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.

Kaudulla National Park, Habarana

 Making tracks...

Having endured the awful sight of these majestic animals chained up and herded around for tourists at Pinnawala's Elephant Orphanage, seeing them in the wild really rams home how awful that place is.

We actually got taken to Kaudulla National Park by a guide who is a friend of Duminda's. It's a good couple of hours' drive and more away from Kandy, the other side of Dambulla on the Trincomalee road - the last section of the drive courtesy one of the best roads in Sri Lanka, recently built following the cessation of hostilities with the Tamil Tigers - this was Bandit Country and perfect it is, too, if you want to fight a guerilla war.

We met our safari car in Dambulla and hared through the country in an open-backed jeep. If you're staying in Kandy and up for a long day, set out early and visit Lion Rock at Sigiriya in the morning and Kaudulla in the afternoon.

Kaudulla is a typical Sri Lankan set-up in that the park is managed by the government, which sells concessions to 'licensed' tour guides and tickets to tourists. I can only say you're best off with an English speaking guide who has a proper four wheel drive vehicle rather than a pickup, which is liable to get stuck in the coastal mud or in wet weather.

The Kaudulla Park is based around the Kaudulla 'tank', one of sixteen man-made lakes created at the end of the C3rd AD by the then king, a visionary-seeming chap. It was restored in 1959 and preserves the waters from the rainy season to keep a year-round resource in what is, for Sri Lanka at least, an arid part of the country. The contrast between this area and the cool, wet highlands of Nuwara Eliya is quite stunning.

Elephants in the wild. The kids are kinda cute...

The ride through the park is great fun, the tracks are rutted and you'll ache the next day from standing up and getting jolted around, but that's okay. A good guide will stick to the tracks in the main - they know what the punters want and that's elephants - and lots of 'em. The park is home to a rich abundance of wildlife, including cats, buffalo, a rich variety of bird life and reptiles. But it's heffalumps wot draws the tourists and our sighting of painted pelicans (some rat has daubed all their bums with pink paint), ibis and buffalo was an incidental - elephants were the game d'jour.

 It's great seeing them in the wild; the dexterity of their trunks as they knot them around tufts of grass, knock off the sand then roll them up and pop them into those big mouths is something quite spectacular. We caught small herds, family units with ridiculously cute babies and protective mothers, old tuskers standing alone in the grasslands and all along we bounced and juddered along the side of the huge lake.

Fishermen buy licenses to net Tilapia and other freshwater fish from Kaudulla Tank.

For you, Tilapia, ze war is over...

Late afternoon in autumn is when the elephants amble down to the lakeside for a nice, cooling bath and the jeeps start gathering in anticipation but there's a been a shower of rain and the elephants are in no hurry and don't pitch for the occasion. Slowly the cars peel away en route home - others have seen but a lone elephant and we're gleeful at our own elephantine cornucopia.

Home, elated and weary, we've had tremendous fun and feel blessed to have seen something good to counter the feeling of mean dirtiness we took away from Pinnawala.

We're due to leave Kandy and make our way up to the highlands of Nuwara Eliya tomorrow. We've timed out and never did make it to the Temple of the Tooth. To be honest, that's no bad thing because it gives us an excuse to come back...

The Elephant Orphanage, Pinnawala

Plenty of room - it's overtake time!

We got into Colombo at 3am-odd and met travelling companions Ishara and Duminda (Deepika's nephew) together with Duminda's rather smart Lexus minibus.

They whisked us off to the Ramada Katanayake where we had elected to try and sleep, wash and grab some breakfast before hooning off up-country to Kandy. The hotel was okay, barely - fine for the stopover. The master plan was to visit a spice garden and the Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala on the way up and we duly did this. Of our encounter with spice, more later.

It's hard to get used to driving in Sri Lanka, although Duminda was as safe a pair of hands behind the wheel as I've ever seen. TukTuks and motorbikes are all over the place, trickling through the choking traffic like sand through marbles. It's all breakneck stuff, coaches appear out of nowhere heading straight at you as they overtake a pair of parallel TukTuks and a moped before melting out of the way miraculously at the last minute just as you'd started to see your life flash in front of your eyes and only got as far as the first time you put your hands up a girl's jumper. The road to Kandy is a twisty turny thing, constantly choked with sluggish lorries and peripatetic coaches given to sudden stops sans indicators. We're overtaking half the time, crouching poised on the bumper of the lorry in front the rest of the time. It's not for the faint-hearted, this stuff.

The Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala was a fascinating experience, but one we won't be repeating thank you very much. In reality, this is no more an orphanage than a kitten tied to a stick and pelted with stones is an orphanage.

Foreigners pay 2,500 rupees to get into this exhibit and Sri Lankans 100. Neither gets any explanation of the work of the orphanage, the need for such work or how the orphanage is investing our 2,500 rupees (the price of a fine dinner for two in a hotel) into bettering the lives of the elephants in its care. In fact there's little to no information on hand anywhere, just bunches of elephants.

As you walk around, you start to realise why - there is no focus on education or familiarisation at all - and no evidence of any focus on animal welfare whatsoever. This is spectacle, not conservation at work. It's actually mildly revolting. The animals are chained, some exhibiting clear locked-in syndrome behaviour. The 'mahouts' control the animals using barbed pikes. You can feed a (unhealthily fat-looking) elephant a bowl of fruit for a fee and have your photo taken. You can watch others eating leaves as they wander about in puddles of their own faeces in concrete pens.

Chains and shit. Something of a theme at Pinnawala...

Tourists feed baskets of fruit to an unhealthily fat-looking elephant. 

The 'mahouts' rake in the cash...

One particularly sad spectacle was an elephant who'd lost her foot to a landmine. Stumbling, impossibly hunched, she presented a grim sight. Chained with others for no apparent reason other than to present a spectacle, it was hard to see if she was unable to move freely because of her injury or the heavy chains around her ankle.

There's no clear signage. There's a shop you have to exit through. Crossing the road, you can watch the elephants bathing. This daily spectacle is best viewed from two restaurants with balconies overlooking the river. The elephants enjoy the water. Two of the elephants are encouraged - in front of the more expensive hotel balcony - to immerse themselves. This is achieved with pokes and scratches from the mahout's pike.

It's all heart-warming stuff: the exploitation of animals for tourists gawping from perches in concession-paying outlets reached through an alleyway of tourist-trap hucksters pushing 'elephant poo paper' and various other gaudy knick knacks.

Government-run, you do wonder if this is not some strange microcosm of Sri Lankan governance, but this is the route to acute depression, so it's time to move on and swear never to return...

The Citadel Of Sigiriya - Lion Rock

 "Right lads, I'll have a palace up there and some pleasure gardens please. 

Quick as you like now. Chop chop!"

Sigiriya is an ancient palace built by a king who decided that if you're going to do 'palace', then it might as well be a gigantic, sprawling moated complex topped by a 200-metre high rock with a pleasure garden, pools and harem at its top.

The guy certainly had style, I'll give him that. 

Fighting off the insistent and rather seedy-seeming gentleman who wanted to be our guide to the sight, we bought our tickets (Rs3,900 for foreigners, Rs50 for Sri Lankans). These were expensive by UK standards, let alone Sri Lankan and our Sri Lankan friends felt shamed by the difference in prices. Oddly enough they seemed more annoyed by it than we were. 

But to be honest, we were a little taken aback. Understanding we earn more than Sri Lankans do, put in a system of concessions for schoolkids and the aged then find ways of presenting the experience that wealthier European or Asian travellers would pay premiums for rather than out-and-out gouging. There was no guidebook to the site and no audio guide on offer. There were no official guides and little evidence of any attempt to structure the experience as a value-added one beyond 'pay up and go up'. 

In some ways, this adds to its charm - it's not slick and over-developed. But then in others it detracts - the pestering freelance tour guide, the lack of any facilities or information. Even the availability of cold water until you get to the stalls in the drivers' car park at the exit. That apart, the site itself is splendorous.

I'm sure there was more information in the museum, but that was 500 metres the wrong way away from the site and we decided to skip it and get on with what looked to promise a hot, gruelling climb.

You travel through the ruins of glorious water gardens and what once must have been an amazing citadel towards the rock towering above you. You can see the steps stretching up to the foot of the rock, then the gantries and walkways stuck to the side of it and vertigo already cuts in. We chose a hot, sunny day and it was certainly warm going. There are delightful signs all over the place telling you to stay silent to prevent hornet attacks. Shame they weren't in Korean or Japanese. 

The hornets, presumably unable to speak Korean or Japanese themselves, let the babblers pass. 

