Everyone goes to Ella. And Ella is genuinely lovely the famous train bridge, the viewpoints, the cafes doing a brisk trade in banana pancakes. There is nothing wrong with Ella. But there is, just beyond it, another Uva Province. One that most travellers drive through without stopping, their eyes on the road to the next listed destination, missing everything.
Badulla and Bandarawela sit a short distance east of Ella in the highland heartland of Sri Lanka. They are older, quieter, and considerably less polished. The colonial architecture here was not restored for the benefit of tourists it is simply still standing, ageing with a kind of unhurried grace in the cool mountain air. The temples carry centuries of unbroken devotion. The railway stations were built to last, and they did. The tea estates stretch across the surrounding hills with the same careful geometry they have held for over a hundred and fifty years.
This is a route for the slow traveller. The kind of person who finds more in a quiet market street than a crowded viewpoint. The kind who wants a long breakfast on a veranda, a conversation with the guesthouse owner about the town’s history, and an afternoon with nothing scheduled except a walk and a book. Six days is the right amount of time. Possibly even slightly not enough.
Day 1 — The Train to Bandarawela
Take the train. This is important. The road from Colombo to Bandarawela works perfectly well, but the railway journey via Kandy, Nanu Oya, and Ella is one of the great train rides of Asia, and it would be a significant mistake to skip it in the name of efficiency.
The journey takes most of a day, depending on your starting point, but it doesn’t feel long. The landscape outside the window shifts constantly and dramatically: the low coastal plains giving way to the first hill-country foothills, the rubber estates climbing the lower slopes, and then the extraordinary ascent through the tea country switchbacks and tunnels, viaducts over deep gorges, the air growing perceptibly cooler as the train climbs. The final approach to Bandarawela, curving through the hills in the late afternoon light, is as fine a piece of railway scenery as you will find anywhere.
Bandarawela station itself sets the tone for what follows: a solid, red-tiled building from 1894, its whitewashed walls and original wooden counter giving the impression that very little has changed since the first train pulled in. The town that spreads out from it has the same quality. Wide, unhurried streets. Old-fashioned shops. A covered market that smells of spices and dried fish. The kind of civic life that proceeds entirely on its own terms, without reference to the tourism industry.
Days 2 and 3 — Churches, Railways, and the Tea Estate Roads
Bandarawela’s colonial churches reward a morning of careful, unhurried attention. St Mark’s Church a handsome, stone-built Anglican church dating from the late 19th century stands on a quiet road above the town centre, its square tower visible from some distance. The building itself is well-kept and still in use, with a spare, dignified interior that speaks of the particular aesthetic sensibility of the British colonial church builder: plain walls, good light, the minimum required and no more.
The graveyard is where the history becomes tangible. The older headstones some of them very old indeed carry inscriptions in English, Dutch, and occasionally Portuguese, the surnames shifting across the centuries as different colonial powers moved through the island. Planters who arrived in their thirties and never left. Children who didn’t survive the first monsoon season. Administrators who had spent their entire working lives at this elevation and were buried looking out at the hills they’d managed for the Crown. There is something in the compressed weight of all that displacement that stays with you as you walk back into town.
The railway station, as mentioned, is worth more than a passing glance. Come back in the afternoon when the light is lower, sit on the platform bench, and watch the trains arrive and depart. The Udarata Menike and the Podi Menike both legendary named services on the Colombo-Badulla line pass through at intervals throughout the day. There is a particular pleasure in old railway stations that is very difficult to account for rationally, but very easy to feel.
On the third day, hire a tuk-tuk and spend several hours exploring the tea-estate roads above the town. The Uva tea country has a different character from the more famous estates around Nuwara Eliya more rugged, less manicured, with wider views and far fewer visitors. The tea itself Uva tea, with its distinctive slightly spicy, almost menthol quality is considered among the finest produced anywhere in the world. Several estates welcome visitors for informal tastings. Ask at your hotel or guesthouse for introductions; the tea industry here is still run on relationships.
