Attractions
What each one is, how long it takes, and the month it is worth going.
The airport, the capital, and the hour between them
Almost every trip starts and ends here. Negombo is forty minutes from the terminal and Colombo is another hour south of it, which makes this the part of the island most people see twice and look at once.
01
Half a day across four hundred years of port city, most of it on foot.
The Dutch grid of Fort, the Old Parliament, the red and white striped Jami Ul-Alfar mosque in Pettah, the covered markets, and Galle Face Green at sunset with the kite sellers out. Add the Port City reclamation if you want to see what the next version of Colombo is going to look like.
02
Handloom, tea, ceramics and gems, at four very different kinds of price.
Barefoot for handloom and books, Paradise Road for ceramics, Laksala for state-run fixed prices, and the Good Market on Saturday mornings for small producers. Pettah is the wholesale end and is worth an hour even if you buy nothing.
Prices are fixed in the shops and are not in Pettah. If a driver offers to take you to a gem or batik place you did not ask about, he is being paid a commission on whatever you spend in it.
03
A working city temple that has been accepting gifts for a century and thrown almost none of them away.
Part monastery, part school, part magpie hoard: Buddha images in every material anyone has ever donated one in, vintage cars, pocket watches, a room of gifts nobody could refuse. Seema Malaka, the meditation pavilion out on the water, is Geoffrey Bawa and is the calmer half of the visit.
04
The national collection, in a white Italianate building opened in 1877.
The reason to come is one room: the throne, crown and regalia of the last king of Kandy, taken to Britain in 1815 and given back in 1934. Around it are the bronzes, the masks and the Dutch and Portuguese material. It is old-fashioned and under-lit, and it is still the best single hour of context available on the island.
05
A stone copy of the Kandyan royal audience hall, built to mark the end of British rule.
The hall was opened in 1953 to commemorate independence in 1948, and it is deliberately a Kandyan building rather than a colonial one. Sixty stone lions hold up the platform. At six in the morning and again at six in the evening the whole neighbourhood walks laps around it, which is when it is worth seeing.
06
The fishing town next to the airport, and the sanest place to spend a first or last night.
A lagoon full of outrigger canoes, a canal the Dutch cut and the British extended in 1802, still running the length of the town, a beach that is workmanlike rather than beautiful, and enough Catholic churches to have earned it the name Little Rome. Nobody should start a trip with a three hour drive after a ten hour flight, and that is what Negombo is for.
07
The fish market at dawn, the canal, the fort gate and a reclining Buddha.
Lellama, the main fish market, works from about five in the morning and is finished by nine. After that: the Dutch fort gate, which is now the gate of the prison, the canal by boat or tuk-tuk, and the six metre reclining Buddha at Angurukaramulla temple.
Dry zone, three to four hours north of Colombo
Fifteen centuries of capital city inside a two hour radius, and the only part of the country where you can climb a fifth century palace before breakfast and be watching wild elephants by five.
08 UNESCO · Ancient City of Sigiriya
A fifth century palace on top of a two hundred metre rock, and the one thing everybody comes for.
Kasyapa built it after taking the throne from his father, and held it for eighteen years. What survives is the water gardens at the bottom, the frescoes halfway up, the mirror wall with graffiti scratched into it from the eighth century onwards, the brick lion whose paws are all that is left of it, and the palace foundations on the summit. Around 1,200 steps.
The middle of the day on this rock is punishing, and the steel staircase is single file, so the queue does not move. There is no shade above the frescoes.
09 UNESCO · Golden Temple of Dambulla
Five caves cut into a rock, painted ceiling to floor, in use for two thousand years.
About 150 Buddha images and two thousand square metres of painted ceiling, following every curve and hollow of the natural rock rather than flattening it. It has been a monastery since the first century BCE, which makes it the longest continuously occupied thing on this page. Roughly 350 steps to the entrance.
Shoes come off at the bottom of the courtyard rather than at the caves, and the stone is hot enough by ten to make the walk across it painful. Take socks.
10 UNESCO · Ancient City of Polonnaruwa
A twelfth century capital, compact enough to cross by bicycle in a morning.
Parakramabahu I built a city and a reservoir large enough that it is called a sea, and both are still there. The four rock-cut Buddhas at Gal Vihara are the best sculpture in the country, and the fourteen metre reclining one is carved out of a single face of granite. The toque macaques here have been studied continuously since 1968, which is where the Monkey Kingdom name comes from.