The climb up, taken with care, is not onerous if you are relatively fit. Many choose to go as far as the 'lion's feet' and leave the final - and most vertiginous - part of the climb to more foolish folk. 

The Mirror Wall. No, it's no longer shiny. 

Not even Dubai could be shiny after 2,000 years...

On the way up you pass the Mirror Wall, a porcelain wall once apparently so burnished the king who built his palace atop this 200 meter-high boulder could see his face in it. You also get the chance to clamber up a spiral staircase to look at the remains of the frescoes some experts believe once adorned much of the rock. We passed, it was too hot, too busy and none of us much liked the look of the buttressing holding the viewing platform together. 

It's only when you're traversing rock a couple of hundred feet from the staging point below looking out over vistas of Sri Lanka's forest carpet that you realise you're standing on a flimsy structure nailed to a rock and maintained by the Sri Lankan Office of Public Works (or some such). The presence of a broken strut on the ground below doesn't add to any vestigial feelings of confidence.

It's not until you're on the way out you get to see what you've been walking on. 

Which is lucky, really...

Struggling to the top (not because of the climb, but negotiating the press of people coming down - even a section which had two walkways, clearly intended to be one for up and one for down, was crammed with people going both ways), you're rewarded by an amazing view of the lush countryside, as well as a scramble through the stepped ruins of the palace, complete with a huge cistern and water pools. 

Apparently yer one had 200 wives and liked to disport with them here. You can't blame him. If I were the King Of All I Surveyed, I'd be tempted meself...

Mind, it didn't do him much good - he was defeated and fell on his own sword in AD495. 

This is where Sri Lankans discover why their ticket only cost Rs50...

Delightfully, once you've struggled to the top and wandered around a bit, you come across a sign that says 'GOING DOWN IS DANGEROUS'. Thanks, you might have mentioned that before...

Sigiriya is a true marvel. Suck it up, cough and pay the inflated fee. Give this at least half a day. Do not, under any circumstance, pass it by.

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!

The Earl's Regency Hotel, Kandy

One of the two wings of the Earl's Regency Hotel in Kandy. 

It's actually prettier than this in real life, but not a lot prettier...

Grubby, sweaty (despite the frighteningly efficient AC in the Lexus), smelling faintly of Frangipani and with the ugly sight of chained elephants still in our minds' eyes, we checked into the Earl's Regency Hotel in Kandy.

The hotel choice had been the source of much angst - a glance through TripAdvisor shows Sri Lankan hotel reviews are all Alpine in their nature - a collection of vertiginous ups and downs. It's like Marmite, there's so much love and hate you don't know who to believe. I went for the least dangerous-looking of the lot and it wasn't a bad choice at all, really.

The Earl's Regency is actually quite a small hotel with something in the region of 130-odd rooms (according to staff - the website says 104) - although it looks larger. The reception area screams 1970s, browns and brass with a lot of woodwork on display - but that's just Sri Lankan decor for you - it was actually opened by the Minister of Tourism in 1999.

The hotel looks from maps and so on as if it's just out of the centre of Kandy but the combination of snaking roads and the driving can mean a 15-20 minute schlep away from Kandy proper. It's by no means walking distance from town.

Check-in's fine, one of those 'take a seat and we'll bring the form to you (containing fields to fill in which you've already filled online but who am I to cavil) and welcome drinks of watermelon juice' jobs.

A balcony overlooking the Mahawelli River in Kandy. Truly lovely.

The room was rather beautiful, large and wooden-floored, overlooking the Mahawelli river doing its placid meandering thing. All mod cons are to be found here, bathrobes (tiny) and slippers, tea and coffee making, a nice enough bathroom with toiletries. There's a TV offering crackly reception and a minibar that was poorly stocked and didn't work properly. The accompanying cabinet has room for more choice - spirits, crisps and that sort of thing but they weren't in evidence. A bottle of wine in the fridge was half-drunk when we opened it, a swift complaint resolved after much Manuel-like 'me no drink this' play-acting.

The plumbing and AC worked, by no means a 'given' in a Sri Lankan hotel, by the way - although the bath took an age to drain and the toilet flush had to be shuggled around to stop it constantly draining from the cistern into the toilet. We asked housekeeping to take a look at this but they didn't. The room had a balcony which was a magical place to enjoy early evening drinks overlooking the lazy waters. Room service was excellent.

