A trip to Nuwaraeliya 🚆

Hey guys, hope you all are doing fine.
After a few months, I finally wanted to share some of my beautiful memories with you. I know this is not the best time to talk about trips because Sri Lanka is facing bad weather these days. But I believe that even during difficult times, we must face challenges, overcome them, and continue our goals.

After the school vacation started on the 7th of November, we also got a chance to spend some enjoyable time. Before the vacation began, I planned to go on a trip to Nuwaraeliya during the first week. But since we had to attend our cousin’s party, we decided to postpone our journey. Finally, we fixed our travel date as the 20th of November. This trip was very special to me because it was my second journey by train.
The first thing was to book train tickets to Nuwaraeliya. Since I could not get my warrants from school as expected, it took more time to book the tickets. After receiving the warrants, we went to the Hikkaduwa railway station to check for morning trains. Unfortunately, there were no seats available on the date we selected. The trainmaster was very helpful and tried his best to find at least three seats for us in the next week. But even for the next four weeks, there wasn’t a single seat available. At last, we managed to find a suitable day, the 22nd of November . However, the train was Tikiri Menike, which leaves at 12.30 pm, not in the morning.

Even with all these disturbances, we were finally ready for our journey. I was so excited because I hadn’t visited Nuwaraeliya for almost 11 years. The last time I went there was in 2014, with my school friends, for our annual school trip. With those old memories in my heart, I was eagerly waiting for this journey.

On Saturday the 22nd, we began our trip from the Hikkaduwa railway station. Since my mother didn’t get warrants, we had to buy a ticket for her. There were no seats available in first class, so we decided to travel in second class. At first, we thought it would be very crowded, but to our surprise, we were able to sit comfortably. The train arrived exactly on time at 7.20pm and reached Fort Railway Station around 9.45am.

When we got there, the station was full of people, both locals and foreigners. Since the Tikiri Menike train was scheduled to arrive at 12.30pm, we had almost three hours to wait.