11
The Gathering: several hundred wild elephants on a drying reservoir bed.
As the dry season empties the tank, the grass that comes up on the bed draws elephants in from across the dry zone. It is the largest seasonal concentration of wild Asian elephants anywhere, and it happens within an hour of the Cultural Triangle hotels, which is a piece of luck no other country gets.
The Gathering moves. When the water is high the elephants are at Kaudulla or Hurulu instead, so a jeep sold as Minneriya in April is the wrong park in the wrong month. Ask which tank has the water that week.
12
An hour over the dry zone at first light, with Sigiriya out of one side.
Launches are before dawn, drift wherever the morning wind takes them, and land in whichever paddy field arrives first. On a clear morning you get the rock, the tanks and the forest canopy at the one hour of the day when the light is worth having.
Cancelled for wind more often than people expect, and the call is made at four in the morning. Do not put it on the last day of a trip.
13
The rock opposite Sigiriya, which is where the photograph of Sigiriya gets taken from.
A cheaper ticket, a rougher climb and a better view, because the thing you are looking at is the rock everyone else is standing on. A reclining Buddha in a brick cave marks the halfway point, and the last five minutes are a scramble over boulders rather than a staircase.
There are no steps at the top. Anyone unsteady on uneven rock should climb Sigiriya instead and look across at Pidurangala from it.
You cannot fit all of this into ten days. Anyone who says otherwise is planning to drive you past most of it.
Central province, 500 metres up
The last independent kingdom on the island, and the road that climbs to it from Colombo, which is lined with the spice gardens, gem showrooms and elephant attractions that the whole country funnels visitors towards.
14 UNESCO · Sacred City of Kandy
The relic that decided who ruled the island, in the palace complex built to hold it.
Whoever held the tooth held the country, which is why it has been moved, hidden, fought over and rebuilt for sixteen centuries. You do not see the relic. You see the casket that holds the casket, during one of the three daily pujas, and the drumming that opens the chamber is the point of going.
Shoulders and knees covered, shoes off, no photographs with your back to a Buddha image. Bags are searched at the entrance and there is a separate queue for them.
15
A half day around the last capital the British had to take by force.
The lake was dug in 1807 by the king the British deposed eight years later. Around it: the covered market, the Bahirawakanda Buddha looking down from the hill, the arts and crafts of the old royal quarter, and Udawattakele forest immediately behind the temple, which is a genuine piece of jungle inside the city.
16
An hour of Kandyan dance, low-country masks and a fire-walking finish.
Kandyan dance was temple and court performance before it was a stage act, and the ves costume with its silver headdress is the real thing. The drumming carries it. Expect the low-country devil masks and the fire walking at the end, which is what the room came for.
This is a show put on for visitors and does not pretend otherwise. If you want the unstaged version, the Esala Perahera in July or August is it, and nothing else compares.
17
Forty minutes on where cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and vanilla actually come from.
Cinnamon is bark peeled from a shrub, pepper is a vine that climbs whatever is nearest, and cardamom grows at ground level under shade. Seeing that once changes how the rest of the island reads, and Sri Lankan cinnamon is a genuinely different species from the cassia sold as cinnamon almost everywhere else.
The tour is free and the shop at the end is not. Expect a head massage and a firm pitch for oils and powders at prices well above a Colombo pharmacy. Enjoy the garden, decline the consultation.
18
Five kilometres of grade two and three water, in the valley where Bridge on the River Kwai was shot.
Seven or eight rapids over about two hours, big enough to be genuinely wet and small enough for a first-timer who can swim. The bridge from the film was built here in 1957 and blown up for the ending, and the concrete footings are still in the river.
19
Sixty hectares of royal garden inside a loop of the Mahaweli, formally laid out in 1821.
The avenue of royal palms, the orchid house, the spice garden and one Javan fig with a canopy covering close to two thousand square metres from a single trunk. It was a royal pleasure garden long before the British formalised it, and it is the best place in the country to spend a hot afternoon.
20
A state-run herd of about eighty elephants, bathed in the river twice a day in front of an audience.
Opened in 1975 for orphaned calves, and now the most visited elephant attraction in the country. The herd walks down to the Ma Oya in the morning and again in the afternoon, and most of the visit is watching that from the terraces of the restaurants along the bank.
