Of Sri Lanka - The Best And Worst Of Serendib

Sri Lanka! Land of Fibreglass Monks!

So this ends Sri Lanka week. I've enjoyed it, getting all this stuff out of my system and down on paper but it's been disastrous for traffic. Lucky I don't lie awake at night worrying about traffic, isn't it?

Given our disastrous week in Galle led to us fleeing the place and swearing never to go back to Sri Lanka, Deepika gets props for talking us down off the ledge and she and travelling companions Ishara and Duminda take full credit for the remarkable turnaround this hectic and madly varied week have shaped. We'd go back at the drop of a hat as a result of this latest visit. And no more Worst Meals Of My Life took place! By the way, should you ever find yourself in Galle don't do what we did - eschew the rumpled twit up the hill and go stay at the excellent Galle Fort Hotel.

So what's the takeaway?

Sri Lanka is a land of contrasts, of poverty and wealth, beauty and dirt, glory and failure. It's never less than fascinating, often entertaining and amusing - sometimes toe-curling, sometimes beam-inducing.

From flying in, getting 40 winks and then being pitched into the dubious pleasures of the Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala - as well as the madcap dash up the mountain road to Kandy - and the Earl's Regency Hotel, we were plunged into a full-on experience that confounded our suspicions and fears. Sri Lanka's fun, people. Truly.

Sigiriya's Citadel and Lion Rock - that immense ruined palace is well worth half a day of your life. And dashing around the veldt-like drylands of Kandulla National Park is a great way to round off that day, too.

One of the charms of Sri Lanka was the constant presence of a government that never comes across as anything other than sublimely venial. Every street corner is bedecked with the Cheshire Cat grin and trademark red sash of Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, a man who looks as if he'd eat you raw if you were salted and there were a few Rupees in it for him. Sri Lanka's politicians are to be celebrated as a breed: conflict of interest, corruption and a clear appetite for the trough sit hand in hand with ostentatious acts of seeming philanthropy which are as shrilly celebrated as they are phony. It's all quite fun in its way.

It was that sense of power corrupted that had me questioning the cosy version of history we found as we visited Mackwoods' Labookellie Tea Factory, which we enjoyed tremendously. It seems like a bitchy way to thank our hosts by penning an expose of Sri Lanka's morally indefensible tea industry but obfuscation does that to me. It makes me want to scratch the itch. Hence this post about the story of tea that nobody's telling because they're so busy trotting out the press release version.

Sure, there are tourist scams and scamsters. Just go along for the ride and keep your money nice and dry. Remember, you've got a lot more money than the average Sri Lankan and they can't be blamed for trying to part you from some of it. What kills me is at the top of the pile are fat cats who could buy and sell the likes of you and me and they're squeezing everyone below them in the system. Armchair socialist, me...

And then there are the cool, gorgeous highlands of Nuwara Eliya, mountain passes and misty peaks, rolling hills and gushing waterfalls cascading for hundreds of feet down wooded slopes. The delightfully potty, charming and excellent Warwick Gardens Hotel was our reward and we regret not having tarried there longer - despite the bonkers, broken track that leads up to it.

We should have been more disappointed and perhaps even angrier at how screwed up the Mount Lavinia Hotel was - how the lovely old building and its rich heritage have given way to a lazy, sloppy hotel that manages to get nothing quite right. But we weren't - we'd learned the most important lesson there is to learn if you're to enjoy your time in Sri Lanka: Just go along for the ride.

Anyway, that's the wrap. Thank you for coming along for the ride this past week. Business as usual from tomorrow - well, usualish - because I'm just finishing the final edit of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and hope to have that up online next week. So you can look forward to the odd book promo here and there. Nothing de trop, you understand... Subtle and understated is the watchword...

A Different Story Of Tea (The One Nobody's Telling)

Some tea.

As a writer, if you ever get asked to pen a feature about tea you know precisely what to do - the vast majority of pieces on Sri Lankan tea consist of a number of trusty tropes. Chinese emperor discovers tea when leaves fall in boiling water, British trade opium for tea with Chinese until they smuggle seeds out of China and plant them in Assam, James Taylor comes to Sri Lanka and establishes a tea plantation after coffee was wiped out by blight, lush highlands of Nuwara Eliya provide 'champagne of teas', workers nip buds, processed by drying, rolling and fermentation bosh bosh there's your 2,000 words. Nah, cheque'll be fine, thanks.