The 'Mountbatten Lounge' should offer a fine venue for a pre-dinner drink, but didn't. For a start, it has no bar - drinks are served from the well-stocked bar in the hotel's Indian restaurant which, if the truth were told, would have made a nicer bar than restaurant. The waiter didn't understand vodka dry Martini or any other combination of these words to produce possibly the world's most famous cocktail but did get 'Gin and tonic' so we resorted to the fallback. The only wine by the glass was a Chardonnay, but if you prefer Pinot Grigio or other varieties, you have the option of buying your own bottle. Getting enough ice into the G&T proved a mission, but we got there in the end by pulling together as a team.

The hotel has two outlets - Royal Spice reflecting Sri Lanka's strange obsession with Indian food (seen as 'more sophisticated' than Sri Lankan - and rubbing cheek-by-jowl with an equally mystifying love of 'Chinese' food) and Far Pavillions, the buffet operation which cranks out breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It's worth noting Kandy has limited eating out facilities. It's not really part of Sri Lankan culture to eat out, so you're likely to end up eating in your own or other hotels.

We ate at Royal Spice on our first night. The food is billed as 'Northern Indian' and wasn't at all bad at doing that, but it wasn't exactly ground-breaking - chicken makhani is hardly the pinnacle of Kashmiri eating. We sent back the undercooked murgh malai kebab, but generally enjoyed the meal which was pleasant if not outstanding. Given we live five minutes away from arguably the best Indian restaurant in the Emirates (The Ajman Kempinski's stunning, if expensive for where it is, Kashmiri joint Bukhara), it would be hard for us to be impressed by anyone's take on 'Northern Indian' food.

On our second night we dined at Far Pavilions. This was barely adequate buffet food, a mix of Indian, Sri Lankan and 'international' dishes that managed to do none of the three terribly well, although a tom yum soup on offer was very good. The desserts were awful international hotel buffet dessert selection fare and best not talked about.

Breakfast at Far Pavilions is a similarly strange affair - but it's hard to see what else you could do with a rainbow nation of visitors - there were Europeans, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Koreans and Egyptians we managed to identify in an idle game of 'spot the strangest plate of food being consumed'. Watermelon, salt, croissant and scrambled egg nestled together on the plate with green salad won the day.

The egg station is in an enclosed room where the frying action takes place - this station is responsible for frying pork bacon, beef and chicken sausages, puri and other varieties of fried breads and eggs. The result is frequently little less than chaos, with milling crowds of guests proffering their cold plates Oliver-like for their chosen savoury to be placed thereon. I'm sure our Muslim fellow-guests would have been a great deal more disquieted to see the non-pork sausages handled with the same tongs as the bacon than we were.

Sri Lanka only does cold plates. Seriously.

The bacon is done on request, so you can wait a long time while your eggs cool unless you know how to work the system. Likewise, the toast machine is one of those conveyor belt numbers and takes three passes to actually toast the tiny slices of sweetish milk bread on offer. By the time you've fought to protect your slices of toast you're exhausted. I couldn't face the fray on day two and asked the staff if they could possibly provide some toast. Of course they could, sir. Of course they didn't.

It's important to note that "Yes" means a number of things in Sri Lanka. It can mean 'I do not have the authority to give you what you have asked for' and also 'I have severe attention deficit disorder and my assurance will be forgotten, along with the nature of your request, in about two seconds' and it can be certainly interpreted as 'I do not want to disappoint you or appear rude but I have no idea of what you are asking me'. It certainly never, ever actually means yes. The sooner we work this out and accept it, the happier we will all be, trust me.

We didn't use the pool, but it looked very nice. The hotel's in two blocks, one above reception and the restaurants, one slightly removed - we thought booking the reception block was a good idea. Overall, this was an enjoyable experience. We used the hotel as a base for some long trips out, so really didn't see it other than breakfast and drinks/dinner. But the service was generally fine (always friendly if frequently ineffectual) and returning to Kandy, we'd certainly come back here again. And yes, you read that right. By the time we'd checked out of the Earl's Regency, we'd recanted our 'never again' vow and become fascinated by Sri Lanka.

The reason why is partly a result of how we spent our first day. But for that you'll have to wait until tomorrow...

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...

