Sri Lanka

It is outlandish not to feel a feeling of aching and wistfulness when one thinks about the excursions of Marco Polo, who in 1292 cruised from a far off Chinese port through Sumatra to Sri Lanka, or Rudyard Kipling who advanced on board a P&O transport from Adelaide to Sri Lanka and chronicled his movements in one of his numerous sonnets. How might we oppose the calling of "craving for something new" when we hear names, for example, Serendib, Ceylon, Teardrop of India, Island of Dharma and, as Marco Polo called it, the "jade pendant in the Indian Ocean".

Despite the fact that the times of audacious travelers any semblance of Marco Polo and Rudyard Kipling have passed, I was glad to see that an excursion through Sri Lanka actually summons the supposition of their compositions. In the wake of having put in a couple of inactive days on the sun soaked sea shores of the Indian Ocean, I wound up sitting on board a train winding its way into the lavish slopes and on to the awesome town of Kandy where the Europeans once came to get away from the warmth. My next stop were a portion of the nation's most stunning recorded destinations, all aspect of UNESCO's World Heritage Site list before I arrived at the renowned tea estates. It is difficult to envision that these verdurous fields, extending the extent that the eye can see, begun with a solitary camellia sinesis plant from China brought to what exactly was then known as Ceylon by the British in 1824!