I, too, have in the past been guilty of this very sin of commission.

And yet the true story of Sri Lanka's tea producers is more disturbing than that. It's fascinating, dramatic and in many ways deeply questionable.

As you cruise around the high passes of Nuwara Eliya admiring the misty landscape, a series of very British names passes you by: Palmerston, Edinburgh, Craigie Lea, Dunsinane, Harrington, Preston and many, many more. There's a definitely Scottish flavour around here. There is, naturally, also a Rothschild Estate. The names have been maintained, although the owners of those plantations were forced out of Sri Lanka by a Marxist government hell-bent on ridding the country of the last shreds of colonialism at any price. Today these estates are managed by Sri Lankan companies eager to associate themselves with 150 years of history and the very British sounding brands that go with it - and very eager indeed to avoid any mention of the rather less prosaic nature of their businesses and the means by which they came by those nice, comfy-sounding names.

Tragically, Sri Lanka's critically important tea industry has been ripped apart by the side-effects of that very governmental intervention - and it's staggering into a very bleak future indeed.

Good Old Fashioned Colonialism

Sri Lanka's tea business was founded through good old fashioned colonialism. The British government had turfed the Dutch out of Sri Lanka in the very early C19th and proceeded to cede land to former military officers and other worthies to operate coffee plantations. Sinhalese labour being hard to find, they sourced cheap labour from that Jewel Of Empire - India. Tamil Nadu, to be precise. All went swimmingly until the late 1860s, when a coffee blight started to wipe out crops. Following from pioneer James Taylor, the remaining planters (many had chucked in the towel, upped sticks and gone home to regret their choice of retirement) took to tea, using that same cheap Tamil labour in the fields they had established for coffee and expanding their plantations as demand for tea back in the UK and elsewhere rocketed.

The estate's relationship with its workers would be familiar to any student of mid-C19th Victorian England and, indeed, contemporary UAE labour practice. The estate housed the workers in labour accommodation, known as 'line rooms'. Each 'division' of an estate has its line rooms, an elementary school and a central creche and dispensary. At a basic level, the estate took care of its workers. And they still do - precisely in this fashion, little has changed - today.

The clearance of rain forest proceeded at a rate that makes the biocide currently taking place in the Amazon look like child's play. Tea was the drink of Victorian England - refreshing, invigorating but never inebriating. More land, more labour, more plantations were the order of the day and Sri Lanka had it all - apart from the labour, but the Tamils were pleased to come. So were the Scots - the highlands of Nuwara Eliya are cool, to the point where you'll find fuschias and roses in abundance, with warm but not uncomfortable summers and shivery but not uncomfortable winters. A nice planters' house in the hills was a dream. Well, apart from the malaria...

Settling Down to the Trough

Sri Lankan independence came in 1948 and two of the earliest pieces of legislation the new government passed were to confirm almost a million Tamil tea estate workers stateless. With the new owners settling down to the trough and getting comfortable, many of the British planters could see the writing on the wall and a slow creep ensued, family companies like Mackwoods selling out to Sri Lankan investors - of which N.S.O. Mendis, buying Mackwoods in 1956, claims to be the first.

By 1972, with a fresh socialist government in place, Sri Lanka had found its post-colonial feet. The plantations clearly could not be allowed to continue to be managed by foreigners and staffed by Tamils. Sri Lankan involvement in the tea industry was minimal and you can only imagine how British plantation owners would view the idea of the new, brash crop of Sri Lankan management wannabe's with their strong sense of post-colonial entitlement wanting to muscle in on positions held variously by experienced British or Tamil workers.

The government acted decisively and passed a sweeping land reform act that nationalised the entire country's plantations in one fell, draconian swoop. The law removed foreign land ownership and took any holding above 50 acres into the government fold. The poor chap who owned the Warwick Estate (if he did, as our friend at the Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel tells us, buy it from the Scottish owners in 1940 he'd precede NSO Mendis and lay claim to being the first Sri Lankan to buy a British sterling company) - like many others, without doubt - had his heart attack. In a flash, hundreds of owners lost everything. Companies and individuals alike were bankrupted overnight.

The trough had suddenly become a great deal bigger, which was lucky as those busying themselves at it were also expanding at the waistline...

