Two countries, one narrow window, eighteen nights

Arrive Colombo, sleep at Negombo

The airport sits north of the capital and closer to Negombo than to Colombo, so the first night goes to Negombo and saves an hour of city traffic at both ends of a long flight. Most arrivals off a Gulf connection land between two and five in the morning.

Nothing is scheduled. If you land in daylight, the walk worth taking is the fish market and the Dutch canal at the north end of the lagoon, where the oruwa outriggers come in and the catch is auctioned on the sand in about fifteen minutes flat.

North to Anuradhapura

Away by eight, north out of the wet zone. The vegetation changes twice on this drive: coconut gives way to paddy, paddy to scrub jungle, and then the tanks begin — artificial reservoirs, some of them two thousand years old and still irrigating, which are the reason a civilisation of this size ever stood in a landscape this dry.

The afternoon is the sacred quarter. The bo tree at Sri Maha Bodhi grew from a cutting brought here in the third century BC and has been tended without a break ever since; the people at the rail are there for reasons that have nothing to do with heritage, and the dress code that goes with that — white, shoulders covered — is not a suggestion. The great brick stupas around it are still being replastered, and the only way to take the size of one in is to walk a full circuit, which takes longer than you expect.

Anuradhapura by bicycle, and Mihintale

The ancient city is spread across enough ground that walking it wastes a day and driving it removes the point, so we do it on bicycles: the monastic refectories with their stone rice troughs, the twin ponds, the moonstones at the Abhayagiri, and the Samadhi Buddha, a seated figure of about the fourth century whose face changes as you move round it. Flat ground, shade in patches, and no traffic worth the name.

Mihintale in the late afternoon, a short drive east. Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka on this hill and the approach is a granite stairway climbed in long shallow flights, which sounds worse than it is because the treads are broad and the shade is continuous for the first half. Go up for the last hour of light, when the pilgrims come and the heat has gone out of the rock.

South-east to Sigiriya, and the painted caves

A short drive to the paddy country around Sigiriya, where you sleep for three nights and stop packing. Dambulla takes the afternoon: five chambers hollowed out of a rock flank and painted floor line to roof, the brushwork bending with the natural curve overhead instead of arguing with it. Footwear is left at the gate, and by three the paving is hot enough that the socks handed to you at the entrance are equipment rather than courtesy.

Sigiriya at opening

Gates at seven, water gardens by ten past. From there the route works through the fallen boulders, along a caged walkway pinned to the rock face, past the painted figures sheltering under their overhang, and out between the lion’s paws for the last open metal flights. There is no shade on it, it turns unpleasant after nine, and from about half past eight the descending traffic and the ascending traffic share the same treads.

The alternative for anybody who would rather not take those stairs is Pidurangala, the rock standing opposite: a scramble at the top, and the one place from which you can look at Sigiriya rather than out from it. Then a free afternoon, deliberately. This is the middle of nineteen days and a good day to spend beside a pool.

Polonnaruwa, the second capital

The medieval capital, and the third stage of a sequence you have now been following for five days: Anuradhapura abandoned, the court moved south-east, the same hydraulic engineering rebuilt at a smaller scale by a king who wrote that not a drop of rain should reach the sea unused. The site is flat and spread out and, like Anuradhapura, best on two wheels.

What justifies the day is the Gal Vihara: four images worked out of one granite face, the reclining figure among them being the piece of carving on this island that people go back for a second look at. The end of the afternoon is a jeep at whichever of Minneriya or Kaudulla the elephants are using, since they follow the falling water from one tank to the next; the park gets a telephone call from your driver that morning rather than a guess. Herds elsewhere means you are told so and the afternoon stays yours.

South into the hills to Kandy

Through Matale and up into the hills. The stop we make is the Nalanda Gedige, a small stone shrine standing alone above a reservoir, built in a form that is Hindu in its plan and Buddhist in its use and settles the question of how separate those two things ever were here. The spice gardens along this road are shops with a lecture attached and we will tell you that rather than let you find out at the till.

Kandy in the afternoon. Rather than the temple on the first evening, we walk: the lake circuit, and then up into Udawattakele, which is a genuine tract of wet-zone forest directly behind the palace, kept as a royal reserve and now full of monkeys, monitor lizards and a great deal of bird inside a working city.

The tooth relic, and the temples west of the city

The morning puja at the Temple of the Tooth. Drums are already going before the inner doors are opened and the file past them does not linger. What stands in that chamber is the most politically freighted object anywhere in the country and the building around it is a functioning shrine, so white clothes and covered shoulders and knees are the floor rather than the recommendation. Nobody lays eyes on the relic. Seeing it was never what the visit was.

The afternoon is the loop that almost no itinerary includes: Gadaladeniya on its rock, stone-built and South Indian in its detailing; Lankatilaka, which stands on the same outcrop and was a good deal higher before it lost its upper storeys; and Embekke, whose wooden pillars carry the best secular carving in Sri Lanka — wrestlers, dancers, a mother and child, a double-headed eagle. Three fourteenth-century buildings within a few kilometres of each other and, on most afternoons, nobody else there.

Up into the tea

The road climbs through Ramboda and past the waterfalls into the high estates, and the temperature drops most of the way. This is planter country: bungalows built for men sent out by companies in London and Glasgow, laid out with lawns and fireplaces high in the hills because that is what they knew how to build.

The afternoon is a working estate rather than a visitor centre. Why a bush is held at pluckable height for a hundred years, why the leaf count is what it is, what the withering lofts and the rolling machines do, and what the estate wage is — the Tamil workforce here was brought from south India by the British in the nineteenth century, and the fact that you are flying to their ancestral coast in three days is not a coincidence anybody on this route should miss.

