The rock, the train and the fort at the end of it

Arrive Colombo

The airport sits north of the city, nearer Negombo than the capital, and how long the transfer takes depends on the hour you land rather than on the distance. Nothing is scheduled. Most people arrive in the small hours off a Gulf connection and want a bed and a shower, in that order.

If you land in daylight and have energy, the walk worth taking is the Fort and Pettah, on foot, ending at the sea wall at Galle Face when the kite sellers come out. Colombo is not the reason anybody comes to Sri Lanka and we do not pretend otherwise; one night is what it gets.

North into the cultural triangle

Away by 08:00, north through the coconut belt and out of the wet zone. The landscape changes twice on this drive: palms give way to paddy, then paddy gives way to scrub jungle and the great artificial tanks the Sinhalese kings built to hold a monsoon in place for six months.

The afternoon is the cave temple at Dambulla, cut into the flank of a rock and painted from ceiling to floor, with the roof line followed exactly by the brushwork. Shoes come off at the gate and shoulders and knees stay covered; the stone gets hot enough by three that the socks we hand you are not a joke.

Sigiriya at opening

The gate opens at seven and we are on the water gardens by ten past. The climb goes up through the boulder field, along a caged gallery bolted to the rock face, past the painted women in their pocket of overhang, and out onto the lion’s paws for the final flights of open metal stair. It is exposed, it is hot after nine, and the descending traffic meets the ascending traffic on the same treads by half past eight.

Anybody who does not want the stairway climbs Pidurangala instead, the rock opposite, which is a scramble rather than a staircase and gives you the view of Sigiriya that Sigiriya cannot give you of itself. The afternoon is deliberately empty. Nobody does two rocks and a ruined city in one day and enjoys the second half of it.

Polonnaruwa, then the tank at dusk

Polonnaruwa is the medieval capital and the one place in the triangle where a bicycle beats a car. The site is flat, shaded in patches and spread over enough ground that walking it wastes the morning. The Gal Vihara is the reason to be there: four figures cut from one wall of granite, and the reclining Buddha in particular is the piece of sculpture people come back to.

Late afternoon is a jeep at Minneriya or Kaudulla, whichever the elephants are using that week — they move between the tanks as the water drops, and the herds gather in the dry months. Our driver rings the park in the morning rather than guessing. If the herds have gone elsewhere we say so and you keep the afternoon.

South to Kandy

Down through Matale into the hills, with a stop at a spice garden that is a shop with a lecture attached — we will tell you that in advance and you can skip it. The better stop is the Aluvihare rock temple, where the Pali canon was first written down on palm leaf in the first century BC.

Kandy in the late afternoon, and the evening puja at the Temple of the Tooth. The drumming starts before the doors open and the queue moves past the chamber quickly; this is a working shrine holding the most politically loaded object in the country, not a monument, and white clothing and covered shoulders are the minimum.

Kandy

The botanical gardens at Peradeniya were laid out for a Kandyan queen and then rebuilt by the British as a plantation laboratory, which is how a royal pleasure garden ended up with an avenue of cannonball trees and the largest Javan fig anyone can point at. Go at opening; the school parties arrive mid-morning.

The rest of the day is the town itself: the covered market, the lake circuit on foot, and the Kandyan dancers in the evening if you want them, which is a ticketed performance and we will say plainly that it is a show. Sri Lanka is full of better things happening for their own reasons.

The train to Ella

The Kandy to Ella line covers about 120 km and takes six to seven hours, which is the whole point of it. The track climbs out of the Kandy valley into tea, runs along contour lines above drops that the carriage doors are open to, and crosses the Nine Arch Bridge below Ella in the last hour.

We book Second Class Reserved rather than First Class air-conditioned, because the sealed windows in First defeat the object; and right-hand window seats, which hold the views travelling in this direction. Seats have to be taken months out in the December-to-April window. Your driver takes the car and the luggage round by road and meets the train.

Ella and the tea country

Little Adam’s Peak first thing, a gentle walk up a ridge of well under an hour, and not the pilgrimage mountain of the same name. Then a working tea factory, where the interesting part is not the leaf but the machinery: rollers and driers built in Britain a century ago and still running because nobody has designed anything better for the job.

The afternoon is free. Ella Rock is a harder couple of hours for anybody who wants it, on a path that starts by walking up the railway line, and it is the one walk on this journey we ask you to take a guide for, because people get lost on it every week.

Down to the coast, with elephants on the way

The road drops out of the hills through Wellawaya and the temperature climbs a degree every few minutes. Mid-morning is a jeep at Uda Walawe, which is open grassland rather than forest and therefore the one park in Sri Lanka where you see elephants rather than the place elephants have just left. It is also quieter than the first block at Yala, which in season carries more jeeps than any leopard will tolerate.

Galle by late afternoon. The fort is Portuguese in origin, Dutch in construction and British in administration, and the whole of it is still lived in — which is why it is worth two nights rather than an hour on the way to the airport.

Galle and the southern coast

The rampart walk is best done at either end of the day and takes about an hour at a slow pace, from the Star Bastion round to the lighthouse and the point where the local boys jump into the sea for money and would do it anyway. Inside the walls: the Dutch Reformed church floor, paved with the gravestones of people who did not last long here, and a street grid unchanged since the eighteenth century.

The afternoon is yours and the honest options are all quiet ones. Unawatuna and Dalawella for swimming, the stilt fishermen at Koggala if you want to see what has become of an actual fishing method, or a room and a book. Between December and March this coast is dry, which is why the journey is built in this direction.

Depart from Galle

The southern expressway runs from Galle to the airport and makes the departure manageable, but we still build a wide margin into the transfer because the last section around Colombo is the unreliable part. Late-evening flights get a day room rather than a lobby and a long lunch somewhere on the water.