The management of the country's estates (tea, rubber and coconut alike), numbering some 500-odd estates and representing over 130,000 hectares of tea plantation was vested by the government in the Janatha Estate Development Board and the Sri Lanka State Plantation Corporation. A great deal of mismanagement, corruption and general idiocy resulted, with yields plateauing and then dropping sharply over the period following nationalisation.

A Quiet Shame

But there was another, quieter movement that took place right after 1972 - the Sri Lankan and Indian governments signed a shameful agreement to divide the stateless Tamils up - a first repatriation agreement in 1964 (directly after 'I don't want them back' Nehru's death, actually) was followed by that of 1974 - India was to take back 600,000 of the Tamils and Sri Lanka was to, finally, grant citizenship to 375,000. It wasn't to be until 1988 that a final act would grant citizenship to Sri Lanka's remaining 'Estate Tamils'. The phrase differentiates them from the secessionist Northern Tamils.

The skills left the plantations and went 'home' to India in one of the biggest - and quietest - forced movements of labour seen in the C20th.

By 1990 it had become all too clear that the whole nationalisation experiment had been a mess. Pressure from the World Bank increased and the government decided to part-privatise the plantations in 1992, retaining ownership of the land but awarding management contracts to the country's 470-odd tea plantations and 700-odd tea factories (as well as rubber and coconut plantations). The whole lot was sub-divided into 23 RPCs - Regional Plantation Companies. Each unit was intended to be a profitable enterprise and consisted of groupings of estates between 6-10,000 hectares in all. A (questionable) bidding process followed, with 39 Sri Lankan companies submitting 102 bids for the right to become managing agents over the 23 RPCs.

The original scheme was a five-year renewable management contract, but it quickly became clear that wasn't going to work and the term was extended to 53 years. The companies awarded management contracts took over the management of estates, workers and factories alike. Many quickly found they didn't have the capital needed to get things rolling again after 20 years of negligence and the government eventually had to bail a number out to the tune of over Rs2 billion.

The Wrong Tea

But there was more trouble in paradise in store. The cost of tea production, especially with the new requirements for social provision for labour and unionisation of the labour force forcing costs up, were high and rising, while market prices were anything but. And Sri Lanka was - and is - producing the wrong tea.

Most of us drink tea made from tea bags these days. There's no time to go around measuring out tea, heating pots and straining the stuff. So demand for tea bags has risen while demand for leaf tea has dropped. In fact, tea consumption generally has dropped. But making tea bag tea - known as CTC (Crush, Tear, Curl) - is a different process to making whole leaf tea. In 2004 Kenya overtook Sri Lanka as the world's leading tea producer, principally because it makes CTC tea. Sri Lanka makes, in the vast majority, leaf tea.

You can hear the plaintive voices arguing that it's all about the quality, even as the billowing clouds of fell destiny gather on the horizon.

So Sri Lanka's market is a fast-shrinking one. And the management companies - holders of limited leases with onerous profit-sharing requirements - have little incentive to invest in new plant and equipment - in fact, many of the country's 660-odd working tea factories are operating with ancient plant, even *shudder* British plant from before 1972. Sri Lanka's also working with ancient plants - the strains of tea planted are traditional and they, too, date back to the Brits, while competitors such as Kenya are working with newer, more productive strains of tea - and younger plantations. Production is further reduced by under-fertilised, over-farmed land.

In fact, there's been little investment in the entire industry since the Brits were sent packing. The trough self-fills, no?

There's a labour crunch on, too. Fewer young people are finding a life of picking 18kg of tea a day (the bare minimum per worker, which nets them about Rs500 a day - the price of a beer in Sri Lanka) attractive. The insanely manual business of tea picking is dominated by women, but the estate also has to provide housing and facilities for their dependents - even if they're not actively involved in working on the plantation. Social issues are on the rise, on the back of widespread unemployment comes hopelessness, brutalisation, alcoholism and rape, while basic amenities such as clean water remain patchy. Labour conditions appear to have changed little since the Victorians - they've arguably worsened.

It's all teetering on the edge of disaster.

Worse, Sri Lanka's tea producers appear dangerously set in their ways. Those ancient factories churn out sacks of tea which are traded on the market in Colombo. Tea's a commodity, so its value goes up and down with market demand. People buy and sell tea futures. The product's price is no longer set by true demand or intrinsic value but by money market speculators. And if your cost of production is higher than, say, Kenya you've only got so long before a move in the market punishes you to bankruptcy.

