Horton Plain

Horton Plain National Park is a high plateau on the edge of the escarpment that drops to the south and has another set of sheer cliffs called Worlds End. The the sun warms the highlands and lowlands at different temperature rates, which brings misty clouds surging up the cliff faces by noon, obscuring the views. Thus, hiking in Horton Plains is best started early. 

What the inside of a minivan looks like at 5:20 AM. 

We rolled through the dark chilly morning on the hour plus drive to the park entrance. Packed and ready the night before, 4:30 AM came early. 

That ain't no sunset.  

Some things are inevitable.  One of these inevitabilites is the scrum of minivans at a  national park gate in SE Asia. 

Sambar Deer are awake this time of morning. 

We paid the roughly $18 per person entry fee and started down the trail.  My Sri Lankan Brothers are proud of their National Parks and do not hesitate to take a chunk of tourist money to maintain them. You pay for each person, your driver and the vehicle. 

 The 11 kilometer trail past Worlds End forms a loop as it climbs around Adams falls and back to the entrance gate.  There were a fair few early birds with almost all of them following their drivers advice and looping clockwise. Seeing an opportunity for a dodge, we took the loop in reverse and earned a good bit more solitude. 

The sun had not hit the land before we hit the trail. 

Horton Plains gets a good coat of mist and fog each night leaving glistening pearls of dew on everything. 

Even though we are traveling during the rainy season, we drew the perfect morning.  The sun broke the horizon and quickly warmed us up. 

The landscape seemed more and more familiar to me.  I finally realized that the upland country hereabouts was like hiking through the fictional terrain of Rowan in The Lord of the Rings movies, when the Warg riders attack the Riders of Rowan. 

There is not much to really say about a hiking adventure. We dodged two incredibly noisy Russian 20-somethings, soaked up the sights and sounds of the place, and reveled in being out on our own on foot.  The Sri Lankans are not fond of folks running loose on foot in the parks. Horton Plains is the exception to that ban.  

Adams Falls in the shadows and its own self-generated must while the morning sun warms the hills behind. 

The last silver dew of the morning still clinging to a bit of briar. 

We began to run into the hikers coming the other way, which marked us at roughly the halfway point.  We came at Worlds End from the opposite direction. 

The cliffs at Worlds End drop over 800 meters, mostly straight down. There is no fence or safety railing.  Several folks have managed to plummet to their deaths from this spot. The other thing about it is that yes, there are great views, but not of the cliffs themselves.  True, you can edge right up to a 2,400 foot drop, but you can't see much of it.  I actually preferred our amble across the open plain, imagining riders in helms chasing nasty Orcs. 

Worlds End, which does not translate in photos.  There was a sheer cliff of prodigious drop but I would have had to jump off to get a photo of it.  Yeah, yeah, don't bother saying it. 

The clouds rolling in right on schedule. 

The sedimentary and metamorphic rock of the high scarp.  This was actually the trail itself for several hundred meters.  I was fascinated by the color and texture of all of the layers. 

We completed our loop and met up with our driver for the return drive to Nuwara Eliya. Our Thanksgiving morning was well spent and our thanksgiving afternoon had a nap scheduled in it before we even had a bite.