Halgolla Plantation Home wins TripAdvisor Award
View(s):Halgolla Plantation Home (HPH) has been declared a 2015 Winner of the coveted Certificate of Excellence awarded by TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel website.
Emil and Arlene
While the award speaks for itself, it should be noted that HPH, situated in the Kandyan Foothills had already been declared Sri Lanka’s best ‘Homestay’ of 2013 by the internationally-famed travel writer (Author of Bradt’s Guide to Sri Lanka), Royston Ellis.
Located in the ancestral home of the van der Poorten family, HPH prides itself on its iconoclastic Sri Lankan cuisine prepared, to a large extent, with ingredients grown on the land adjacent to the lovely two-storeyed bungalow in which guests are lodged. The pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and vanilla, with which the food is spiced, as is the coffee served, are all grown on the plantation which is a true example of what is possible in agricultural diversification in Sri Lanka.
For those with the more exotic of tastes in fruit, your hosts will even provide durian, that most controversial of fruits, in season, of course. When Arlene Madawela and Emil van der Poorten who operate HPH are asked from where their visitors hail they respond that they’d need an atlas for such identification! What is probably, unique to this Homestay is the fact that guests from Alaska to Australia, Northern and Southern Europe, Canada and the US, West and Southern Asia, and the Far East invariably say that they “arrived as guests and leave as life-time friends.”
The beauty and tranquility of Halgolla Plantation Home is only matched by the warmth of those operating it and the wealth of information about Sri Lanka that they provide guests. ‘We truly enjoy what we do and awards, no matter how prestigious, are only the icing on the cake’ is the response from Emil and Arlene when asked for a final word about the TripAdvisor recognition.