The Slow Train to Ella, and the Signal I Stopped Checking

I travelled to Sri Lanka in the second week of September 2026 with a notepad, someone else's coat, and a fear of sitting over my phone for hours, watching it load.

The fear came from experience. Two years ago I stood on a pavement outside a closed phone shop, trying to activate a new SIM card with a copy of my passport and 9% battery. I remember the street but nothing else about that city.

This time I wanted it sorted before I took off. My phone takes both a physical SIM card and an embedded one (an eSIM). This meant my Indian number could stay quietly in its slot, gathering bank messages that would never arrive any other way, while its digital twin handled everything else.

A couple of nights before I left, after skimming forums and comparison sites, I settled on a shortlist of data-only eSIM companies. One of them, eSIM Plus, lists its data plans by country and installs by scanning a QR code. I bought its seven-day plan for Sri Lanka, because seven just happened to be how many days I'd be staying. I name it not as a recommendation, only because it is what I bought.

I scanned the code at the gate in Kolkata, turned it on when I landed, and a local network detected it before I'd even hit the baggage belt.

That was the least interesting part of the trip, and that is rather the point of what follows.

Fort station, 5 a.m.

Colombo is humid in September. I arrived at night and didn't sleep well. The fan above me clicked on every third spin. I walked to Colombo Fort station in the early hours. The only other people out were men washing the pavements in front of shuttered shops.

I didn't reserve a seat. That was my first mistake. Reserved seats to the hill country sell out quickly, and asking for one on the day gets you nowhere. The woman at the counter gave me a sympathetic look and sold me an unreserved second-class ticket to Ella.

For the first two hours, I stood. I'd like to think I took it philosophically. I didn't. My bag was propped between my feet, my elbow was stuck in someone's ribs, and the carriage reeked of wet umbrellas and oily dough from a vendor who paced the aisle, ringing a bicycle bell and calling out something unintelligible that I ended up buying anyway.

Past Kandy, the train begins to climb, and the country folds itself into hills. Rice paddies give way to steep hillsides combed into rows of tea, so green they look wet even when the sun is shining. The train hugs the contours. Every few minutes it takes a bend so tight that you can see the engine from your window, ploughing on ahead.

The man with the satchel

At Nanu Oya half the carriage got off for Nuwara Eliya. A man in a grey cardigan shuffled out of the window seat and pointed me into it. I sat down without a word. I had not spoken for hours.

His name was Mr. Weerasinghe. He'd taught geography for thirty-one years in Kegalle. He told me that within a minute, the way other people tell you their name. He was headed to Haputale to visit his sister, like he did every September, and he took the same train every year because, he said, the others were faster and therefore wasteful.

I did what I do on every train these days: I pulled up the map. The little blue dot was all over the place, jumping about a kilometre away from where we were. In every cutting and tunnel the signal vanished. It wasn't the connection's fault, just the mountains. I kept refreshing, hoping for the best.

"You are looking at the dot," Mr. Weerasinghe said kindly. "Look at the hill." I put my phone face down on my knee and looked.

The tea pluckers, women moving along the rows in short quick steps with empty baskets strapped to their backs, paid by the weight of leaf they pick. Low brick factories with chimneys poking through red roofs. The place where the cloud settles each afternoon and never shifts.

At Pattipola, the highest station on the island at just under 1,900 metres, the air that blasted through the open window was fractionally too cold, fogging the glass at the edges. On one platform a man in a woollen cap stood shivering, selling roasted peanuts in paper cones. I bought one for the warmth of it.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a neat little sermon about putting phones down. It was not that. My phone was useful that day, and I would be lying if I said otherwise.

Earlier, somewhere outside Hatton, the train had stopped for almost two hours for a reason nobody explained, and the connection let me message my guesthouse in Ella to say I would be very late.

The owner replied minutes later: she would not cancel dinner. When I finally arrived, dripping into the house in the dark and rain, nearly eleven hours after setting out from Colombo, there was a plate of rice, dhal, and coconut sambol tucked away under another plate to keep it hot. It reached me because at that exact moment there happened to be a signal.

What I discovered was less flattering. The connection hadn't made me miss the island; I had managed that by myself, with a perfectly good connection in my hand.

The bridge, and a wrong turn

The next morning I woke to thick fog. Even after it lifted, the valley below stayed hidden. I walked down the track to Nine Arches Bridge at Demodara before tourists arrived, beneath dripping trees and past makeshift vegetable plots. A woman lugging firewood gave me a gruff nod and trudged onward.

The bridge is stone and brick, its arches worn with age and slick with moss, and the trains clatter across slowly enough to take it all in. I sat on the embankment for an hour, watching. A schoolboy scampered across the tracks, holding his bag over his head against the drizzle. An old man selling tea stopped beside me with a thermos and poured me some without asking.

When the blue train came chugging through, people stuck their heads out of the windows and waved at everyone; strangers waved back. I waved too, like a child. I took a picture. It's awful. The best part of that morning isn't in it.

Later that day I set out for the top of Ella Rock. It was at that point that my fear of getting lost kicked back in. I had downloaded the offline map before leaving the guesthouse, a habit learned from too many dead zones on past trips.

A signal can fetch you a map, but where there is none, only the map already on your phone helps. There was supposed to be a well-defined trail through the tea fields on that map. The trail decided otherwise. At a fork right by the railway tracks, the little blue line on my screen veered left. A tea plucker looked at my phone, then at me. "No, no. Right. Left... that is for the cows," she said.

I went right. It was steeper and muddier. My shoes despised me. By the time I got to the top, clouds had consumed us. We stood on top of a mountain surrounded by white: six strangers, one extremely cocky dog, and me. Nobody was disappointed. Thinking about it still makes me happy.

What stayed

I am home again and scrolling through pictures of my trip. There are not as many as I thought I took: rows of tea growing askew in the train window's reflection, the bridge in the wrong light, and a photo of the covered plate of dinner, which I took because I couldn't think of anything else to do with how it made me feel.

What I remember most is Mr. Weerasinghe saying "Look at the hill" above the noise of the carriage. My connection, which I had paid well for, was flawless. But it gave me nothing memorable. What I wanted, I had to find for myself, between Nanu Oya and Pattipola, watching steam fog up the glass as I held a fistful of hot peanuts.

If I ever take the train again, I will pay for a seat. But I will still stand for the first hour, just to see who offers me the window.