Ravana Falls is the roadside waterfall everyone stops at on the way south from Ella. Honest advice on the swimming, the monkeys and the timing.
Ravana Falls is the waterfall you can see from the car, which is both the reason everybody stops and the reason it disappoints people who planned a day around it. It sits directly beside the Wellawaya road a few kilometres south of Ella, a wide cascade dropping over dark rock into a pool at the bottom, with a pull-in, a row of vendors and a resident troop of monkeys.
It is worth ten minutes. It is not worth a morning, and the swimming is more complicated than the crowds make it look.
Where is it and how do you get there?
On the A23 between Ella and Wellawaya, roughly six kilometres south of Ella town, on the road that drops off the escarpment toward the lowlands. Any southbound bus passes it and will stop, and every tuk-tuk driver in Ella knows it.
It is the easiest waterfall in the country to reach, which explains the volume of people. You park, you walk a few metres, you are there.
TODO: add the current bus fare from Ella and the tuk-tuk rate including waiting time, with the date you checked.
Can you swim at Ravana Falls?
Sometimes, and with more caution than the scene suggests. The pool at the base takes the direct force of the fall, and the flow changes quickly and without warning when it has rained higher in the catchment — which it often has, even when it is dry where you are standing.
In low water there are shallow areas at the edges that people wade into. In high water the whole pool is dangerous and the rocks around it are slick. There is no lifeguard, no barrier and no one whose job it is to tell you not to.
When is the best time to go?
Early morning, for the same reason as everything else around Ella: fewer people and better light. The falls face in a direction that puts them in shade for much of the day, so the middle of the afternoon is the least rewarding time to arrive.
Seasonally, the fall is at its most dramatic during and just after the wet months, when it is also at its least safe to approach. In the driest stretch it narrows considerably and some visitors find it underwhelming.
What about the monkeys?
There is an established troop at the roadside and they have learned exactly what a plastic bag means. They will take food directly out of your hand and occasionally out of your bag.
Do not feed them, do not photograph them at close range with food visible, and keep bags closed. This is not a warning about danger so much as about losing your lunch — but bites do happen, and rabies risk in Sri Lanka means any bite means a clinic visit.
Is it better than Diyaluma?
No, and it is not close. The two are often mentioned together because they sit on the same road south, but they are entirely different propositions:
- Ravana Falls is a roadside stop. Ten minutes, no walking, crowds, vendors, and swimming that is often inadvisable.
- Diyaluma Falls is a morning. A climb to natural pools at the top of a two-hundred-metre drop, with a view over the Koslanda valley and somewhere genuinely good to swim.
If you have one waterfall day in the hill country, spend it at Diyaluma and stop at Ravana for ten minutes on the way past. That is the correct order of priorities and almost every itinerary gets it backwards.
The name
The fall is tied to the Ramayana — the legend holds that this is near where Ravana, the king of Lanka, held Sita after taking her from India, with the caves above associated with the same story. The nearby Ravana's Cave belongs to the same set of sites.
Whether you treat that as history or as story, it is why the name attaches to several places around Ella rather than just one, and it is worth knowing before a driver offers to show you "Ravana's" anything.
Stop, look, take the photograph, and drive on to Diyaluma.