The world’s greatest places of 2025: The Pekoe Trail

Up in the Sri Lankan highlands, a 19th-century transport network for tea is now conveying adventurers to remote communities and businesses. The 186-mile Pekoe Trail—completed last March and named for the high-grade black tea produced on many Sri Lankan estates—is the country’s first long-distance walking path, linking thousands of colonial-era dirt roads and railway tracks built by the British for exporting tea. Though local companies have led trekking tours along parts of the route for years, this is the first time all 22 sections have been connected as a single trail, an initiative led by Sri Lanka-based sustainability consultant Miguel Cunat as part of the IESC-implemented Tourism Resilience in Sri Lanka Project, funded by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development.