The train down to Ella

The Kandy to Ella line covers about 120 kilometres and takes six to seven hours end to end, which is the whole product. We take the upper half of it, boarding at Nanu Oya after a slow morning on the estate, which keeps the best of the scenery — the contour running above the drops, tea to the horizon, and in the final stretch the viaduct of nine arches under Ella — and cuts three hours of sitting from a journey that has plenty of sitting in it already.

Reserved seats in Second, not the air-conditioned First, because a sealed window removes the only reason to be on the train; and seats on the right, which is the side the country falls away from going this way. Between December and April they are gone months out. Car and luggage go round by road with the driver, who is on the platform at Ella.

Down to the south coast

Little Adam’s Peak at first light: an easy ridge, under an hour, and not to be confused with the pilgrimage mountain that shares the name. Then the road lets go of the hills by way of Wellawaya, picking up a degree every few minutes until you are at sea level again in dry heat and palmyra.

The afternoon is Bundala, a chain of coastal lagoons and salt pans east of Hambantota, which is a bird reserve rather than a big-game park and is the better choice for it: waders, painted storks, crocodile, and the winter migrants that come down the Indian flyway in exactly the months this journey runs. It is quiet in a way the first block at Yala, an hour further on, is not.

Colombo to Kochi

A slow morning on the coast, then the southern expressway north, which makes the run to the airport manageable; the unreliable section is the last part around Colombo and we build a wide margin into it. Your Sri Lankan driver hands you over at departures.

Kochi in the afternoon, and roughly an hour and a quarter from the airport down to Fort Kochi, a peninsula on which traffic ceases to be a consideration. Nothing else is scheduled. What to do with the first evening is the north sea wall, where the cantilevered Chinese nets get hauled by hand as the tide turns and then stand idle until it turns again.

Fort Kochi and Mattancherry on foot

A morning walking the peninsula behind a guide who can hold four centuries in sequence: church built by the Portuguese, graveyard left by the Dutch, Residency put up by the British, a synagogue in a quarter that has not stopped smelling of the pepper stacked around it, warehouses where cardamom and ginger are still sorted by hand on the floor. This port was trading long before Europe arrived and went on trading after, and the buildings are what is left of the paperwork.

The afternoon has an argument in it that you have been walking towards since Anuradhapura. Everything you saw in Sri Lanka — the Buddhism, the stone shrine forms at Nalanda and Gadaladeniya, the estate labour in the hills — arrived across this water or left from it. Your Indian guide is briefed to pick that up rather than start the country again from scratch.

Muziris, the port that disappeared

North of Kochi, along the channels, sits the ground archaeologists now think was Muziris: the port Roman writers named, where pepper went west for gold until a flood in the fourteenth century moved the river and killed it. What survives is a string of small sites within a few kilometres of each other and almost no visitors — the synagogue at Paravur, the Jewish and Syrian Christian quarters at Chendamangalam, a Portuguese-era church, a mosque that claims descent from the first in India.

We do the last stretch by boat rather than by road, because the channels are how the whole thing worked and because the road version of this day is a series of car parks. This is the best day in Kerala for anybody who came to south Asia for its history rather than its water, and it is the one most itineraries skip entirely.

South to Alleppey and aboard

Down the coast road to Alleppey and aboard at about noon. What you are floating on is a system of lakes, cut channels and rice polders sitting under sea level, farmed by the people whose houses line the banks — and the fleet working it is large, and not all of it behaves.

The boats we use carry a sealed waste tank and three crew, and the mooring for the night is a narrow channel rather than the open lake in company with sixty others. Slowness is the design. Lunch is cooked on board, the fish arrives alongside in somebody else’s boat, and the engine is off by about five.

Off the boat at Kumarakom

Ashore after breakfast on the eastern shore of Vembanad, the lake every one of those channels feeds. A single night afloat is the correct dose. The first afternoon carries the entire idea, and by the middle of a second day almost everybody wants to be standing on something that holds still.

Kumarakom is where you stand on it. The bird sanctuary here is small, walkable and best in the two hours after dawn, and it is on the same migratory flyway as the lagoons at Bundala five days ago — the same species, wintering at either end of the same short sea. The rest of the day is the lake, a canoe in the smaller channels where a houseboat cannot go, and an early night.

West to the coast at Marari

A short drive back across the polders to the sea. Mararikulam is a working fishing village with a long open beach behind it, and it is not a resort strip: the boats go out at night, the catch is landed in the morning, and the hotels sit behind a coconut belt rather than on the sand.

The afternoon is nothing. After eleven days in Sri Lanka and five more of Kerala, the last two nights of this journey are deliberately empty, and every time we have tried to put something in them the clients have quietly cancelled it.

Marari, free

Nothing scheduled. There is a shore break here and there is a current, and the flags on the beach are not decorative. For anybody who would rather be doing something, two suggestions: the sand at first light while the night’s catch is sold, which lasts about twenty minutes and finishes before most guests are awake, and a proper ayurvedic consultation followed by treatment, which wants three hours and bears no relation to a spa massage.

This is also the day to do the thing nobody plans for: sit down with your guide and work out what you would change. We ask for it, we write it down, and it is how the next version of this route gets better.

Depart from Kochi

Breakfast, then about an hour and a half north to Cochin airport. Anybody flying out in the evening keeps a room for the day instead of sitting in reception, and Gulf connections want their flight number sent to us a week out so the car leaves to suit the aircraft and not the front desk.