The way out of this would be to produce tea as a value added rather than primary product - take your tea to market by creating branded produce and a distribution chain, products such as iced tea and other tea drinks. The government's even identified that - in a framework that calls for some nice workshops and study committees to take place.

Probably around a lovely cup of tea.

So behind the British-sounding name with '160 years of tradition' stretching back to the very first planters is a mess of mismanagement and wickedness, corruption and cronyism, abusive labour practices, rapacious short-termism and wilful profiteering in the face of the industry's decline and almost certain collapse.

Two sugars, please...

Sri Lanka - Isle Of Gems And Spices

A grumpy old expat wearing a Father Ted t-shirt in a spice garden.

The two biggest tourist scams in Sri Lanka are spice gardens and jewellery showrooms. In each case, coach-loads of willing rubes are deposited by drivers who are paid to deliver their charges up to the operator of the dubious 'attraction' who will gouge them for as much hard cash as is physically possible. Both consist of a degree of 'show and tell' before the process of cash extraction commences.

In the case of the spice gardens, the idea is to show you around the spice garden and introduce you to a range of culinary and medicinal spices native to Sri Lanka. Nobody will mention the fact that no spice is harvested here unless you ask and then the answer comes with the clear inference that this is a facility operated by a larger enterprise with plantations deeper in the jungle that are too big to show people around. So this convenient facility helps to familiarise you with the riches of Sri Lanka.

It couldn't be further from the truth. Each spice garden (and they line the roads in their hundreds) is merely a small collection of spice plants together with some huts used for 'demonstrations'. You're taken around the garden and shown little patches of turmeric, pepper, nutmeg, vanilla, cinnamon and other spice plants. Anybody with a basic culinary understanding of spice will come away knowing no more than when they arrived.

You're sat down and fed some spiced tea, given various bottles to smell and introduced to mixtures for this and that ailment. And then you're taken to the shop where, tada!, they're all on sale. At vastly inflated prices. We're talking roughly Dhs100* (Rs 3,000) for a small bottle of essential oil and Dhs13 (Rs400) for four cinnamon sticks. All of it has come wholesale in plastic containers and been decanted into those little branded bottles 'around the back'. They are all, of course, we are assured with many assurances, 'made on the premises'.

All of these dubious little displays are licensed by the government - essentially a concession scheme rather than a watermark of quality and integrity, which is what the license will be whipped out to prove if you question either. And the sell can get quite hard if you balk at this stage.

The Sri Lankan Gem Tour

The gem showrooms have variations on a theme. You're shown into the place, met by your salesman and taken to see an educational video about gem mining.

Incidentally, all mining in Sri Lanka is either pit, open cast or river mining and all three are carried out in the most basic, largely unregulated and - to the environment at least - damaging fashion possible. It's unbelievably manual, pit props are cut from rubber wood and lashed together with ropes, diesel pumps chug as they clear the water streaming from the fern-packed walls of the vertical shaft. In the bottom of a shaft typically about 30 feet deep, sloshing around in mud up to their waists, bare-footed miners dig up gravel to be hauled to the surface and washed in search of gemstones. The miners qualify for something like 2.8% of the take - you're looking at Dhs 1,500 or so if you're lucky, as a seasonal take home. The rough gems are then sold on by the license holder, often at a pre-agreed low price to avoid taxation. The trader will then sell the stones on at a much higher price and share the proceeds back with the owner who has paid the workers at the low price rate. The environmental impact of mining in Sri Lanka, particularly around Ratnapura, the town and area that contribute something like 85% of Sri Lanka's mining revenue, has been - and continues to be - severe.

But you don't care about all that stuff, you're starry-eyed from the video and you're being introduced to various gems in a demonstration room and perhaps walked through the workshop, where workers might be soldering jewellery or grinding stones. And then you're taken to the showroom with its staggering displays of precious and semi-precious stones. You can buy rings, bangles, pendants, earrings or simply bare stones. The choice is entirely yours, but by now your salesman has sized you up and knows pretty well where to guide you.

The prices are never less than outrageous and, unless you know exactly what you're doing, you're going to get majorly ripped off. Sri Lanka's most famous gemstones are its sapphires - the bluer the better - but you'll also find the world's rarest gem - the light sensitive Alexandrite as well as peridots, moonstones, garnets, rubies, topaz and many more gems of a bewildering and dazzling variety. Sapphires can vary enormously in value, particularly given whether they've been heat treated or not - sapphires' colouring can be corrected and altered through the use of heat, radiation and other treatments and only an expert can tell if a stone has been treated. Recently a chap was sacked from his job in a Colombo hospital because he was using the radiography department facilities to correct sapphires!

