In 2024, National Geographic named the Pekoe Trail one of the world’s top 20 travel experiences. TIME followed by listing it among the World’s Greatest Places for 2025. The British Guild of Travel Writers gave it their Best International Tourism Development Project award. For a walking trail that only opened in late 2023, this is an extraordinary accumulation of international recognition in a very short time, and the recognition is deserved.
The Pekoe Trail is Sri Lanka’s first long-distance point-to-point walking route, stretching over 300 kilometres through the central highlands from Hanthana near Kandy to Nuwara Eliya across 22 stages. It follows old plantation roads and footpaths carved during the colonial era, linking mountain ridges, forest reserves, tea estates, and villages shaped by the rhythms of Ceylon tea. As of early 2026, 16 of the 22 stages are open with full signage, with Stage 10 closed indefinitely due to access negotiations. This post covers the best seven days of walking the trail has to offer, the accommodation, the food, and what the experience actually feels like from the inside.
Before You Go
The Pekoe Trail is not a wilderness trek. You will not be sleeping in tents or filtering river water. The trail passes through living communities, working tea estates, and small towns, and at the end of each day’s walking there is a guesthouse, homestay, or converted estate bungalow waiting. This is what makes it accessible to a far wider range of travellers than most long-distance routes, anyone with a moderate level of fitness and a genuine curiosity about the landscape they are moving through can walk it.
Download the official Pekoe Trail app before you leave Colombo. It contains turn-by-turn navigation, stage information, difficulty ratings, and current status updates on which stages are open. The trail is marked with distinctive orange and white dots and arrows throughout its length, visible from both directions, which means you can largely follow the route without looking at your phone. A trail pass is required and available through the app or at designated points along the route. Purchase it before you start rather than trying to sort it out mid-trail.
Pack leech socks. This is not optional advice. The trail passes through forest and estate sections where leeches are a consistent presence, particularly in the wetter months between May and October. Quick-dry clothing, a light waterproof jacket, sunscreen for the open ridge sections, and sturdy walking shoes with ankle support cover the essential kit. Carry two litres of water for each day’s walk, as reliable water sources on some stages are limited.
Day 1 — Kandy to the First Estate
Begin at the Ceylon Tea Museum on the Hanthana Estate, about twenty minutes by tuk-tuk from Kandy town centre. The museum itself is worth an hour before setting off, its four floors of restored colonial-era tea processing machinery giving you the industrial history of the landscape you are about to walk through in a form that a day on the trail alone cannot provide.
The first day’s walking climbs from the estate through tea plantations with views of Kandy spreading out behind you as the elevation increases. On a clear morning, the Victoria Reservoir and the Knuckles Mountain Range are both visible from the upper sections of the climb, a view that establishes immediately what kind of journey this is going to be. The descent toward Galaha gets muddy and damp in the forest near the river crossing, which sets the other tone equally clearly.
Arrive in Galaha by early afternoon and check into your first trail accommodation. Green Leaves Homestay in Galaha is a frequently recommended option among trail walkers, a family-run property with clean rooms, a warm host who prepares a Sri Lankan dinner each evening, and a garden view across the valley that makes the morning departure considerably harder than it should be. Budget around three thousand rupees per night including dinner and breakfast, which is the standard homestay rate along most of the trail.
For a first evening meal in the village before returning to the homestay, the small tea shop on the Galaha main road serves plain tea and short eats from six in the morning and stays open into the early evening, the kind of establishment that exists to serve the surrounding community rather than any passing visitor, which makes it precisely the right place to sit after the first day’s walking.
Day 2 — The Estate Roads Above Galaha
The second day moves through some of the most scenic tea estate country on the entire trail, the rows of bushes running down the hillside in every direction and the views across the valley continuing to open as the elevation increases. This is the section where the Pekoe Trail’s essential quality becomes clear. You are not looking at the tea country from a train window or a viewpoint car park. You are walking through it, at the pace it was designed for, and the difference is considerable.
Estate workers move through the rows on either side of the path throughout the morning, their baskets filling steadily with two leaves and a bud. The social reality of the trail is one of its most distinctive features, and five minutes of conversation with a picker who stops to watch you pass, mediated through whatever shared language is available, teaches you more about the tea industry than any museum exhibit.
Stop at one of the estate canteens that operate along this stretch for a mid-morning tea break. The tea served here, brewed strong and poured into small glasses at around fifty rupees, is the estate’s own production drunk within a few kilometres of where it was grown, which is the most direct possible relationship between landscape and cup.
For accommodation at the end of the second day, Show Me Lanka campsite near Deltota has developed a following among trail walkers for its comfortable facilities and the particular atmosphere of a campsite surrounded by plantation that is unlike any hotel stay the route offers. For those preferring indoor accommodation, guesthouses in Deltota town provide basic rooms at around two thousand rupees per night.
Day 3 — Climbing toward Hatton
The third day brings you into the Hatton tea district, the elevation increasing steadily as the trail moves through the upper estate roads. This section contains some of the highest walking on the route, the air noticeably cooler and the views considerably wider than the more enclosed forest sections of the previous days.
The landscape here has a different character from the Kandy-area estates, more exposed and more dramatic, the ridgelines visible ahead and the surrounding hills dropping away on both sides in a way that makes the scale of the highland interior suddenly legible. The mist that moves through these upper sections in the morning hours can close the views entirely within minutes, which is not a disappointment but a different kind of beauty.
Arrive in Hatton by the afternoon. Hatton National Hotel on the main road is a reliable mid-range option, clean and comfortable and well-positioned for an early departure the following morning. For a more atmospheric stay, the Tea Trails bungalow properties in the surrounding Dimbula district provide the closest thing to a genuine planter’s experience available anywhere on the route, at a considerably higher price point that is worth it for travellers who want two nights rather than one in the Hatton area.
