While trains are a great way for travelers to get around in many parts of the world, in Sri Lanka they are something of an attraction in and of themselves. On the Kandy-to-Ella train through the central highlands – and again on the Ella-to-Nuwara Eliya train – my fellow travelers spent hours hanging out the doors and windows trying to get photos and selfies and videos of the curving blue train carriages traveling through the mountains and tea plantations.
Caught up in the excitement, I took scores of photos and selfies and train-videos of my own – though this was such a ubiquitous tourist activity that most of my photos wound up featuring the camera (or smartphone) lenses of other travelers. The Sri Lankans, for the most part, seemed happy to have bench seats to themselves in the train-cars, while the tourists (myself included) crowded into the open-doorway foyers at the ends of the carriages to snap photos.
This made for something of a carnival atmosphere in the crowded hallways of each train-car. In places like England, “trainspotter” is a faintly pejorative euphemism for a person with esoteric fixations, but in Sri Lanka riding and photographing – and talking about – trains was a kind of default tourist obsession.
Every time the train went through a mountain tunnel – and I mean every single time – people on the train-car would scream in unison in an attempt to hear the Doppler-echo. This startled me the first few times it happened, and while at first I thought this was an annoying tourist undertaking, the Sri Lankans I spoke with informed me that it’s a common and cheerful ritual for all passengers on this stretch of railway.
Photos and tunnel-screams aside, I came to love Sri Lankan trains for the simple feeling of motion, as well as the way the landscape unspooled before my eyes when I was on the move. I came to look forward to lurch of the train at the start of the journey, the cascading clank of the cars pulling taught as the trip began. As the landscape sped by, everything – tea plantations, schoolchildren at play, orange-red vine-flowers clotted with white paper trash – looked beautiful under the cloud-dappled sunlight.
Though I got some decent photos over the course of the journey, I eventually realized that they are more or less identical to the photos everyone takes on Sri Lankan trains. Given the splendor of a Sri Lankan train ride, it feels like some unspoken rule dictates what exactly you’re supposed to photograph (and how, exactly, you’re supposed to frame it).
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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