Can you tell a heat-treated sapphire from a natural one? Then don't buy a sapphire in Sri Lanka.

You'll be offered certificates for gemstones. These are unlikely to be worth more than the paper they're printed on.

There are something like 4,000 gem traders in Sri Lanka. Every one of them will be glad to welcome you into their showrooms. If you're hell-bent on buying a stone, you'll actually need to do your homework before you travel - and when you do decide on buying one, the National Gem and Jewellery Authority offers a free testing service.

We had enormous fun dickering over a particularly lovely 5 karat white sapphire we had no intention, frankly, of buying - blue sapphires are valued, white ones are not held in particularly high esteem. The price started at $12,000 and had gone down to $8,000 by the time we left. Its true value, an expert pal assures us, was likely less than half of the 'last price'.

Buyer beware!!!

I'm not saying, BTW, you shouldn't go on these tours - quite the reverse, do: they're fun. I'm just saying don't buy anything. You're perfectly well within your rights to refuse to be ripped off. They have merely gambled on you being a willing rippee...

* Exchange rates for the Sri Lankan rupee are amazingly diverse. UAE Exchange wanted to give us 29 Rupees for the Dirham, a popular Sri Lankan exchange off Sharjah's Rolla Square gave us 32 Rupees and if you bought a draft and cashed it in Sri Lanka, you'd get over 35 Rupees! We sort of went with converting mentally at a rate of 30 to the Dirham to make things mathematically easier, 'cos we're dunces.

The Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel, Nuwara Eliya

Scotland? Nope, Sri Lanka. Exotic tropical flowers rub shoulders with fuschia 

and pink roses in the rich gardens of Nuwara Eliya's Warwick Gardens Hotel.

Jetwing, often for some reason called Jetwings, is a major Sri Lankan conglomerate with interests in the travel and tourism industry and ownership of a large number of hotels across the country. The company's hulking luxury buses ply the tourist routes, the Eddie Stobart of Sri Lankan tourism. I had past experience of one of those hotels, Galle's achingly beautiful Lighthouse Hotel, a building designed by much-celebrated Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa.

Bawa's extraordinary architectural vision places the Lighthouse Hotel in every coffee table book of 'funkiest hotels in the world' and it's always to be found in collections of 'lovely hotels' - the camera loves its clean lines mixed with visionary statuary and yet the truth is, when you get up close to it, the hotel is at best unkempt and at worst shabby. It is also home to the mind-numbingly beautiful Cinnamon Room - the restaurant at which, readers will by now be weary of being reminded, I had The Worst Meal Of My Life.

We had also endured a week of public school-like misery at the hands of a 'boutique small hotel' in Sri Lanka, the dubious, woeful and rat-piss spattered charms of Galle's Sun House Hotel.

So booking the Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel - a boutique small hotel - as our overnight stay in the lush, cool highlands of Nuwara Eliya was something of a leap of faith. Or lunacy. You tell me.

On paper it looked stunning - C19th planter's house restored check, different out of the way experience check, uniquely stylish way to spend a Nuwara Eliya night check. But still there was a niggle. What if it were, you know, just not very good after all that? What if the TripAdvisor reviews were all so starry-eyed at the splendour of the place they missed the things that make somewhere truly special, not just decoratively exceptional?

We approached the hotel from the Ambewela Dairy Farm side, a dumb move that we only had ourselves to blame for. We're hooning around in a charcoal Lexus minibus and the increasingly precipitous road through the mountains starts to become no laughing matter as the daylight begins to fade. There are yawning chasms inches away to our right as we negotiate the narrowing single track mountain road which becomes barely road and mostly track. Still it wends up through the misty hills and we've stopped talking. Everyone's nervous as Duminda skillfully wrestles with the wheel and guides us past those awful drops and crumbling margins.

The silence bears down on us, the engine becomes something to focus on as its note rises and falls.

