Central

Sri Lanka’s lush inland hill country, known to the locals as Up Country, is picture perfect with mist-shrouded mountains, plunging waterfalls, quaint hilltop villages, lavish Colonial plantation bungalows, and a seamless carpet of rolling green tea fields, embroidered with sari-clad tea pickers.

At lunchtime, groups of tea pickers can be found enjoying parcels of rice and curry and sipping strong black tea from old arrack bottles. Most tea pickers are Tamil, belonging to a group known as Plantation Tamils, and speak a slightly different dialect to the Jaffna Tamils. The region is also home to the old Sinhalese kingdom of Kandy, which remains the Buddhist cultural and spiritual hub of Sri Lanka. Fortunately, the region has managed to escape much devastation from the war and it is easy to forget about the former conflict here.