Part of five of the agency’s seven packages and an optional stop on a sixth, always timed to a bathing. If you would rather see elephants living wild, a jeep safari at Minneriya or Udawalawe does that, and any package can be changed to include one.
21
Why an island this size produces sapphires, and how a stone gets from a pit to a window.
The gravels around Ratnapura have been worked for two thousand years and still produce blue and padparadscha sapphires, cat’s eye and star stones. The museums walk you through the pit, the washing, the cutting and the grading, which is the part worth an hour whether or not you buy anything.
A certificate handed to you inside the shop that issued it is not an independent certificate. If you are spending real money, buy from a member of the Sri Lanka Gem and Jewellery Association and have the stone tested at the state laboratory in Colombo before you fly.
22
Twenty minutes in a saddle on a working captive elephant.
Sold everywhere along the Kandy road and at most of the Cultural Triangle junctions, usually as a short circuit through scrub or a river crossing, with a mahout walking alongside.
Included at Pinnawala on the Classic Mini Tour, the Scenic Tour and Culture and Wildlife, and offered as an optional elephant back safari at Habarana on Cultural and Historical. Anyone who would rather not ride can swap it for a jeep safari.
Nuwara Eliya to Ella, 1,000 to 2,300 metres
Tea above a thousand metres, the railway the British built to bring it down, and the coldest nights in Sri Lanka. Take the layer you did not think you would need.
23
Withering, rolling, oxidation, firing and grading, in a building that has not changed since it was built.
Tea has been grown here since 1867, and a working highland factory still runs on Victorian machinery in a corrugated shed built to catch the wind. Forty minutes end to end explains why altitude changes the price, and the tasting afterwards is the only way to understand what the grades on a packet mean.
The plucking is done by women on wages that are a live political argument in Sri Lanka. Ask the guide about it. Any factory worth visiting will answer.
24 UNESCO · Central Highlands of Sri Lanka
A cold montane plateau with a 9.5 kilometre loop walk across it.
Grassland and cloud forest at an altitude that has frost in January, with sambar grazing the open ground at first light. The loop takes in Baker’s Falls and both viewpoints, and it is the only national park in Sri Lanka you are allowed to walk in unaccompanied.
Two degrees at dawn and thirty by noon on the same walk. Take a fleece you can take off. There is no shelter and no water on the loop.
25
The hill station the British built to feel less far from home, still committed to the act.
A post office in red brick with a clock tower, a golf course from 1889, a racecourse, hedges, and hotels with fires lit in the evening. It is entirely artificial and completely charming. St Clair’s Falls is on the road in from Hatton and is worth the ten minute stop.
It is cold. Two degrees at night in January is normal and almost nobody packs for it, which is why every hotel here rents out coats.
26
A hill town in a gap in the mountains, with the best three hours of railway in Asia leading to it.
The town itself is one street of cafes and guesthouses. What makes it is the position: it sits in a notch in the escarpment so the view runs south and down, all the way to the coastal plain on a clear day. The train in from Nuwara Eliya or Kandy is the journey people remember longest.
27
A ninety metre viaduct built in 1921 out of stone and brick, with no steel in it at all.
The story is that the steel intended for it went to the war effort, so it was finished in stone and cement by local labour. It still carries the Badulla line twenty four metres above the valley, and a train crosses it a handful of times a day, which is what the crowd on the hillside is waiting for.
28
A small Victorian park in the middle of town, and one of the best places to bird in the country.
Named in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee and still doing exactly what it was built to do. The reason birders come is the stream at the back, where the Indian pitta, the Kashmir flycatcher and the pied thrush turn up in the migrant months in a park you can cross in ten minutes.
29
A cloud forest garden on the side of a mountain, started in 1861 to grow cinchona.
It began as a plantation for the bark that quinine comes from and became a garden when the market collapsed. The roses and the terraces are the postcard, but the top of it runs straight into montane forest, and the Ramayana places the garden where Sita was held, which is why the temple below it is busy with Indian pilgrims.
30 UNESCO · Central Highlands of Sri Lanka
The point where the plateau stops and drops 870 metres in one step.
Not a separate outing: it is the turn on the Horton Plains loop, about an hour and a half in if you walk it clockwise. On a clear morning you can see to the south coast. After about nine the cloud comes up the escarpment from below and there is nothing to look at at all.