For dinner in Hatton, the small rice and curry establishments along the main street serve freshly made meals from six in the evening at around three hundred rupees, simple and reliable in the way that town-centre restaurants in working Sri Lankan hill stations generally are.
Day 4 — Lipton’s Seat and the Dambatenne Estate
The day above Hatton heading toward Haputale passes through the Dambatenne Estate, built by Thomas Lipton in 1890 and still producing tea on the estate he established. The trail passes close enough to the Dambatenne Factory to justify a one-hour detour through its processing operation, the smell inside a working factory, somewhere between fresh-cut grass and the first note of a very good cup of tea, being one of those sensory details that permanently changes how you think about the beverage.
Lipton’s Seat, the viewpoint above the estate where Lipton surveyed his domain, sits at around 1,970 metres and on a clear morning offers one of the most expansive views on the entire trail. The instructions are simple: get there before ten in the morning before the mist closes the view entirely. The trail passes within easy walking distance of the viewpoint and the detour adds perhaps forty minutes to the day’s distance.
The descent toward Haputale in the afternoon brings you to one of the finest base towns on the entire route. Haputale sits on a ridge so narrow that the town drops away sharply on both sides, and the evening view from the main street, the southern lowlands visible far below through gaps in the cloud, is the kind of scene that rewards sitting with a glass of tea and doing very little else.
For accommodation, Kelburne Mountain View Cottages above the town is the most atmospheric mid-range option, the stone cottages sitting on the ridge with views that change character completely between the morning mist and the clear afternoon. Olympus Plaza Hotel on the main road handles budget comfort reliably. For dinner, Hotel Dilshan on the main street serves a good rice and curry from six with a dhal that is made fresh daily.
Day 5 — The Haputale Ridge to Ella
The section approaching Ella from the Haputale side is one of the most popular on the entire trail, and deservedly so. The ridgeline walking offers views in both directions simultaneously, the southern lowlands on one side and the central highland interior on the other, and the trail passes through a landscape that shifts continuously between open ridge and enclosed forest in a way that maintains interest throughout the full day’s distance.
The approach to Ella from the trail, arriving on foot through the surrounding estate rather than by road or train, gives the town a completely different quality from the standard tourist arrival. The Nine Arches Bridge, Stage 16 of the trail, is the most photographed section of the entire route, the path crossing the bridge itself before continuing through tea fields where, as one frequent trail walker noted, you walk out of busy Ella, across the bridge where there are a lot of tourists, and then suddenly hear nothing but birds chirping.
For accommodation in Ella, 98 Acres Resort on the hillside above the town offers the most comfortable mid-range experience with good views across the surrounding valley. For a more social atmosphere suited to the trail’s community of walkers, the smaller guesthouses along Ella’s main street offer clean rooms and the easy sociability of shared spaces where trail conversations happen naturally. Cafe Chill on the main road is the town’s most reliably good casual dining option, the wood-fired pizza and the fresh juice combination providing exactly the refuelling the day’s walking earns.
Day 6 — Ella to Bandarawela
The section east of Ella toward Bandarawela moves through a landscape that fewer trail walkers reach, the crowds that congregate around the Nine Arches Bridge thinning rapidly once the trail moves beyond the immediate Ella area. This is where the trail’s original promise, a route through living communities rather than a managed tourist experience, reasserts itself most clearly.
The walking here passes through small estate villages that have had minimal exposure to passing hikers, their daily rhythms entirely organised around the estate economy rather than any awareness of the growing trail traffic a short distance to the west. The welcome extended to walkers who pass through is genuine rather than practised, which makes the human encounters on this section of the trail qualitatively different from the more visitor-accustomed communities around Ella.
For accommodation in Bandarawela, Bandarawela Hotel, open since 1894 and still carrying every bit of its colonial atmosphere, is one of the most distinctive places to stay anywhere on the trail. Wood-panelled corridors, a formal dining room, a library with period furniture, and the kind of fireplace that the evening temperature at this altitude actually justifies.
Day 7 — The Final Climb to Nuwara Eliya
The final day of this seven-day section moves through the upper estate country toward Nuwara Eliya, the trail climbing into the highest elevation tea growing land and the views on clear mornings extending to the southern coast in one direction and the central highland peaks in the other. Stage 22 from Kandapola to the Pedro Estate in Nuwara Eliya is the last stage, and the trail walkers who have covered the full 300 kilometres describe the arrival with a euphoria that the seven-day walker, arriving with significantly fresher legs, can appreciate vicariously.
Arrive in Nuwara Eliya by mid-afternoon and check into The Grand Hotel on Grand Hotel Road, the most atmospherically appropriate final destination for a journey that has been, throughout, about walking through the landscape that the colonial tea industry built. The formal dining room, the wood panelling, and the cold highland air that makes the hotel’s fireplaces genuinely necessary complete a journey that began in the Hanthana Estate above Kandy and ends in the hill station the planters built for their own rest and recreation.
Practical Notes
The best time to walk the Pekoe Trail is between January and April when conditions are driest and visibility from the ridge sections is most reliable. The trail is walkable year-round but the wetter months between May and October bring significantly heavier leech activity and reduced visibility on the exposed sections. Check the official Pekoe Trail app and website for current stage opening status before planning, as conditions change with weather and access negotiations. A trail pass is required and costs around USD 15 for foreign visitors, available through the app. Most stages average 12 kilometres and take between three and six hours at a comfortable pace. Local guides are available at around USD 50 per stage and are worth engaging for the first day or any sections where the path is less clearly marked.
