Sri Lanka teaches you to tell your “Uda Pussellawa” from your “Uva”.

My guru smacked his lips appreciatively. An almost Buddhist-like calm suffused his face. He swooned as he swilled, blissfully savouring the anti-oxidants.

“The loose leaf produces an excellent rounded intenseness. Dimbulla takes milk well. And is perfectly balanced to be quaffed all day,” he observed sagely. “But to be truly ecstatic it must be brewed at exactly 80⁰C and not be allowed to stand for more than two minutes four seconds. Of course, I am also a great fan of Green Kandyan Blooms.”

He looked at his dry-mouthed acolyte in a very learned “But who isn’t?” way. “It is made from one bud and one leaf only. Plucked in the early hours of morning at high elevation. It is the Rolls Royce of Ceylon teas.”

He drank from another cup and smiled serenely. “Unmistakably Kandy FBOP. A good red colour and lingering malty taste. But my preference with scones is the classic black wiry Ruhuna.”

Tea is thought to have been discovered by the Chinese emperor Sheng Nung 5,000 years ago when some leaves fell into a cup of water. It began as a medicine and grew into a social beverage. Sri Lanka now produces over 280 million kilos of tea every year from six tea districts. The industry employs 30,000 workers. Harvested all year, Sri Lankan tea is exported to over 50 countries.

Tea in a glass cup, mint leaves, dried tea, sliced lime, cane brown sugar

The best place to taste tea and get a taste of Sri Lanka is up in the tea fields of Nuwara Eliya

The best place to taste tea and get a taste of Sri Lanka is up in the tea fields of Nuwara Eliya, a four-hour drive from the capital Colombo. En route you see white-shirted schoolchildren, ladies under parasols and roadside orange coconut stalls. You pass waterfalls like St Clair and Devon, the elephant orphanage and bathing site at Pinnawala and the Kelani Ganga river, where Sir David Lean filmed the Bridge Over The River Kwai.

Beautiful houses in Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka.

You see arrack toddy collectors shinning up coconut trees. You are watched by Toque monkeys and brown-capped babblers. You cross rivers and see river monitors and enormous black bats hanging from trees. You smell wild tobacco and the Princess of the Night flowers. You drive under conical Bunabunya trees. Your senses overload.

And then you climb 6,000 feet above sea level upcountry into the tea plantations where the pluckers work the steep terraces picking the top two leaves of every bush for 20p a day. You learn from your driver that the shrubs are picked every 20 days and dried for a fortnight and then rolled.

Then you suddenly arrive at the mock Tudor-style “Scots Club” , now called the St Andrews Hotel. And an old man in a claret waiter’s jacket asks you to guess how old his balls are.

Elephants of Pinnawala elephant orphanage bathing in river.

The snooker table of Nuwara Elija’s “Mansion in the Mist” is 120 years old and its ivory balls only slightly younger. The snooker room used to be a dance hall. Here tea and coffee planters worked and played.

A Scotman James Taylor first planted tea in the area in 1867. Some of the early equipment is still to be seen.

Kandy, the lakeside second city, has a tea museum but Nawara is one big museum. Of tea and colonialism. During World War II it was used for R&R for servicemen. The first patients were from HMS Hermes bombed by the Japanese off Sri Lanka’s east coast.

It is one of the most atmospheric hotels imaginable. It stands for what Sri Lanka ( Sanskrit for “resplendent land” ) stood for before the tsunami and the on-off Tamil civil war affected peoples’ opinions and put them off this wonderful country. Sinhalese hospitality is as warm in the hill stations as it is down on the beaches. The cooking good everywhere.

As well as milk rice with scraped jaggery, lentil dhaal and string hoppers (noodles) the menu in “The Old Course Restaurant” of the St Andrews Hotel includes steak and kidney pie. Hot water bottles are left in your bed.

Sculpture in Sri Baktha Kovil temple. Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka.

Down the road is a racecourse and a golf club with fireplaces in the men’s locker room. The 5,550 yard par 70 Nuwara Elija Golf Club is a great test of golf. Green fees are only £10.

Sri Lanka is rebuilding itself... picking itself up

Traditions are preserved despite independence being granted 60 years ago. The British influence remains. Golf is part of Sri Lanka’s new tourism drive. You can get seaplane connections between all the courses. After Royal Calcutta, Royal Colombo is the oldest golf club outside the UK.

Tea leaves.

St Andrew’s Hotel is owned by “Jetwings”, which also owns the Lighthouse in Galle. South Sri Lanka was decimated by the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004. Over 100,000 people lost their lives.

At Peralya two carriages remain of the “Queen of the Sea” train swamped by the tidal wave killing a 1,000 people on their way back from market. The Japanese government donated a giant memorial statue. Sri Lanka is rebuilding itself. It is beginning to pick itself up. To go back to where it once was.

You sense this with the Mount Pedro Range behind and a china tea set in front of you in the lawn of the St Andrews Hotel. Everyone in Sri Lanka is a tea connoisseur and wants to talk about “The Leaf That Cheers The Globe”. Tea factories give tastings. Hotels will provide impromptu lessons. To educate your palette. To make you smile when you provenance your cuppa.

Indigenious Sri Lankan tea picker.

“Sri Lankan tea liquor is the cleanest in the world regarding pesticide residuals”, said my guru proudly. “But, of course, the best tea is brewed in a gold pot.”

I chortled. My teacher looked at me with concern, suspecting the worst.

“You aren’t a tea bag man, are you?” he asked with disgust that he was in the presence of a philistine.