Located in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, Ella is a classic backpacker town. Sure, there are parts of Ella that exist independent of tourism, but it’s not hard to spend a week in the town entirely in the company of travelers from Europe and North America. There are plenty of things to do in Ella – hikes, cooking classes, music performances – but at times it feels like the main attraction here is other backpackers. It’s a good place to get a bed in a cheap hostel, rent a motorcycle to explore the surrounding countryside, and compare notes with other travelers.
One thing that startled me, more than a month into my Asia travels, was how much gear travelers – and European travelers in particular – brought with them. Sitting in a café in Ella one morning, I marveled at how most everyone seemed to be carrying the same sort of backpack – giant technical bags more suited to traversing Switzerland’s Alpine Pass Route than chilling in a tropical place like Sri Lanka.
In pointing this out I don’t mean to be critical – I myself have, in the past, embarked on vagabonding journeys carrying way more stuff than I needed (and in fact the pack I’m carrying in the Libyan Desert on the cover of Vagabonding is far bigger than what I carry now). I’ve just streamlined my travel kit down to the point that all my gear for a multi-month journey easily fits into my 35L Tortuga Setout, and I’m befuddled by what it is people might be putting into those giant trail packs.
Packing idiosyncrasies aside, I’m really fond of the optimistic energy one feels at these traveler scenes. I stayed at the Sleep Cheap Hostel, a simple, tidy little bunkhouse about a five-minute walk up the railroad tracks from Ella’s train station. This hostel was home to a rotating mix of German, Dutch, and Australian travelers, and I came to look forward to chatting with them at breakfast (invariably omelets, banana pancakes, and coffee, included with the $9 price of a room) about travel and history, about the spice trade and the global domestication of food plants
My time in Ella made me appreciate being a solo traveler. In Sumatra, where I met few other backpackers, going solo meant I was an outsider-celebrity of sorts, always posing for selfies and hanging out with local Indonesians. Sri Lanka, which had a much more saturated backpacker scene in places like Ella, offered me less spontaneous interaction with local people, but it did offer me a steady rotation of very cool fellow travelers to socialize with on a given day.
Backpackers tend to be on a pretty tight circuit, and – in constantly seeking each other out – they tend to take over places like Ella (which is great economically for hill-station towns like this one, even as if makes these places feel slightly less Sri Lankan). Everyone seems to have been to – or headed to – more or less the same destinations in Sri Lanka, and it’s fun to hang with folks as they eat and drink and compare notes (and worry that all these places might be getting too many tourists).
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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