Finally we come across a sign. It's a right turn off the track. We take it and meet an even narrower track. There's no tarmac, this is compressed mud and pothole. We bounce and judder down into a valley only to see another track leading upwards, two concrete runners have been laid down, but they're smashed and cracked. White-painted rocks mark the route of the narrow, precipitous track upwards. The Lexus strains as Duminda tries to slow for the potholes and yet maintain enough momentum to take us up the rain-slicked incline. The edge seems very near indeed and then we hit a tight hairpin. It's too much, we have to reverse and re-take it. Bouncing and creeping, we negotiate the iniquitous track and finally draw up outside the old plantation house that is the Warwick Gardens.

It's glorious.

As far as I understood the story told me by the house's factotum as we stood on the lawn looking out over the mountains the next morning (there is a guest-facing staff of three, said factotum, a housekeeper and a chef), a Scottish planter by the unlikely name of Lemon (we tried looking up Lennon, but both come up blank) built his home from home here up in the temperate hills of Nuwara Eliya in the 1880s. He thrived here, with a massive plantation estate of some 10,000 acres.

The family stayed until 1940, selling up to a Sri Lankan chap by the name of Fernandes and he ran the estate until the nationalisations of 1971-2. This was a black period in Sri Lankan history, when the government took to its own any and all plantations over 50 acres, particularly focusing on foreign-owned estates but, it seems, even Sri Lankans weren't safe. His proud mountain kingdom reduced to 50 acres, Fernandes had a heart attack and died of grief.

Thirty years later, the house - a ruined shell in the hills - was discovered by Jetwing chairman, Hiran Cooray and he, his wife and architect Channa Daswatte took to restoring the house to its original glory. Every bit of woodwork is new, the furnishings, fixtures and fittings all selected tastefully to recreate the glory of that 'Grand highlands house in a foreign land' the original owner had set out to create in the middle of his lush plantation.

The result is a very special small hotel indeed.

The living room gives into the formal dining room. Can't stand eating with other guests? 

Find a hotel for the socially inadequate, then...

Two dining rooms (the formal dining room with a ten-seat table and the pantry with a smaller table) and a drawing room and study form the 'front of house' downstairs (there's also a pantry and kitchen).

Informal dining in the Pantry...

There's a ceiling-high tapestry on the dogleg of the stairs and then a landing leading to the other rooms. Behind the tapestry is a secret staircase to the glorious 'White Room' - originally called the Netherleigh Room. This is where we stayed - a minimalistically stylish room with an equally stylish bathroom attached to it, complete with walk-in shower and claw-footed bath. If you ever go to this hotel, book this room. Just do it. The views out over the stepped country-house lawn and peaks beyond alone are worth it.

Dinner consists of no menu. What sort of thing do you like? Sri Lankan? European? Chicken? Fish? What floats your boat? We plumped for Sri Lankan and settled down for drinks in the living room. Our host pours a serious G&T.

A long while later we wandered over to the dining table and enjoyed a meal of rare finesse, a chicken curry, vegetable curry, breadfruit curry, dal and string hoppers together with a spiced coconut sambal were subtle, spicy and served piping hot. A dessert of set yoghurt and a traditional Sri Lankan set pudding followed by coffee (from the estate's own plantation) and a battering, flashing thunderstorm whipped up almost to order, with rainwater cascading off the house. There's magic in the air.

The post-storm night is noisy. All sorts of things bump, croak witter and caw through the dark hours. And it's majestic. The morning sunlight floods the white room as we pull open the heavy curtains.

Walking in the Warwick Gardens' gardens is a morning delight...

Breakfast ("What would you like for breakfast?") was an omelette for Sarah and, for my part, bacon, sausages and eggs. With toast, home made preserves (including jam from the strawberries grown on some of the 30 acres of land remaining to the house) and more of that excellent coffee. Then a walk around the grounds, fresh from the night's rain, the channeled streams muddy with the night's run-off.

The staff are knowledgeable, charming and couldn't do more to help. The water in the bathroom is hit and miss - really not consistent with the rest of the experience on offer. There's nothing quite like standing, freezing and covered in suds waiting for the other room to turn off the tap to make you count quite how much you're paying for your boutique small hotel experience room. That's my only complaint - apart from the mad track to the house.

But, by golly, this is a special place made more special by its staff. I have no hesitation recommending it heartily to anyone who wants to do something outstanding and memorable at least once in their lives. I'd rank it alongside Ballymaloe, The Clarence and Auchterarder House as one of my favourite hotel experiences ever.

