“Good luck, good luck, good luck.”

The man hanging out his car window calling out to us must know something I don’t know. He gives a final wave and speeds off, leaving us to continue up the busy “hill country” road.  We are somewhere between Gampola, our start point, and the highest point of today’s ride, some unknown distance ahead.  The grade is pretty gentle, and I wouldn’t think we’d need too much luck to get through it, but you never know.

We would have needed luck to get out of Kandy on our bikes. Heavy Saturday morning traffic makes our “30 minute” bus transfer take nearly two hours. There’s lots of confusion about what the road is like. Depending on who you ask, it might be 10km with a few steep sections, or 25km of undulation with two very steep sections  The one thing that everybody agrees is that once the uphill is done, there is a long, long downhill all the way to the finish.

I am learning that getting accurate information out of our guides is impossible; you have to get on with it and find out for yourself as the day unfolds.

We’re in the mountains for sure this morning. The land rises to rocky points on one side of the road, and plunges on the other. We are surrounded by verdant green foliage. Local humanity go about their business on and beside the road, but many people take the time to call out or wave as we ride by.

We pass through a very busy town, and have to dodge and weave through unpredictable traffic. The road is much busier today than any road we have ridden on this whole trip. We all need to pay a bit more attention, but in general the cars, buses, tuk tuks and other traffic give us a wide berth.

This is a tea growing region, and I’ve been keeping a look out. We finally reach a tea plantation alongside the road. I wonder if tea is still harvested by hand – my mind is picturing the typical woman with her headdress and bag on her back, skillfully plucking leaves one by one. I round a corner, and there she is!

It turns out to be around 25km to the top, and there are indeed two steep sections before we make a wide hairpin-turn and plunge down the other side. We have several pretty exhilarating kilometres of downhill on a road that is a little less than smooth before being stopped short to turn up a very steep driveway. We are due to have lunch at a tea estate, so this must be it.

I manage to drop into my granny gear before tackling the short, steep driveway and get about three-quarters of the way up before my chain snaps. The beauty of a fully-supported trip is that I get to just hand my bike over to the mechanic and head off for lunch.

Lunch is a four-dish Sri Lankan meal – with rice, chicken curry, bitter gourd salad, jackfruit curry and potato curry. Though I’ve loved the big buffet lunches we’ve had, with so many dishes to choose from, I always end up eating too much because I want to taste everything, so this more simple meal lets me keep the intake in check

We are offered dessert. The choice is fruit salad or ice-cream. When I ask if I can have fruit salad AND ice-cream there is a bit of a flutter and Ajith says that would be out of his budget. OK. Fine. I order fruit salad, Annette orders ice-cream, and we split and share.

It starts to rain while we are eating. This is not great, as we have around 20km of downhill this afternoon. We dither around – the guides are concerned about road conditions – and then finally set off. The road is a little damp, but not really wet. As a group we’ve agreed to ride carefully with the weather conditions, the traffic, and the bumpy road making it a little dangerous to hoon down.

I ride along behind Alex most of the way. We have more steep downhill, then the road settles into what I would call downward undulations. We encounter some pretty wet roads on the way down, and cop a little drizzle, but luckily no downpour.

I whizz through one little village and all I can smell is brewing tea – definitely in tea country now!

But not just tea country: the road is lined with adventure tour operaters. We are following a river valley down, and you can go white water rafting, canyoning and waterfall abseiling before settling in with a cuppa.

The road is still undulating, though in a net-downward fashion. I round a corner, and change gears to tackle the next rise, and feel my pedal slip. Damn! I’ve dropped the chain. I’ve been riding with Paul and Alex, and they zoom off into the distance while I hunt around for a stick to lift the chain back into place. It takes two goes, and I have quite an audience by the time I jump back on the bike and pedal off.

And then we are done. The days can end suddenly when you have no idea where the end point is. I am waved in, we wait for everybody to finish and then get onto the bus for a two hour transfer –  to Panadura, on the south-west coast.

Our new hotel is very resort like, with an open breezy foyer that leads straight to the beach. The foyer is filled with people, mostly asians, almost all huddled over their phones. One woman reclines in her pyjamas; another is wearing a head towel. It is as if there is only wifi in the foyer, but that isn’t the case. Is this how people socialise now, coming together to hunch over their devices?

Stats for today:

• Distance: 49.4km
• Climb: 434m
• Average speed: 17.9km/h
• Average temperature: 29C
• Moving time: 2:45:53
• See our ride on Strava

Along the way today: