‘Changing the game’: Sri Lankan mountaineer Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala promotes women’s rights on a walk along the new Pekoe Trail through the island’s Central Highlands
- Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala, the first Sri Lankan to summit Everest, walked part of the nation’s Pekoe Trail through Unesco World Heritage site the Central Highlands
- She visited homestays operated by women, and an ethical tea plantation, promoting gender justice and equality in the tea industry
The first person from Sri Lanka to summit Mount Everest wants the world to know that it was not a man who achieved the feat.
Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala is a passionate mountaineer, and an advocate for women’s rights. She was named one of the most influential women in the country by the Sri Lankan government in 2019.
This summer, she trekked part of the Pekoe Trail – a new route that winds through more than 300km of the Central Highlands, a Unesco World Heritage site in Sri Lanka. It was, she says, an adventure combining the two things she cares about most: mountains and gender equality.
Funded by the European Union with additional support from the US Agency for International Development in support of Sri Lanka Tourism, the Pekoe Trail has 22 stages. Kuru-Utumpala walked four of them – 13 to 16, mostly on small footpaths, with a few overgrown sections – over four days while staying at community-focused properties, visiting an ethical tea plantation and promoting gender justice in Sri Lanka’s tea industry.
Stages 13 to 16 of the Pekoe Trail are the ones most accessible from the Amba Estate, which hosted Kuru-Utumpala’s trip and which, according to the adventurer, is an “an exception to the norm” that is “really changing the game” in terms of gender equality and ethical practices.
