The next day we were greeted with another traditional and delicious Sri Lankan breakfast: String hoppers and a sweet corn dressing with a chilli coconut sambol combined with hard-boiled eggs, toast, jam and fruit. We needed all the fuel for the days ahead as most of it included various walks to various peaks around the area.

The first day we walked up to Little Adam’s Peak. A small peak looking out to the south of the country. They say on a good day you can see the coast. There’s a big Adam’s peak a 20 or so kilometres away where they say Adam was placed by God on the earth. The legend is a global one and was helped to spread by Marco Polo.

There was a good supply of annoying tourists, but the view and friendly dogs made us forget our superfluous annoyance. We were all humbled by what we were seeing.

We walked for a coffee in a luxe resort and pretended to be guests as we sipped on overpriced cappuccinos and ate the bananas that we brought ourselves.

Afterwards we headed down to the 9 nine arch railway and sat and waited for the train that never came. The trail down to our vantage point was dusty and treacherous, so we felt a need to stick around for something. After half an hour a German family showed up and gave us the train timetable, which proved our fears correct that there wouldn’t be another train for an hour and a half.

We walked back past a massive tea plantation and were lucky enough to have the tea pickers up close to the road. We both got a few snaps and laughs from the old leathery skinned ladies. Their faces folding in on themselves as they revealed their teeth in grins that were too big for their faces.

The next day we chose to do absolutely nothing. Ella is a very tourist-oriented town and hence most things were overpriced. We’d walk into a cafe, order the cheapest thing on the menu and hook ourselves up to the internet for the next couple of hours. Unfortunately the internet wasn’t a civilised speed so there was no way we’d be downloading the latest Game of Thrones episode. We tried streaming but to no avail. Our day was practically wasted. But what good is a holiday when you haven’t wasted a few days here and there?

On our last day, we rose with the sun and made the walk up to Ella Rock, the main attraction of Ella – a giant outcropping of rock some 800 metres above the valley floor below. A French family staying at our hotel told us the difficulty level of finding our way there, but we were confident in our wayfinding ability after our trekking experience. Naturally, we followed some instructions we found on the internet. They were wrong. We followed the train tracks for 45 minutes as most of the instructions say to do, but then we missed the turnoff and were forced to backtrack 10 minutes. Then we completely missed the left turn up the hill and decided to take a much friendlier looking path to the right. This led us straight into a tangled jungle, where oddly we stumbled upon a young boy who nearly seemed to be waiting for us. It turned out we were on his property and he led us up through crops of corn and through his house, where a young puppy fully divulged its distrust for us. After the heartbreak of not being able to pat the puppy we left, the hill becoming steeper and steeper as we moved on. Eventually we got to the semblance of a path and I thanked the boy with a tip of a 100 rupees. He refused to take the tip and asked for 400 instead. He rubbed his stomach and put on his best poor boy face. I told him if he didn’t take the 100 he’d get nothing, realising this he snatched the note from my hand and slowly walked down the hill. We continued our long trudge up the ever steepening hill. Eventually we reached a fire trail, the road and the gums growing on the side of the hill felt amazingly close to Australia. We traversed the mountain-side and eventually found the proper trail an hour and a half after our beginning. The way to the top was steep but easy from there.

I don’t need to tell you the view was amazing. And we could see Little Adam’s peak across the way. We’d arrived early and there was only one couple on the rock. They were kiwis and didn’t hesitate to take the opportunity to remind us of our defeat at the hands of the All Blacks. Cheers guys. We took their photo and they took ours, the lady, who obviously considered herself a decent photographer immediately became flustered when she had to use my Canon. She, being a Nikon user, was trying to use a “fill flash” to light our fronts because the sun behind us was causing our fronts to shadow. Unfortunately the shot kept blowing out and she thought that it was all the fault of the Canon. I thought she was outdoing herself. We spent a good half an hour there before the tourists really started rolling in and we fled the scene.

The way back was so much like the Australian bush that it startled me. The perfect mix of red dirt and green shrub, ground ferns and white gums made it hard to feel like we weren’t bushwalking back home. I felt the pang of homesickness as we made our way back to our hotel.

Before we left for the walk, we discovered that the family dog, Bindu, had taken a liking to one of my shoes and decided to promptly devour it. I’d left the shoe where it lay so that the owners could see what the dog had done, instead of me having to confront them. When we got home, we discovered that they’d moved the shoe and denied any knowledge of the crime. I was annoyed, partly because they didn’t care and partly because I loved those shoes, which had a nostalgia of many years attached to them. However, all was redeemed, at least in their eyes, when they gave us three extra servings of everything for breakfast. We could only laugh.

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around town and bought our train ticket up to Nuwara Eliya the next day. We’d be travelling first class as we were still pretending to be rich stately people, they were also the only tickets left. Richelle had fallen in love with the family cat, Cathy, they were both extremely attentive towards each other. This was becoming a trend for Richelle. If the guesthouse we stayed at had a cat, then she’d promptly fall in love, attempting to fill the void that was left by her separation from Frida. But this rebound-kind of love could never be sustained. When it came to leave the next day, we both shed a tear. Richelle for Cathy and I for my shoes. The train came and took us away to Nuwara Eliya and The World’s End.