Worlds End, Horton Plains National Park

The alarm goes off at 5.15am. We have a cup of tea, grab our packed lunch then the owner takes us in his tuk tuk to the main entrance of the National Park, 6km away. He's a little worse for wear from his party last night and spends the entire journey coughing his guts up. Not very pleasant but its a steady uphill so we're glad we didn't walk this bit.

We pay our entrance and walk our first 5km of the day to the main carpark area through beautiful countryside, spotting samba deer as we walk. We then begin the 9km loop which takes us to Worlds End which is a sheer cliff with a drop of over 800m. Its stunning but there are quite a few people there. We have breakfast and sit for a while and lots of people leave as the clouds come in. Its quite atmospheric so we hang around for a bit before heading off to Bakers Falls then back to the car park. We have a look in the visitors centre then decide to head back via a different route and climb Sri Lanka's third highest peak en route. Its called Thotupolo Kanda and is 2357m above sea level. We're already over 2000m up so not such a big climb and its meant to take about an hour each way.

We reach the bottom and start to climb, stopping at a small open bit to have lunch about 40 minutes up. Then we hear the thunder and see a storm approaching. We watch for a while then decide we don't want to be on top of the mountain if a storm is coming and it appears to be heading our way so we go down. At the bottom, it seems the storm has gone the other way so we go back up again! We don't have loads of time as we are walking to another village and have a train to catch back to Ohiya so leg it up and its a bit disappointing - just a large ariel at the top .. but we did it! 

Another 5km and we're at the station in Pattipola. We were told the wrong time so have an hour's wait for our train. We reckon we've walked about 30km today and are knackered. Its a beautiful station in a rural village but is the noisiest place we've been for a while with people fixing bikes with hammers nearby and loud music over the road. Eventually the train comes and we head back to our homestay. There is an Australian couple checked in today and we chat to them as we have another nice home cooked dinner.