Tuktuk day #4-5 - Haputale - Ella - Tissamaharama

This is a follow up of my previous post: https://peakd.com/tuktuk/@jordan-tainan/tuktuk-day-3-and-4-gampola-nuwara-eliya-horton-plains-national-park

Traveling with @stoodkev and @balourdos95

End of afternoon of the 4th day we make it to Haputale.

Quentin and I go down from the tuktuk and Julien goes to park it. Except that instead of parking at the hotel he parked at the mosque next to it.

When he realised he was parked at the wrong location he then drove the tuktuk out of the parking lot of the mosque but someone suddenly arrived in front, he turned the tuktuk and it ended up stuck on the side wall of the mosque, scratching our tuktuk protection. Even though we are going to loose some of our deposit it actually made me laugh quite a lot ^^

We then went to our hotel. The view from the dinner/breakfast location was awesome and our host super nice.

He ordered a massive amount of noodles for our pre-dinner and he said he would cook later for us... In the meantime I went to walk around in the city and Julien joined later for a beer. It reminded me a bit of some villages I visited on the East coast of Malaysia except people here in Sri Lanka were way more welcoming and curious with foreigners.
The village is small but seems quite animated (until 9 pm) then things close.

It was time to go back to the hotel for dinner anyway.
Our host prepared SO much food and it was SO good!

It was made with love and good taste! Also the owner actually stayed with us during dinner and it was a great opportunity for us to know more about Sri Lankans and their way of life thanks to all the stories he shared.

After a good sleep without being woken up by the muezzin (surprisingly!) we head toward our first stop Ella.
Well... a good place for instagram apparently... not much to see honestly except a hipster town full of tourist and a bridge like many.

If it's on your way stop there to have a look at the bridge but it is not worth changing drastically your plans just for that.

Our goal was then to go to Tissamaharama passing by a road in-between two national parks. We were hesitating to pass by the road as we may had to pay again just like the previous road passing through a national park that we took. But our previous host said it was ok to go for free and indeed it was.

Good choice as we could see several animals while driving including a couple of elephants on the road.

We then arrived at the hotel and jump in the pool with beers immediately. The following day we went for the safari. This will be for the next post.