Ella: Hostel or construction site?

In Uduwalawe we met a guy from Ella who took us with him on his way back home for a very fair price. Tarik and Missy joined us for a part of the tour (they exited erlier since they wanted to checkout some other town before). After around 1,5 hours detour (the driver needed to bring back a lost iPad) we arrived at Ella's main square.

For the rest of the way we took a tuktuk that brought us straight to the address of the hostel. The emphasis lies on address here since we did not see much of the hostel but rather stood infront of a building site wondering what to do now.

The tuktuk driver left us and we entered the site to figure out if there is any way we could stay there for the night, and indeed: after walking down a small stairway we met the very motivated owner of the place, with big visions of his hotel in the future, ho started renting out rooms on the building site to make money and sustain the building process. We were shown our room and as we entered we started making jokes about how long this room might already exist and if they maybe just built it for our booking. It had a strong smell of wall paint inside and the beds where 2 big blocks of concrete with mattresses on top. We put our backpacks down and then enjoyed a very beautiful sunset right around the corner, in the middle of the tea fields.

In the evening we had a beer with two other guests named Frederico (from Italy) and Pablo (form Spain). Frederico told us that when he first came into his room he touched one of the walls and had wet paint on his fingers, so we figured that we were lucky anyway with our room. Together we made a plan to go to Little Adam's Peak in the early morning, to check out the sunrise. We decided to start at 5 in the morning and then went to bed.

Said so, done so. After we figured out the right way it took us only 15 minutes to get up Little Adam's Peak. The app TopoMaps on ios prooved to be really useful and i could see all the little pathways around and up the mountains. It was pretty easy to get up the hill since it was basically only one very long staircase. The sunrise was absolutely amazing and I even made a little time-lapse video of it. It was devinitely worth to get up early for it.

Afterwards we went back to our homey building site to have some breakfast and get a little sleep, but not too much since we had a date with Ella and Elliot, a couple from England that we knew from back when we were in the hostel in Galle.

Together with them the plan was to go up Ella's Rock, a hill with about 300 vertical meters and also a beautiful view over the city and its surroundings From the top you could also see the top of "Little Adam`s Peak", on which we were standing just a few hours before. We took a few pictures and Johanna and Ella were busy being artsy (as Elliot described it) On the way up we also met some Italien friends of Elliot and Ella. Together we enjoyed the view a little longer and also the very sugary maracuja juice.

As we started our way back down we were starting to feel how tired we were, because we had been up since many hours. On the way we chewed on tea leaves and met a few lizards, that were chilling in the sun. I also got myself a coconut and we met a monkey family on the train tracks. There were still no trains that day because of the ongoing train strike, that should become a bigger problem later on.

Back in town we took a tuktuk back to our homey building site. We spent some time trying to haggle about the price and then got a local guy to drive us. After the tuktuk left and we had walked a few meters Johanna noticed that she left her phone in the tuktuk. It must have slipped out of her pocket. But since we angered the guy in the tuktuk with our haggeling he was gone and did not return. As our last hope we left a notice at the local police station, people there were pretty friendly and also helpful.

The anger about the lost phone was replaced by some good Gin Tonic and a nice tuna filet for Johanna as we had a very nice dinner with elliot and ella and the couple from Italy and then we fell into our bed in a pretty exhausted state.

The last sight in ella we had not visited yet was not even very far from the hostel. It was the Nine-Arch-Bridge one of the biggest bridges on the island. It is very famous as a touristic attraction. But after the trouble with the phone Johanna was not very keen on seeing the bridge. But since we were so close to it I wanted to take at least a few pictures. The bridge was really cool, but the massive amount of tourists there made it really not enjoyable. I did not even bother to make more than 4 pictures there since it was completly impossible to get a shot without people and I lost my motivation fairly quickly.

As we were searching for the bus to leave Ella we met Ferdinando again. Even though we would have really liked to go by train and see the beautiful trainride we had to take the bus since there was still the ongoing train strike and we did not really want to wait longer in Ella, so we got us some Snacks and moved on by bus.