More Tea, Vicar? The Mackwoods Factory And Labookellie Tea Centre

The Mackwoods factory at Labookellie is a charming trip

Mackwoods' tea factory at Labookellie is on the A5 up to Nuwara Eliya from Kandy, past Tawalantenne and the Ramboda Tunnel. You can't really miss it, sitting on a bend on the road, all green and white. It's surrounded by swirling rows of plantation, the lush green hillsides all around striated by tea bushes with colourful dots here and there - the tea pickers of fame - moving slowly between the lines.

Actually, they're more like nickers than pickers - they nick off the delicate, light green bud and topmost pair of leaves from each plant once a week or thereabouts, the thicker, darker leaves below are left to drop as natural compost. Each tree lasts up to 65 years and they're pruned every five years to keep them in check and generally show them who's boss.

Mackwoods makes fine tea - sending some to auction, some to Harrods and some retailed under its own brand name. The company also makes much of its 160-year heritage.

But like so many things you'll find in Sri Lanka, Mackwoods isn't actually quite what it seems.

The true history of Mackwoods is quite hard to define - there are some very 'fuzzy' periods in Sri Lankan tea history and although the company is keen to infer that its Labookellie plantation is part of an unbroken tradition spanning back to 1841 with the foundation of the company by retired sea captain William Mackwood, that's not actually quite the way it all worked out.

For a start, there was no commercial tea plantation in Sri Lanka in 1841. James Taylor didn't introduce commercial planting until 1867, with the establishment of the 19-acre Loolecondera plantation near Kandy. It wasn't until 1875 that the first plantations were established in Nuwara Eliya - a replacement for the island's devastated coffee industry, progressively wiped out by blight from the 1860s onwards.

Oddly, the company claims in its website that the first tea plantation in Sri Lanka was actually in 1867 - contemporaneous with Taylor's in Kandy - at Labookellie, by Solomon and Gabriel de Worms but this is not borne out by history. The de Worms brothers actually established the nearby Rothschild Estate and divested the estate in 1865. And their attempt at planting Chinese tea failed, while Taylor succeeded.

Besides, Labookellie belonged to The Ceylon Company at the time - later transferred to the Eastern Produce and Estates Company. And, in fact, Mackwoods (originally established in 1839, actually) wasn't a plantation company at all but a trading and shipping agency based in Colombo.

Whatever. Pressured, as so many others were, by the growing clouds of impending nationalisation and 'SriLankisation' when Ceylon gained its independence from Britain in 1948, the Mackwoods family sold out in 1956 to a Mr. N.S.O. Mendis, the deal claimed to be the first SriLankisation of a British sterling company. It was by no means to be the last, as a draconian wave of egregious nationalisations in 1971-72 saw every tea plantation in the country over 50 acres forcefully sequestered by the government.

Funnily enough, the impact of the nationalisation isn't mentioned at all in Mackwoods' carefully worded official history, neither is how it managed to acquire the rights to manage some 27,000 acres of plantation today. Oddly, before the shake-up of the nationalisation, Mackwoods appears to have owned the Carolina and Balmoral plantations. It manages neither currently. Whether it owned Labookellie prior to nationalisation is unclear - as is whether Mackwoods ever did own a plantation before Mendis acquired it.

In fact, all tea plantations in Sri Lanka currently remain in government hands with management contracts awarded to 'managing agents' on a long lease basis. Sri Lanka's 'privatised' RPCs or regional plantation companies manage the plantations and take a profit share as their 'management fee'. One of these 23 'super plantation' companies is Agalawatte Plantations Plc - a subsidiary of Mackwoods. It apparently acquired its management contract without having to go through any of that inconvenient competitive bidding stuff, which is always nice. And one of the many plantations included in its 'package' of plantations awarded by the government is Labookellie.

Not so prosaic as the whole sea captain thing, is it?

Back to the tea plantation visit

The Labookellie tea factory is open to visitors and so we duly visited. It's a very slick PR exercise indeed and they don't charge for tours of the factory, which are guided by smart young ladies in green Mackwoods uniforms. Like the tea pickers themselves, the girls are Tamil (The British coffee and then tea planters originally established the practice of importing Indian, Tamil, labour to work on the plantation and the tea industry's labour force remains dominated by 'Estate Tamils' today).

