No cycling today. Instead we transferred by coach up to the hill town of Nuwareliya. We are around ~1900m elevation and considerably cooler.

It was a relaxed start. Unlock my bicycle at 7am so it could be loaded into a renter truck. Breakfast buffet at the hotel, load our bags onto the baggage truck.

Originally the idea was for the tour to take a train. While that would have been fun, Cyclone Ditwah knocked out several railway bridges and made that impossible. The staff weighed having us ride but there is a *lot* of climbing and hence a bus day with lunch at a tea plantation.

The process for tea is summarized above. What surprised me was (1) while there are ~300 species of tea plant, most of the tea in the world comes from two species (2) it seems like a very mechanical process of drying, rolling, breaking, sifting the leaves into different uses (3) fermentation might distinguish black tea from others but physical characteristics like leaf size, size of the tea powder make for differences in tea

Some more info here: https://teasrilanka.org/tea-grade

As we got to the right altitude to grow tea (soil PH, sunlight, rain and other factors also at play) there were many plantations catering to tourists. We stopped at one of the larger ones. We had lunch first, then the tea tour.

First step, drying ~500kg of tea to leave ~250kg

A lot of rolling, shaking and sorting to get different coarseness of tea powders sorted into bins

Next was the tea tasting. We got to sample four different teas.

Last step here was the sales center where one could buy tea. I didn’t get any here but many other riders have some tea to carry home in their bags.

Sign boards also told some of the story.

Nuwara Eliya is a tourist town with horse rides.

Sign pointing back to Kandy down the hill.

Gasoline is approximately $4/gallon equivalent here.

Classic looking hill house.

From here the plan is two days cycling – back down to sea level. Still some uphill tomorrow as well.