Day 8 - Nuwara Eliya

Another early start today with a 430 get up and what was supposed to be a 5am departure but then turned into 5.30am as we took some people from our hotel in the van with us, with the hopes they would pay the driver a little more. It was dark when we left for Horton plains so half the drive we couldn't see much, but slowly the sun started to peak out and as usual it was green hill after green hill. We saw a beautiful sunrise over the valley with every low bit of low ground covered by a thick mist. We pulled up to buy our tickets and headed into the national park. Our goal was to get to "worlds end" which is basically the edge of a cliff, with a straight drop of almost 1km. The walk between 6-8km long, it was fairly easy definitely had some hard areas but the majority of it wasn't too bad, and the scenery on the first part of the walk was really beautiful, gentle hills covered in native grass with odd trees here and there, there was also a nice waterfall (Bakers Falls) on the way to worlds end . Having said that the whole thing was a bit of a disaster... so first off Bec felt very average after a windy drive in and felt sick for the whole walk, 2nd we should have left earlier and 3rd the walk is a loop and we took the long way to get to worlds end, so by the time we made it to worlds end, we literally had 10 seconds before the clouds rolled in and the view was gone! and I'm not kidding - I had enough time to get 1 photo and Bec missed out while she was trying to get her camera out of her bag! the frustrating thing was we powered through the first part of the walk to make it in time to see this cliff and so didn't get to enjoy and admire the views as much as we could have, and then we also kinda missed worlds end... and finally the last part of the walk (the shorter bit) was nowhere near as nice as the way in!! arghh!! there was just no winning. Anyway such is life we headed back to the van, I got a few pics of a deer who must have been fed by people as he was hanging out in the car park watching and waiting, not scared at all. We went back the the hotel, Bec still feeling sick and both very sleepy from the early start, so we had a 2-3hr nap and then headed out again. We drove over to the local lake (we had seen some canoes, kayaks and swans to ride when we drove into town yesterday) so we thought we might hire one but once we got there we found out the lake is shut down and out of bounds! the police were worried that there would be trouble because of the election. So we drove around the lake made a stop to take some pics with some horses and some local kids playing cricket. The local town is dead as everything is shut because of the election so we headed over to the train station to get our tickets for tomorrow morning. Then we headed back and Bec got herself some sprite type drink and some biscuits hoping they would make her feel better. We walked around town a little and walked down to the local race track, where there were a few games of cricket and some horses wondering around, but as Bec felt sick and there was really not a lot to do we decided to head back to the hotel and relax. Tomorrow its a 2hr train to Ella which is meant to be stunning so hopefully we have more luck then this morning!!!