Days 4 and 5 — Badulla and the Muthiyangana Temple
Badulla is about forty minutes by road from Bandarawela, and the drive is scenic enough that it doesn’t feel like a transfer it feels like the next part of the journey. The town sits in a broad valley ringed by hills, and has a more workaday energy than Bandarawela: a proper district capital, with a large market, a busy commercial centre, and the kind of civic infrastructure that suggests a town that has been the administrative heart of its region for a very long time. Which it has.
The centrepiece is the Muthiyangana Raja Maha Viharaya a Buddhist temple of considerable antiquity and national importance. The site is believed, in the Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition, to have been consecrated during one of the Buddha’s three legendary visits to the island, and the Muthiyangana Dagoba at its heart is said to enshrine relics from that visit. Whether or not you hold any personal investment in that history, the temple is a genuinely affecting place to spend a morning. Pilgrims come from across the island, particularly during the annual Esala Perahera festival, when the entire town is transformed by processions of drummers, dancers, and ceremonially decorated elephants moving through the streets by torchlight.
Outside of festival season, the temple has a different quality: contemplative, industrious in its quiet way, the air thick with incense and the scent of the white temple flowers that devotees lay at the base of the dagoba throughout the day. Leave your shoes at the entrance and walk slowly around the stupa. The white dome, rising against the surrounding hills with calm, composed authority, is one of those sights that lodges itself permanently in the memory.
On your second day in Badulla, take the short five-kilometre drive north to Dunhinda Falls. The trail from the car park to the falls takes around thirty minutes through forest, and the waterfall itself a powerful, 64-metre cascade crashing into a wide, mist-filled pool is one of the more dramatic in the country. The walk back feels like returning from somewhere else entirely.
Day 6 — Tea Bungalows and Leaving Slowly
Use the final morning for what this entire journey has, in some sense, been building towards: a long breakfast on a tea-estate veranda, somewhere above the valley, with a clear view of the hills and the first good light coming across them.
The old colonial bungalows of the Uva Province estates were built for British planters in the 19th century and designed for exactly this kind of morning: cool air, a wide view, tea grown on the slopes directly below you. Some have been converted into guesthouses or boutique properties. Others are still working estate bungalows, rented to visitors on a night-by-night basis. All of them have the same essential quality a sense of time moving differently, of a pace of life that was never designed to accommodate urgency.
You wake early because the mornings are cool and clear and too good to sleep through. You have your tea. You walk the estate lanes, the dew still heavy on the bushes, the pickers arriving in small groups with their baskets. You read in the afternoon. You talk to whoever sits down near you at dinner. This is, in the best possible sense, a way of travelling that has largely disappeared from the world. Six days in the Uva highlands is a good way to remember what it felt like.
Where to Stay in Badulla and Bandarawela
The region offers everything from budget guesthouses in the town centres to remarkable heritage hotels and atmospheric estate bungalows in the surrounding hills.
Bandarawela Hotel – One of Sri Lanka’s most characterful heritage hotels, open since 1894 and still carrying every bit of its colonial atmosphere. Wood-panelled corridors, a formal dining room, a library with period furniture, fireplaces in some rooms. Mid-range in price and exceptional in character – genuinely one of the most atmospheric places to stay in the hill country.
The Uva Halpewatte Tea Resort – A boutique property set within a working tea estate, offering beautifully restored bungalow-style accommodation with panoramic hillside views. Guided estate walks are available, and the sense of being embedded in a working landscape rather than merely visiting it makes a real difference.
Cressida Bungalow, Badulla – A restored colonial bungalow in the hills above Badulla, available as self-contained accommodation. Budget to mid-range depending on season. Considerably more atmospheric than any town hotel in the area, and the views from the garden are exceptional.
Sunrise Inn, Bandarawela – A clean, straightforward budget guesthouse in the centre of Bandarawela. No frills, but well located, family-run, and genuinely friendly. Ideal for travellers who want to keep costs low while remaining close to everything the town has to offer.
