Day five and time to leave the chilly hill country behind and head to the corrupt core of the tourism industry in the country, Ella (Mmmm… corrupt *drools*) The road back begun with a small and insignificant (or so we thought) breakfast in the village center and a brief walk to the police station, from where the buses headed to the familiar route towards Hatton. At Hatton we faced the biggest problem thus far, as all the ATMs in the city seemed to be magically malfunctioning and everyone was slowly running out of cash – And in Sri Lanka cash is the King! In any case, after a short rush towards the seats in our cart, only couple of us got seated and the rest of us were left hanging into the doorway, peering out of the open doors – and they saw it was goood. The doorways provided way better view on the passing scenery than hanging partially outside the open window ever did. Cool I tell  ya, C.O.O.L. Well, apart from a gang of local hipsters (who look like a weird mix of jpop idiots, classless saggy pants and your average western hipster) who kept running back and forth between the doors and shouting like a bunch of crazied little girls in a Bieber concert.

During the train trip we ended up climbing into the low hanging clouds and entered the Silent Hill zone.

At Ella it was raining lightly, the perfect weather to feel the atmosphere of this tucked away small piece of the west and the hills bordering it. And even more importantly, in this capitalist heaven, we finally found a functioning atm! After a short crawl from the life giving machine, we finally arrived to our accommodation, ran by this sweet lil granny and her daughters/daughters-in-law/some  sorta other relatives. We got half of the whole upstairs of the property and set to make ourselves comfortable. But as soon as did the mistake of turning on the lights in the common room – in a couple minutes (as the rain had just paused) we started to see some sorta flying beasts buzzing around the lights. Things got bad enough that we had to turn off all lights indoors, make one brave knight stand outdoors wielding a The Flaming Torch of WLAN to lead the beasts away and eventually we even had to resort to discarding our precious gem of LED to rescue our brave hero. Turns out that we arrived on that _one_ evening that the local termites were doing their mating flight – in the morning the floor and all tables & chairs on our balcony were covered in discarded wings and dead bodies of those lil buggers.

Our arrival to Ella also marked the beginning of the rise of the Brown Tide, that eventually drowned all but the bravest of our ranks – or the luckiest. Things would get… messy… rather soon.

On our first full day in Ella region we all felt it was time to take it a bit easier (even though most of us were still oblivious of what was about to hit us) and decided to take the shortest hiking route available, to the Little Ella Waterfalls. The journey proved to be way  longer and a lot more tiring that we anticipated, to the point that we had to take a breether in a small track side restaurant – yeap, the only sane route to the falls went along the train tracks. After giving up on the hopes of ever reaching the (apparently dried up) falls and returning to the town, we had the pleasure of enjoying well over an hour of waiting for some only-semi-decent food, the first signs of the tide started appearing in mass (personally I had already felt the first trickles around my toes some while ago). By the following morning things were getting… humhh… interesting. Our second full day in Ella went more or less in the same tune – people hitting the town or doing short trips when ever the waves receded a bit. I and Jenny for example did hit the local tea factory, which was insightful at the least – I’ll appreciate my cup of all-that-is-holy-made-in-flesh a lot more from now on (And most likely will end up being some sorta tea juppie.)

Next time on this same bat channel at the same bat time (or something like that): Leaving Ella and the shores that have been beckoning us ever since we laid our eyes on this tiny speck on the map.

Bonus pic of the day: Our personalised alarm clock