Shuntin' and hootin'

February 25, 2020

HAPUTALE - Running a British colony was a job for the inner circle. You didn't see postcards pinned on newsagents' windows or in the small ads of weekly papers. You needed to have been to the best school. And to have come from A Good Family, of course.

There's a nice story that things changed when the post-war Labour government in Britain appointed not a toff but a former railwayman. The story says that he boasted that he wasn't a huntin' an' shootin' type but a shuntin' and hootin' man.

The story's too good to be untrue. But when I looked up the last governor, I found he was a knight with a triple-barrelled name.

The point of this is that Ceylon once had a governor called Robert Wilmot-Horton (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford) and very much of the breed. And more than 2,000 metres high above Haputale is Horton Plains national park, which you might reasonably assume was called something else before Posh Robert turned up. And indeed it was; it was called "the great open plain." Not much of a name, I concede, and so Posh Robert maybe had a good point when the place was named after him.

Observation car for our trip through the tea plantations

The clergy get their own rest rooms at stations and airports all over Sri Lanka

It was there that we went this morning after coming into the town on a train that ran through precipitous tea plantations. We had an hour of sporting driving before dawn in a tuk-tuk with its blinds drawn to keep out the chill. The driver had decorated the windscreen with the flags of Britain, Brazil and Spain and, upside down, the USA.

We left in darkness and arrived at dawn at six, to get to the edge of a canyon called World's End before it filled with mist. The air is thin at 2,300 metres but it feels thinner still when the temperature is barely above zero and your lungs are fighting to warm your breath.

It's hard to describe a walk in unspoiled countryside - plastic bags and wrappings were confiscated at the entrance - without falling into a slough of purple prose. And it's impossible to capture the beauty in a single photo.

"It reminds me of the Scottish Highlands," was Steph's assessment as she grasped for a comparison. "Warmer, of course [the sun and mercury had woken up together] and not precisely the same but it's the nearest I can get to it."

We walked a nine-kilometre loop, some of it demanding, some not, none of it crowded.

"You were lucky," said Mahmin, our driver, who'd waited and dozed as we walked. "There weren't many visitors today. On Saturdays and Sundays it's really crowded."

We have another day here tomorrow. And then we head south, the first stretch through more mountains and then the drop to the coast.

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