Book Post: Writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy

I found a sub-folder in my laptop's big mess of writing folders that contained a tiny snippet of text - an idea I'd jotted down at some stage. It was dated early 2004 and the Word doc in contained no more than:

Today I have been alive a little over an hour. The sea is very blue outside the window of my bedroom, which makes up most of one side of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp, and they feel good.

It was an odd thing to find in 2013 - particularly as Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy starts:

Jason Hartmoor has been alive a little over an hour. He has recovered from his recurring nightmare and turned the damp side of his pillow to face the mattress. He lies, luxuriating in the bright light streaming through the window overlooking the sea. It takes up most of the length of the room. The bed sheets are white and crisp. Every opening of the eyes is a bonus, a thrill of pleasure. Sometimes he tries to stave off sleep, lying and fighting exhaustion until the early hours. It is becoming increasingly hard to push back the darkness. These days he’s lucky to hold out beyond midnight.

The idea seems to have stuck around, no?

The concept of MECAS - the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies - has long fascinated me. Somewhere up there in the Chouf mountains above Beirut was a building that had for thirty years housed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Arabic language school - known to the Lebanese as the British Spy School. Founded by Bertram Thomas, disgraced by George Blake, (taken from Shemlan and arrested as a Soviet double agent) and closed by the Lebanese Civil War, MECAS is an enigma and a minor marvel to me.

The idea of setting a spy thriller around someone who had studied at the school - around the school itself - had long nagged at me. I bought books about the school and sought out memoirs written by people who had studied there, life-long diplomats like Ivor Lucas, whose self-published memoir of his career was to inform Jason Hartmoor's mostly unremarkable diplomatic existence. Eventually, on a misty, rainy spring morning, I travelled up into the mountains with pal Maha and we tottered around the dripping village of Shemlan looking for the school. Or rather Maha tottered, wearing her usual mad heels and complaining that I was responsible for ruining her McQueens as we squelched around.

She found my comment about how she should have worn trainers unhelpful for some reason.

The locals didn't think much of being asked about the spy school by some Egyptian chick with a camera-toting Brit old enough to be her dad in tow. But we eventually tracked it down. I've been back to Shemlan a few times now - the village is lovely and the Cliff House restaurant an absolute delight that is alone worth the journey up from Beirut. It's odd how all roads lead to Shemlan - pal Dania 'Summer Blast' Al Kadi hails from the next village, as did a lady present at the recent How To Write A Book workshop I did for the Hunna writer's club (the How To Publish A Book one is at Dubai's Dar Al Adab on the 2nd November). Choueifat is just down the road, the home of the school that brought Sarah out to the UAE first in 1988. And Shemlan was home to Philip Hitti, the author of 'History of the Arabs' - a book I have long revered.

I had actually started writing Shemlan just before I published Olives - A Violent Romance. The book was shelved, paused about halfway through, while I got publishing Olives and Beirut out of my system. Originally called Hartmoor, the title was quickly changed when I discovered Sarah Ferguson's 'planned' historical novel of the same name was scheduled to publish in 2015. Having sent Beirut bobbing into the wide open sea last year, I took up the reins on Shemlan again earlier this year and finished the novel in a mad burst of frenetic activity, pumped on death metal and alternately smacked down by Arvo Pärt like a twisted druggie shredded by a mouthful of French Blues chased down with slugs of chilled vodka and warm dark rum.

And just in case you're interested, yes - I do know precisely what that feels like...

The story of Shemlan was, from an early stage, fated to travel to Estonia. We went to Tallinn for a magical week a couple of years back and I dragged Sarah across town to the British Embassy so I could photograph it for use in the book later - as it turns out, Lynch never does go to the Embassy to fall out with the ambassador in the final version of the book and so I didn't need the Embassy at all, but you can never be too careful.

Sadly, the other major location for Shemlan was Aleppo and the marvellous C14th Ottoman souk has been destroyed. In the overall devastation the last two years have brought, the loss is a small one, I know.

An odd footnote of interest to absolutely nobody but me is that the Urfalees church of St George's in Aleppo was somewhere you could still hear very early plainchant - the root of all European music lived on in the preserved practice of the Urfalees community. I use the past tense only because I don't know if it - and they - are still there. The little green orthodox church (Estonia is the most secular country in Europe - you don't get a lot of working churches there!) down by the port in Tallinn is also somewhere you can hear Estonian Orthodox singing, a rare and beautiful sound that is not only similar to the haunting echoes of Aleppo, but also the inspiration for Pärt's sparse, spine-tingling music. And it was to the aching soundscape of his 'Fur Alina' I finished writing Shemlan.

