Ceylon Tea Trails

Tea pluckers are already on the terraces above Castlereagh Reservoir when the first pot reaches the veranda. Ceylon Tea Trails spreads across this stretch of the Bogawantalawa valley near Hatton, at roughly 1,250 metres in Sri Lanka's central highlands, and it has no lobby, no reception desk and no main building. The hotel is a set of five former planters' bungalows on working estates, each run as a private house with its own small staff. The idea is simple: stay in the houses the planters built, on the estates they ran, and let the tea country set the pace.

History

The houses belong to the British planting era. Coffee was the island's great plantation crop until leaf rust ruined the estates in the 1870s and 1880s, and planters switched to tea. Estate superintendents lived above the factories in solid bungalows with lawns, fireplaces and long verandas that looked out over the bushes they managed. Many of those houses still stand in the valleys around Dickoya, Bogawantalawa and Maskeliya.

Resplendent Ceylon, the hotel company of the Fernando family who founded Dilmah tea, restored the first of them and opened Tea Trails in 2005. It became the first Relais & Châteaux member in Sri Lanka. The same family later opened Cape Weligama on the south coast and Wild Coast Tented Lodge beside Yala National Park, and the three are often combined in a single journey around the island.

Architecture and design

The five bungalows keep their estate names: Castlereagh, Norwood, Summerville, Tientsin and Dunkeld. They were restored rather than rebuilt, so the proportions of the planters' era survive, with high ceilings, deep verandas, timber floors and open fires for cool highland evenings. Lawns, flower beds and mature trees surround each house. Modern bathrooms and services were fitted without changing the outlines, and the interiors rely on period furniture, old maps and estate photographs rather than designer pieces. Each house has its own character, set by its age, its position on the slope and its view of the water.

Rooms and suites

Rooms are shared out among the five bungalows, a handful in each, so a house never holds more than a small party. Every bungalow has a butler and a resident chef, and stays are sold on an all-inclusive basis that covers meals and drinks. A bungalow can be taken for exclusive use, which turns it into a private country house for a family or a group of friends.

Dining

There is no restaurant in the usual sense. The chef of each bungalow cooks to order, and guests choose where to eat: the dining room, the veranda or a table on the lawn. Menus move between Sri Lankan rice and curry, with its many small dishes, and European cooking. Afternoon tea is a daily ritual, served with Dilmah teas, and a visit to a nearby tea factory shows how the leaf is withered and rolled before the tasting.

Weddings and events

The scale is domestic, unusually so for a luxury hotel in Sri Lanka's hill country, and the setting is the draw. A bungalow reserved in full suits a small wedding party, an anniversary or a leadership retreat, with ceremonies on the lawn and dinners in the dining room or on the veranda. There is no ballroom, and large gatherings are not what these houses were made for.

Location

Hatton, the nearest town, is a station on the main hill-country railway, which climbs from Colombo towards Nanu Oya and Badulla. Many guests arrive by train and finish the journey by road; by car, the drive from Bandaranaike International Airport near Colombo takes several hours. Adam's Peak, the 2,243-metre summit where a footprint-shaped hollow in the rock is venerated by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, lies within driving distance. Pilgrims climb it at night to watch sunrise from the top, mostly in the season between December and May. Closer to home, estate roads and footpaths link the bungalows, so walking between them, past the pluckers and through the tea, is the natural way to spend a day.