expecting to see there.
Near the mines we found a jewelry and gemstone manufacturing facility where I picked up some at a substantial discount.
Being that it was New Years many places I wanted to check out were closed but I found a massive commercial tea factory that was open. It was called Mackwoods and im pretty darn sure their welcome sign is not original and I have seen something like it before.
Being that there were no workers there really, they let us walk all around the empty factory.
Fresh tea sorted and waiting for packaging.
The accountant with the tea before the auction.
I wasn't planning on doing anything else that day but we had some more time before dark and were told there was a beautiful Botanical Gardens in the area, so having nothing else on the agenda, off we went. Like everything else in Sri Lanka there are separate prices for locals and for tourists, with the former being a couple cents and the latter being a couple dollars. Its quite large but you can hire a golf cart to drive you around for around $5 an hour. Alas a little less than an hour there and the floodgates of heaven opened releasing a downpour of astronomical proportions cutting short my visit.
By this point we were all tired and headed to sleep.