The colonial hill station at 1,868 metres was designed by British planters to feel like home – Georgian bungalows, a racecourse, hedge-rowed gardens and a climate cold enough for open fires. The Victorian post office, the Hill Club, the golf course and the tea estates that spread across every hillside above the town exist in an almost time-locked quality that makes Nuwara Eliya unlike anything else in South Asia. The surrounding tea landscape is among the most photographically dense in Asia: emerald terraces rising into cloud, pickers in bright saris moving through rows of chest-height bushes in the early morning mist.