31
Pick-your-own strawberries at two thousand metres, which is the only altitude in the country they will grow at.
The hill country is cold enough for temperate fruit and dairy, which is why this stretch of road has strawberry farms, a milk bar and a herd of Friesians in the middle of South Asia. It takes twenty minutes and the milkshake is the reason to stop.
A roadside stop rather than a destination. Worth it if you are passing and have children in the car, and not worth a detour if you are not.
32
An easy 45 minute climb to a ridge with the whole Ella gap in front of it.
Named for its resemblance to the real Adam’s Peak, which is a different mountain and a far harder night. This one is a path, then steps, then a grass ridge with four small summits along it. Most people stop at the first and miss the best of it.
Southeast and northwest, four to five hours from Colombo
Four national parks, four different reasons to go. Which one is right depends on the month and on whether you want elephants, which are reliable, or a leopard, which is not.
33
The best odds of a wild leopard anywhere in the world, and the busiest park in the country.
Block 1 has a density of leopards nothing else matches, along with sloth bears, elephants and a coastline of lagoons and rock. It is also the park everybody books, and on a bad morning there are forty jeeps at one sighting.
Ask before you book how many people share the jeep and what the driver does at a sighting. A driver who blocks a leopard to give his own vehicle the shot is the reason the park has a reputation, and he is avoidable.
34
Elephants, all year, in open country where you can actually see them.
Several hundred elephants live in thirty thousand hectares of scrub and grassland around a reservoir, and the vegetation is low enough that they are visible rather than merely present. If seeing elephants matters more than the chance of a leopard, this is the park, and it is on the way from Ella to the coast.
35
Orphaned calves hand-reared behind a fence and released back into the park at about five years old.
Run by the Department of Wildlife Conservation. Calves are bottle-fed four times a day from a platform the public watches from, kept in a herd rather than handled, and released into Udawalawe when they are old enough. More than a hundred and fifty have gone back to the wild.
No contact, no bathing, no photographs with the animals, and that is the entire point of the place. It is twenty minutes from the Udawalawe park gate, so it pairs naturally with a safari there.
36
The largest and quietest national park in the country, built around fifty natural lakes.
The villus are shallow rain-fed basins in the middle of dense forest, and animals come to their edges rather than to a road. It is slower going than Yala and you see less, but you see it without a queue behind you, and the leopards here are the same animals.
Every one of these has a right month and a wrong one. The wrong one is cheaper, and that is not a coincidence.
Bentota to Mirissa, two to three hours from Colombo
A hundred and fifty kilometres of beach, reef and river mouth, swimmable from December to March and closed by the southwest monsoon for most of the rest of the year.
37
A sandbar between a river and the sea, which is why everything happens on the water here.
The Bentota Ganga meets the ocean behind a long spit of sand, so the town has a flat, sheltered river on one side and open surf on the other. It is the closest proper beach to Colombo and the easiest one to reach on a short trip. Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga is twenty minutes upriver.
38
A shallow reef a hundred metres offshore, reachable by glass-bottomed boat or by swimming out.
The reef is a declared national park and holds green turtles that feed in the shallows close enough to snorkel with. Bleaching and the 2004 tsunami both took a heavy toll and the coral is recovering rather than pristine, which is worth knowing before you go.
Standing on coral kills it, and the boatmen will not always tell you that. Wear fins, stay off the bottom, and do not let anyone lift a turtle for a photograph.
39
A beach, a working harbour and the headland every photograph of Sri Lanka gets taken on.
Coconut Tree Hill is the small green promontory at the eastern end with the palms leaning off it. Behind the beach is the fishing harbour that the whale boats leave from before dawn, which is why the town is both a beach resort and a port that starts work at four in the morning.
40
Blue whales, sperm whales and pods of spinner dolphins, on a continental shelf that comes close to shore.
The shelf drops away only a few miles off Dondra Head, which puts the deep water blue whales feed in within an hour of the harbour. It is one of the most reliable places on earth to see the largest animal that has ever lived. Boats leave around six and are back by midday.
Take the seasickness tablet before you board rather than when you feel it. Pick an operator that keeps the hundred metre distance rule and does not cut across a whale’s track. The ones that chase are easy to spot from the deck and hard to get off.
