High tea in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country

In the bar of the Hotel Suisse, perched above the lake in Kandy (pictured), high up in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, a driver touting for business smiles to reassure me that the British ‘left us many good things’. Trains, roads, the English language. And cricket, I remind him, ‘Oh yes, sir, cricket.’ I wonder what he says to French or Australian tourists.

The Hotel Suisse was used as Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in the second world war; these days it has something of the feel of an old-fashioned and slightly eccentric English prep school.

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If the Hill Country is not quite the last redoubt of Sri Lanka’s British past, it remains the district in which it is most palpable. For instance at Nuwara Eliya, at nearly 6,000ft, Sri Lanka’s highest settlement, the hotels are named Windsor, Glendower, the Hill Club and so on. There is a risk of tweeness amid the tea plantations and the manicured lawns. A modern-day British visitor may easily imagine himself back in Edwardian Ceylon as a provincial administrator sipping tea on a fan-cooled verandah. It is a Somerset Maugham-inspired idle fancy, of course, but still an attractive one.

The best, though far from the fastest, way to reach Kandy is by rail. The 75-mile journey takes four hours by rattling, wheezing, overcrowded train. Frequent stops between stations leave the impression of an over-worked diesel locomotive needing to pause for breath. In second- and third-class carriages, old women are compelled to stand much of the way but men give up their seats to novice Buddhist monks.

If the lush peace of the Hill Country is still Ceylon, Colombo is Sri Lanka. Crowded, modernising, cacophonous. In the capital huge hoardings advertise the imminent construction of ‘luxury’ condominiums.