Drying the tea - 10,000 kg of green leaves are dried to 2,000 kg a day at Labookellie by the factory's four blowers

We are taken up to the drying room where the picked tea is dried, two huge batches a day go through the process of 'withering' which takes about 12 hours. Then the leaves go downstairs to be rolled, fermented, dried and then sifted into grades. It's all great fun to witness and our guide is smart and has the answers to all our questions about the process.

And then onto the tea room where the tea, despite a notice saying it's Rs35 a cup, is free. The wee square of chocolate cake is excellent and is charged for at a wicked Rs50 - about Dhs1.5...

Needless to say, the tea is excellent. We're happy buyers in the shop and go crazy buying every grade of tea we can find, although we balk at the silver-tip tea, which is the finest tea you can get, sold in fancy containers and savagely priced.

It's been fun. Mackwoods sees upwards of 2,000 people a week pass through its factory and the operation is slick, smart, well managed and totally on-brand. It's not often you'll meet that combination in Sri Lanka and it's all the more impressive when you do.

Even if the experience masks a somewhat murky past...

Invigorated by our experience and the cup that refreshes but does not intoxicate, we wend our way up the vertiginous road to the highlands of Nuwara Eliya and our appointment with destiny. Our hotel here is the boutique 5-room Jetwings Warwick House. And it's Jetwings who managed the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle - the site of The Worst Meal Of My Life.

What was this place - that promises so much and yet threatens so much - going to be like? The answer lies here!

Sri Lanka Week

Some flowers. A symbol of Sri Lankan hospitality or some such...

Rather in the same mould as a hotel special night - and having had one too many themed buffet meals than we needed over the past week, thank you - this week's going to be Sri Lanka Week, so if you're not interested in Travels In Serendib, I'd give it all a miss if I were you.

We did a hare-brained, breakneck tour of Sri Lanka over Eid, as usual ill-informed and wilfully determined not to be told what to do. We had help at hand - an 'inside job' had been arranged by Sri Lankan pal Deepika, who had a driver at hand. The scheme was simple - clock into Colombo at the dreadful hour of 2.50 am thanks to Air 'we like the cheap slots' Arabia and stay briefly at the Ramada Katunayake at the airport before whizzing up to Kandy for two nights staying at the Earl's Regency, Nuwara Eliya for a night at uber-funky boutique plantation house The Jetwing Warwick Gardens and then back down to Colombo for an evening at the Mount Lavinia before flying out again in the early hours.

There was method behind the four-night madness. We had travelled to Sri Lanka before, a week's stay at the lovely-looking Sun House in Galle. That week was to turn out to be nothing short of disastrous, featuring a gurgling twit English hotelier, a randy old monk, sham tea plantations, rats piss blankets and The Worst Meal Of My Life. We eventually escaped to Colombo and got drunk before fleeing Sri Lanka vowing never to return.

I reviewed the Sun House Hotel for now defunct food blog The Fat Expat back in the day. The review's linked here and worth a read for a laugh. As a taster, it starts...

"What more could you want to make your boutique hotel experience unforgettable than the facilities offered by the Sun House in Galle, a former colonial bungalow converted into a small, exclusive and luxurious hotel?

The Sun House offers a gurgling twit British owner who appears to have escaped from a comedy show, limited and inflexible dining, a set of threadbare towels and sheets, broken plumbing and a nice, steady stream of rat's piss onto your pillows as you sleep. It really is the perfect way to come to a state of fear and loathing in Galle."

As for The Worst Meal Of My Life, that was at the gloriously beautiful Lighthouse Hotel in Galle, in probably the most handsome restaurant I have ever dined in. That one's linked here for your listening pleasure. As a piece of review writing, it's one of my personal favourites, by the way and still makes me, despite everything, laugh. Here's a snippet:

"In fact, the entire meal had come out and then simply gone back. And the waiter didn’t bat an eyelid. He had obviously seen this happening before: seen the breathless anticipation of romantic couples turned into wide-eyed horror and revulsion and then plunge into despair."

Sarah 'The Hedonista' Walton went to Sri Lanka and loved it, writing it up as an ethereal and magical experience. I could never reconcile that with our own snarling, resentful journey of furious disappointment.

So this time around Deepika talked us into it - but we decided to move so fast that if we encountered disaster, at least it would be fleeting. And I'm glad we did it now, because we had a fantastic time - a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs that was never less than fascinating, frequently endearing, sometimes frustrating but never in danger of going anywhere near the painful lessons of Galle.

So welcome, armchair traveller, to Sri Lanka Week...