THE BEAUTIFUL KNUCKLES MOUNTAIN RANGE

This time I wanted go to a slightly remote place where not much of tourists and locals usually travel to. I drew my Sri Lanka map out and came across a place in the central province, the beautiful Knuckles Mountain range. I have heard people do visit Knuckles but not as much the other famous places in Sri Lanka which seems like a perfect trek for me to take.

Luckily, I had few of my friends who were willing to join with me and we have another friend living in Mathale, Mathale is the nearest place you can get to the Knuckles Mountain range. How great is that! So, we don’t have a problem of accommodation. So, we headed to Mathale on a Monday afternoon, by late evening we reached the town of Mathale, had a nice chat with our old friend, had a lovely dinner and our plan is to head to the mountains first thing in the morning tomorrow. We woke up around 5 am had a light breakfast, by 6 am we hit the road. It took roughly about two hours for us to get to the foothills of the Knuckles. The surrounding is amazing, lots of greenery we don’t see every day.

Before heading to the Jungle, we stopped by this small village to get our supplies, water, snacks had a lovely cup of tea to keep it pumping with some vegetable rotties. Being a Sri Lankan nothing like tea that can give me the pump to go on for the day, especially on a trek like knuckles. We got back in our jeep and started heading upwards, now we are opening ourselves to much more beautiful views of the mountain range. These mountains are called Knuckles as the peaks of the mountains take the shape of your knuckle;

it actually does look like that. There are steep cliffs so the driving was a bit hard and we had to be careful. One slip, we can be so far down. We passed some of the country’s famous tea plantations and saw the tea pluckers doing their everyday job. We stopped by a lot of places to admire the beauty of this amazing place. Suddenly my friend gives this brilliant idea of visiting a waterfall which is about 30 minutes away, tight time table but why not? We don’t visit here every day! The drive was crazy luckily, I wasn’t the one who was driving. Finally, we reached my friend’s secret waterfall. Wow! After a hectic ride this is exactly what we needed, the waterfall is amazing and there is no one here today being a weekday so we have the whole place to ourselves. The water is so cool I cannot describe how refreshing it is even to look at it, best thing happened so far today. We could actually take a walk through the waterfall, walking along the rock, you can literally see the water falling from inside the waterfall. Had a great swim, in fact we didn’t feel like getting out of it. The waterfall is called “Sera Ella”.

We had our packed lunch there as we were very hungry after the swim. Now we had to drive back another 30 minutes to stick to our original plan and it’s getting late and as we get closer to the jungles, we felt it is getting dark quickly which is not a good thing because driving in the dark can be very dangerous in these areas. Finally, we reached the homestay my friend has arranged for us. The people were so great and full of hospitality and had arranged the best places for us to crash for the night. All we knew was seeing the beds, we were so tired and fell asleep instantly.

We woke up early morning. Wow the sounds of nature is so amazing and believe me it is SO cold! The birds, the sunrise its unreal. We didn’t see the surrounding of this place yesterday as we arrived in the dark there is a lot of vegetation surrounding the house. These villagers are so lucky to wake for this every morning. Had a lovely cup of tea enjoying the view. After an awesome coconut rotty breakfast the people of the house had prepared for us we started to hit the mountain peak.

The trek is going to be at least four hours long, as we started the trek, taking the steps of rocks we started to see a lot of wildlife in the area specially some endemic birds. we spotted tons of spiders, the ones we have never seen before almost everywhere and also endemic butterflies. We finally came to the first peak to get a better view of the mountain range. Believe me all the hardness while trekking, its worth it. Then we took the trek further we came across buffaloes for our surprise out of nowhere but nothing serious. They were just looking at us. Probably wondering what we are doing. We came up to another peak with another great view that’s where it made sense when we saw the water hole of the buffaloes. So, this is their resting place and we are the visitors. Once again, the view is amazing and we can see that we have come a very long way up now. We rested enjoying the view for about a good twenty minutes sitting on edges of cliffs. This is the furthest we can get due to the time factor. With a greatest difficulty all of us made up our minds to turn back without going any further reasons being we have to return to Colombo today, and it’s starting to get dark. The mountain range is the best trek I have ever taken in my life.

So, the Knuckles mountain range is approximately 6 hours from the town of Mathale. You can base yourself in Mathale and take the trek to the mountain range. There are not much of luxury hotels or any hotels at all in this area but a homestay can be certainly arranged, the villagers are extremely friendly and the hospitality Is second to none. So, if you are visiting Sri Lanka, reserve at least two days to visit the amazing mountain range oh, also don’t forget to take a picture with your knuckles alongside knuckles mountains because unfortunately we couldn’t.

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