crisis-coverage
Fuel queues and tea fields: the human side of the 2022 crisis
A ground-level dispatch from Sri Lanka's Hill Country in July 2022 — tea pickers, stranded drivers, and communities' quiet resilience during economic collapse.
Updated January 2026 — this is a historical dispatch from July 2022. The economic crisis has substantially resolved; for current conditions see our 2026 forecast.
| Where | Hill Country tea estates around Hatton, Nuwara Eliya and Haputale |
| Cost | A guided estate and factory visit today runs around USD 15-30 per person; a full day trip from Kandy or Nuwara Eliya is typically USD 40-70 |
| Time needed | Half a day for one estate and factory; a full day if you combine it with the Hill Country train or an Adam’s Peak base |
| Getting there | Train to Hatton or Nuwara Eliya (Nanu Oya station) from Kandy or Colombo, then a short tuk-tuk to the estates |
| Best time | Clearest, driest conditions are most likely December-March and again around August-September, between the island’s two monsoons |
Hatton, 6 a.m.
The petrol station in Hatton had a queue of vehicles that began forming before dawn. By the time the early bus from Colombo arrived — four hours late, a casualty of its own fuel calculations — the queue stretched back past the tea estate entrance gate and around the corner toward the bazaar. Cars, vans, a lorry, three-wheelers. The drivers were sleeping across their seats or standing in small groups, sharing cigarettes and phones.
This was Hatton, gateway to Adam’s Peak, in July 2022. The petrol station had reportedly last received a delivery forty-three hours earlier. It had run out within two hours. The next delivery was expected “today or tomorrow.”
The geography of the crisis
The 2022 economic crisis in Sri Lanka was unevenly distributed across geography. Colombo felt it most intensely in its political manifestations — the protests at Galle Face Green, the storming of the Presidential Palace, the extraordinary drama of a president fleeing his own country. The Hill Country felt it in more material terms: fuel shortages that paralysed the private vehicles and tuk-tuks on which communities depend for everything from hospital trips to market runs.
Nuwara Eliya, the former British hill station at 1,868 metres, had a quality of surreal incongruity in July 2022. The colonial-era architecture — the Grand Hotel, the Hill Club, the cottages with their English-garden borders — stood photogenically intact. The tea estates on the surrounding hillsides produced their crop regardless of the national currency situation. The pickers moved through the rows in the morning mist, weighed and recorded their baskets at the estate offices, and returned to their estate housing.
The tea industry is Sri Lanka’s oldest and most resilient export earner. It operates in US dollars (tea is priced and sold internationally in hard currency) while paying its workers in rupees. The devaluation of the rupee that came with the 2022 crisis therefore created a complicated situation for estate economics: dollar revenues rose in local terms, but input costs for fuel, machinery, and imported materials also rose sharply.
For the individual tea pickers — many of them Tamil workers whose families have been on these estates for generations — the rupee collapse meant that the local economy of the estate town was severely disrupted even if the tea harvest itself continued.
A morning on the estates
A contact who manages a mid-sized tea estate above Hatton agreed to let us spend a morning with the picking teams. The operation was running normally — the bush doesn’t care about the IMF, as she put it with brisk pragmatism — but the transport challenges were significant.
Estate workers normally travel between estate sections on lorries running fixed routes. With diesel increasingly scarce and expensive (when available), some of these routes had been reduced to fewer runs per day. Workers who lived in one part of the estate but picked in another section were sometimes walking an extra hour each way.
The weighing station at the factory was working. The tea was being processed. The dried leaf was being prepared for auction. The institutional machinery of the tea industry was intact. But the friction costs — the extra walking, the fuel calculations, the uncertainty about tomorrow’s diesel — were borne entirely by the workers and managers on the ground.
The tuk-tuk calculus
Outside the estates, in the market towns of the Hill Country — Hatton, Nuwara Eliya, Bandarawela, Haputale — the fuel shortage hit differently. The towns’ tuk-tuk drivers, who earn per journey, faced a direct trade-off: fuel costs had increased dramatically in the months since January (fuel prices had been artificially held below market levels for years and were being rapidly liberalised), and the supply was intermittent.
A driver we spoke to in Nuwara Eliya described his July 2022 calculus: he could spend three hours queuing for petrol and then drive for four to five hours before needing more. Or he could not queue and not drive. On days when the station had petrol, he queued. On days when it didn’t, he stayed home and helped his wife with the vegetable garden.
This is the micro-level of an economic crisis: individual decisions about how to allocate limited resources under uncertainty, repeated across hundreds of thousands of households, aggregating into an economic contraction that shows up in GDP statistics as an abstraction but is lived as a daily negotiation between what you need and what you can get.
The tourists who came
There were tourists in the Hill Country in July 2022. Not many — international arrivals were still recovering from COVID and the crisis had created uncertainty — but some. A group from Germany, two couples from Australia, a solo traveller from France.
