Ella is a small town in the tea country of Sri Lanka's Uva highlands, at 1,040 metres, and a few kilometres from it a stone railway viaduct of nine arches, built in 1921 without a single piece of steel, carries the highland line across a green valley, where the blue train inches over it for the photograph. The bridge is the Nine Arch Bridge, 91 metres long and 24 metres high, and its Sinhala name, Ahas Namaye Palama, means the bridge of nine skies, because from beneath the arches nine separate patches of sky line up in a row. Official records credit a British engineer, Harold Cuthbert Marwood, but a stubborn local legend hands the honour to a Sinhalese drummer, P. K. Appuhami, who built it from stone and cement when the steel was diverted to the First World War. The way to see it is from below, on the tea path under the arches, waiting for the train to cross high above, or from the live track itself, which curves through forest and tea gardens to the bridge, walked between the sleepers with the valley opening beside you.
The train is the other reason to be in Ella. The line from Kandy to Badulla is one of the great slow rail rides, curling past waterfalls, tunnels and endless tea, and a short way down from Ella it beats a steep slope at Demodara by spiralling through a full loop and passing into a tunnel bored directly beneath its own track; the stretch through Ella is the most photographed, with people in the doorways. Above the town, an easy path climbs through tea fields to Little Adam's Peak at 1,141 metres for a view across the valley to Ella Rock and the gap in the hills through which, on a clear day, the plains run to the south coast. The town itself is a single street of guesthouses and cafés grown up around the view. Ella is a tea town with a bridge in its valley, and the train still crosses it several times a day.