I was woken by the long, forlorn sound of the siren. The brakes hissed and screeched as our train chugged up the hill and pulled into Radella, a station along one of the most beautiful train journeys in the world: the Colombo to Badulla railway.
BBC Travel – 9th December 2022
“The journey is so enthralling that you don’t want to take your head out of the window,” said Dayawathie Ekanayake, who has travelled extensively by train across the island during her career as a finance consultant. “It makes you feel constantly in awe. You wonder about what comes next – is it a waterfall? A stupa-like tea garden? Or is it mist-clouded peaks? You never know. You just have to keep looking.”
Since my first journey along this route seven years ago, I have returned numerous times, eagerly jumping off the train to explore towns and hamlets flanked by tea estates. The 291km track takes in a mix of deep gorges, craggy cliffs, cascading falls, lakes and rivers from Sri Lanka’s west coast into its mountainous interior. It twists and turns through 46 tunnels, snaking past high montane canopy with bright red rhododendrons and wild ferns, a fragment of the native hill country forest cover left untouched by British colonisers. On a bright day, sun-drenched hills stretch down to the glistening southern coastline from the train window as far as the eye can see.
This slow, 10-hour long journey might be inconvenient for the modern-day traveller, but it’s so enchantingly scenic that it’s become a bucket list adventure for many visitors.
It’s not just the views that has travellers in awe. The train journey itself has become an Instagram sensation in recent years, with travel bloggers risking their lives to take photos of themselves hanging off the door as the train rumbles past rickety bridges (some of them have been criticised for their dramatic poses). Yet, the journey is also tied to Sri Lanka’s colonial history and gives passengers a deeper understanding of the island-nation.
During British colonisation in the 19th Century, Sri Lanka was the third-largest coffee exporter in the world. As demand rose, it became expensive to ferry coffee on bullock carts from the central mountains to Colombo for shipment, especially with road conditions deteriorating during the monsoon months. Estates had to therefore store their coffee for long periods of time, causing the quality and value to deteriorate. So British estate owners pushed for a rail system to transport coffee. In 1867, the British completed a railway from the city of Kandy in central Sri Lanka to the coastal city of Colombo.