Their experience varied. The hotel generator in Nuwara Eliya ran during the power cuts (which by July were running 8-10 hours per day in the Hill Country). The train from Kandy was running — diesel trains are somewhat insulated from the petrol shortage, though the Sri Lanka Railways diesel supply was also under pressure. The restaurants in Ella had food. The Ella Rock hike was open and beautiful.
What the tourists couldn’t easily do was rely on private vehicle hire. Many drivers were rationing their fuel, prioritising multi-day bookings over single trips. Travellers with pre-arranged private drivers reported uncertainty about whether their driver would have petrol for tomorrow’s leg.
The train became the common solution. In July 2022, the Kandy-Ella train was the most reliable form of long-distance transport in the Hill Country, and the fact that it was running normally — if often late — was genuinely appreciated.
What the fields said
Tea fields in July are at their most productive: the southwest monsoon brings the moisture that the high-altitude estates need for growth. The landscape of the Hill Country in July is a saturated green that photographs can’t fully capture — every surface of every hillside covered in the dense canopy of the tea bush, the picking paths cutting between them, the estate buildings white against the green.
The beauty of the landscape is real and irreducible. The crisis was real. Both things were simultaneously true. The tourists who arrived in July 2022 saw both: the extraordinary landscape that makes the Hill Country one of the world’s great travel destinations, and the fuel queues, the darkened hotel lobbies at 7 p.m. when the power cut started, the careful conversations with drivers about whether tomorrow’s trip was feasible.
This is the honest version. Sri Lanka in July 2022 was difficult and beautiful in equal measure. It was worth visiting — the economic argument for coming was as strong as it’s ever been. But it required patience, flexibility, and some willingness to engage with the reality of what the country was going through rather than pretending it wasn’t happening.
From July 2022 to 2026
The economic recovery since July 2022 has been real, if uneven. The IMF bailout program (agreed in late 2022) imposed fiscal discipline that stabilised the currency and allowed fuel imports to resume normally. Power cuts ended in most of the country by early 2023. Fuel queues disappeared. The political situation normalised.
The Hill Country in 2026 is functioning normally. The tea estates are producing. The trains are running. The guesthouses in Nuwara Eliya, Ella, and Haputale are full in season. The drivers have petrol.
The story of July 2022 is not the story of 2026. But it’s part of the story of Sri Lanka — another chapter in the accumulated history of a country that has been through more than most, and keeps finding its way back.
Visiting the tea country today, and why the two monsoons still matter
Readers sometimes ask whether a trip built around July 2022 is still relevant reading before a Hill Country trip. It is, but for a different reason than crisis-tourism curiosity: the geography that shaped that crisis — a tea economy split between dollar exports and rupee wages, a road network that funnels everything through a handful of hill towns — is the same geography that shapes a good itinerary now.
The Ceylon tea history behind James Taylor’s first plantings explains why Hatton and Nuwara Eliya became estate country in the first place, and the tea plantation ethics and worker conditions guide is worth reading before you photograph a picking team — the same Line room communities described above are still there, still working, and still deserve more than being treated as scenery.
One thing that didn’t change with the crisis or the recovery: Sri Lanka has two separate monsoons, not one. The southwest monsoon (roughly May-September) is the system that waters the Hill Country’s western slopes and the tea estates around Hatton and Nuwara Eliya — it’s the “moisture that the high-altitude estates need for growth” mentioned above.
The northeast monsoon (roughly October-January) affects the opposite side of the island, the east coast and the north, and barely touches these estates at all. A traveller planning a Hill Country trip around “Sri Lanka’s dry season” without checking which monsoon applies to which coast is planning around the wrong data. The monsoon explained by region guide breaks down which system affects which part of the island and when.
James Taylor tea story tour from KandyFor travellers who want to walk through this landscape rather than drive past it, the Pekoe Trail day walk from Lipton’s Seat covers the same Hatton-to-Haputale estate country described in this piece, on foot. And for a broader introduction to the region before you go, the Sri Lanka tea country introduction and best tea factory tours guides cover the practical side — which factories welcome visitors, what a tour actually shows you, and how to combine a factory stop with a base in Bandarawela or Haputale.
FAQ
Is it safe to visit Sri Lanka’s Hill Country now?
Yes. The fuel and power shortages described in this piece were resolved by early 2023, and the Hill Country in 2026 functions normally — trains run on schedule, tuk-tuks have fuel, and hotels operate without rationed power. See the honest 2026 forecast for the current picture.
Can you still see tea pickers and factories working today?
Yes — the tea harvest never stopped, even during the 2022 crisis, and estates around Hatton, Nuwara Eliya, and Haputale continue to welcome visitors for factory tours and, with the right guide, brief encounters with picking teams on the estate footpaths.
Related reading: Sri Lanka in crisis: should you still go? and How tourism is helping Sri Lanka recover.