Book Post - Something For The Weekend

(Photo credit: dsearls)

This is just a note, really, not a post as such. So please don't feel cheated or anything.

It's for those of you what has read Olives - A Violent Romance or Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and not got around to reviewing them on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

I wonder if I could prevail upon you to do so this weekend? A sort of thing to add to your things to do list. It needn't be a very big thing, but I would truly appreciate your candid assessment - there's no need to sugar coat it or anything, a review is a review. I won't hate you if you didn't like one of my books. Honestly. I've linked the .co.uk versions in the titles above.

But reviews - particularly for Beirut, which didn't get the promotional whirlwind Olives did (basically because I was exhausted by then) - are really an important part of how people buy books these days. And I could do with a few more.

If you've already read and reviewed them, please take no action but accept my thanks. This post will self-explode in a short time.

Ithankyou.

Dubai Real Estate Boom Bubble Flashback

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Ah, there you are! Come in! Come in! Have a seat. Fancy a Fanta? Teem? Mirinda? Sprite?"
"I'll have a water please."
"Sure. Masafi do you? Sorry about the bottle, it's one of those annoying flimsy new ones that's worse than a paper bag. There, see? You've got water all over yourself now. Those skinny lids don't fit too well, I know."
"That's fine, thanks. Look, it's about this new Shiny you're selling."
"Oh, yes. Shiny 2.0! It's brilliant. You can dare to dream of a fulfilment of your desert lifestyle as you tantalise your ultimate desires with an abundance of urban satisfaction."
"Yes, that's the one. How is it different to the old Shiny?"
"Different? Oh, my dear boy, it's a leap - a quantum leap, I should say. We're back and it's official - there are crowds of people scuffling to get their hands on the new Shiny 2.0. Simply flocks of them. We've had to put pit bull terriers on our stand at Cityscape just to keep the masses in check. Shiny 2.0 has got what the market wants, no doubt about it. We've made a few changes along the way as we've refined the product for today's discerning buyer, of course."
"Like what?"
"Well, we've dropped the Falkirk Wheel and the life sized model of Mount Everest and the working volcano with real lava. It's a simpler, more effective product. And it's regulated, look."
"You've just put on a cap that says 'regulator' on it."
"That's the one. Your quality guarantee."
"So what about the bubble?"
"What bubble?"
"The one that burst in 2008 taking away the aspirations, hopes and dreams of thousands of unwary investors who rushed to buy something they didn't understand from people that weren't interested in helping them understand anything beyond how to write a blank cheque?"
"Hahaha! Oh, you're such a cynic and I do like that in you. There was a global financial crisis dear chap, not a bubble. There was no bubble. It never happened. Lalalalala. Anyway, moving on, how many Shiny 2.0s do you want?"
"Well I swore I'd never buy another one after the first one went dull and my kids got sick and you stopped me from watching my TV or planting red flowers in my garden..."
"Ah, those were the times, eh? All water under the bridge now. Shiny 2.0 is going up 50% in value year on year, you know. It's got a fingerprint sensor, too. You'll need to get in quick before you lose out to the rest of the market. Have you seen the skyline? Isn't it marvellous? The cranes are back!"
"But what about how it was before? The mad traffic, the groaning infrastructure?"
"It's all coming back! Isn't it just glorious? We're going to make fortunes! We're back at the brunch tables and they're simply groaning! Nomnomnom as they say. Here - have some Bolly! I'll get the hog saddled up."
"You learnt nothing didn't you? It's as if the past five years never happened."
"What five years? Here you go, just sign here. It's a perfect plot, right next to the lakes and near to the shopping centre we're building on top of that old monument thingy that had to go. We'll move the plot on you by the time it's built and it'll be a three bed instead of a five bed, but you know that this time around. You'll have so much less to complain about, in fact."
"Okay, I signed. What about my old Shiny?"
"Rent it! You'll be living off the rental income and then some the way things are going. Through the roof, rents are! Do you want us to tell you who you can rent it to, how much you can charge and what your tenants are allowed to do in their home?"
"No, not really."
"Shame, that. Because that's precisely what we're going to do. Have a nice Shiny!!!"

(Old Shiny posts linked here for your listening pleasure)