Nuwara Eliya. Any chance of a brew ?

Our train tickets to Nuwara Eliya (Middle England) cost 120 rupees, so about 69p for a 4 hour journey which took us  into the mountains, central SL - so as you can imagine we didn't have high hopes for the journey!  As expected no seat and certainly no buffet cart!  Didn't even try the loo.  We stopped at many stations on route and each time we pulled away it was as if the driver was doing his best to pull the front end compleely away from the carriages. The locals seem to find this quite amusing ! Boarding and ilighting the train in SL never takes very long as if there is a door, it is never closed (like the windows).  Each time we went through a tunnel everyone would scream at the top of their lungs as if they were on ghost train at the fair.

We arrived at The Grand hotel in Newara Eliya which was 2000 ft above sea level.  They call it Middle England. Within the villae there is a race course and golf course, all very bristish (although our caddies don't wear skirts).  It even smells like Britain, must have been the rain!  The first night we event wore our long sleeves!!  The hotel was lovely and had a billiards room and a bar with a open fire.  Felt like a ski lodge, very strange. 

The mountains are home to many tea plantations that SL export all round the world.  We drank the odd pot or two here!!   We did a tour of one of the factories, Mackwoods in Labookellie. 
http://www.mackwoodstea.com/aboutus.asp  

They have been producing tea for some 160 years. Not a bad drop we
thought. Bee gee we've drunk some tea over the last few weeks...

Some tea facts: 75 % of the pickings turns to water.  Only 2 leaves and a bud are hand plucked from the tea bush, this is the first stage of making tea.  Most bushes last 100 years although they have started cloning which reduced the life of the bush to 60 years but has an increased yeld - typical.