41
Reefs, wrecks and an island national park, split across two monsoons.
Hikkaduwa and Unawatuna in the northern winter, Pigeon Island off Nilaveli in the southern one, and a set of wrecks off Colombo and Trincomalee that are dived all year. Pigeon Island is a marine national park and the reef starts a few metres from the sand.
42
A beginner beach break in the southwest and a world-class point break in the east.
Weligama is a long sandy beach with a gentle break and a dozen schools on it, which makes it the easiest place in the country to learn. Arugam Bay on the east coast is the opposite: a right-hand point break that draws a serious crowd for four months of the year.
43
Jet skis, banana boats, wakeboarding and windsurfing on flat water.
The lagoon side is protected from the swell, which makes it the one place on the coast where a beginner can waterski without fighting the ocean. Operators run from the river mouth and most of them will take a first-timer out with an instructor on the board.
Ask to see the life jackets before you pay rather than after. Standards vary a lot between operators on the same stretch of river.
44
Two hours through a mangrove estuary of sixty-odd islands, listed under the Ramsar convention.
A wide, shallow, brackish river with mangrove tunnels narrow enough that the boat has to be poled through them. There is a cinnamon island where the bark is still peeled by hand, a temple on an island of its own, and monitor lizards and kingfishers throughout.
Say no to the fish tanks. Some boatmen also feed the monitor lizards and drive into the mangrove tunnels at speed, and a quieter boatman sees more. Ask for an engine at idle.
45
Nests bought from the people who would otherwise sell the eggs, incubated and released.
Five of the world’s seven marine turtle species nest on this coast. The hatcheries buy clutches from beach collectors, rebury them above the tide line and release the hatchlings, and the good ones release within a day or two of hatching.
The difference between hatcheries here is enormous. A tank of adult turtles kept for handling is a bad sign, and so is handing hatchlings to visitors at midday. Ask how long the hatchlings are held. The answer should be hours, not weeks.
46
The coast’s original surf town, still the liveliest strip on the southwest.
Sri Lanka’s first backpacker beach and still the one with the most going on after dark. The main break is in front of the town and works for improvers, the sand is wide, and Galle Fort is twenty minutes down the road when you want a day off the beach.
47
A curved, reef-sheltered bay, which is the safest swimming on the south coast.
The headland and the reef between them take the swell out of the bay, so it is one of the few places on this coast where the sea is flat enough to swim in properly rather than be knocked over by. Galle Fort is close enough to walk back from after dinner.
Kalpitiya, Trincomalee and Passikudah
The half of the coastline that is at its best when the south is under rain. Everything here runs on the opposite season, which is the single most useful thing to know about a Sri Lankan itinerary.
48
A flat, waist-deep lagoon and a wind that blows for two long seasons.
The lagoon at Kappalady is shallow enough to stand up in across most of its width, which is the ideal place to learn, and the peninsula gets a steady cross-shore wind for most of two seasons. There is a second, rougher lagoon and open sea for anyone past that stage.
49
A small coral-stone fort from the 1660s, with a Dutch church of 1706 beside it.
Built to control the entrance to the Puttalam lagoon and the pearl fishery beyond it, out of blocks of coral rag cut from the reef. It is small, plain and almost never busy, and St Peter’s Kerk next door still has its original Dutch gravestones set into the floor.
Parts of the fort are still in military use and the accessible area changes. Check on the day rather than assuming.
50
A Shiva temple on a cliff directly above one of the finest natural harbours in the world.
One of the five historic Shiva temples on the island, on a headland that drops a hundred metres straight into the sea. The Portuguese destroyed the original in 1622 and pushed it over the cliff; some of it was recovered from the water in the 1950s and the temple was rebuilt around it. The view along the coast is the other reason to go.
Shoes off and shoulders covered, and there are monkeys on the approach that will take anything loose in your hand.
51
A shallow bay you can wade out into for a hundred metres, with no surf in it at all.
A reef across the mouth of the bay stops the swell, so the water inside is warm, clear and flat to well past standing depth. That makes it the best beach in the country for small children and the natural place for jet skis, kayaks and paddleboards. Kayaking out to the sandbank is the thing to do here.
Send us four or five from this page and the weeks you can travel, and we will tell you which of them fit together, which are in the wrong month for your dates, and what the drive between them really costs in hours.