Things to do
in Sri Lanka

The largest animal that has ever lived, forty minutes off a fishing harbour. Boats leave before six, and the sea is calmest early.

Block One holds one of the densest leopard populations anywhere. Two days gives you the dawn and dusk drives that matter.

As the tank shrinks in the dry months, hundreds of elephants converge on the grass. The largest gathering of Asian elephants on earth.

Five species come ashore on this beach to nest. You wait in the dark with a ranger, no torches, and the sea does the rest.

Elephants swimming between islands on a reservoir, and a jungle walk led by a Vedda chief. Almost nobody goes.

A troop of toque macaques studied continuously for fifty years, living among the ruins of a medieval capital.

A long, forgiving right-hander that peels for two hundred metres. The season runs opposite to the south coast, so the east is at its best.

A protected island reef half a mile offshore, with reef sharks in the shallows and coral you can reach without tanks.

Two hours through tea country and cloud forest, doors open, feet out. The Kandy end of the line is closed for repairs; you join at Nanu Oya. Regularly called the most beautiful rail journey in the world.

Five thousand steps through the night to a summit sacred to four religions. At dawn the peak throws a perfect triangle across the plain.

Up at dawn over paddy, tanks and jungle, with Sigiriya standing out of the mist. Roughly an hour in the air, weather permitting.

A UNESCO range most visitors drive straight past, with cloud forest, cold rivers and villages that are still a walk from the nearest road.

Three hundred kilometres of tea country in twenty-two stages, opened in 2023. Walk one, or string several together.

Grade three rapids through rainforest, with canyoning and cliff jumps either side of it. Two hours from Colombo.

A flat-water lagoon on one side and ocean swell on the other, with wind you can set your watch by.

Secluded bays on the south or east coast, snorkelling off the back, and dinner cooked on board as the light goes.

Twelve hundred steps to a fifth-century palace on a two-hundred-metre column of rock. Go at six, before the heat and the coaches.

The relic itself is never shown, but the drums begin at six and the queue moves through a building that has held it since 1595.

Dutch ramparts, Portuguese foundations and a working town inside the walls. Best in the last hour before the lighthouse lights.

Leaf to cup on a working estate, with the pluckers on the slopes at dawn and a tasting of grades that never leave the island.

Lunuganga and Number 11, the garden and the townhouse where Geoffrey Bawa worked out how Asia should build for its own climate.

A medieval capital spread over several kilometres of shaded parkland, which is why everyone who enjoys it does it on two wheels and does it early.

The rock opposite Sigiriya, climbed in the dark for the one view the lion rock cannot give you — itself.

A private session with master drummers and dancers inside a walauwa, rather than a hotel show with a buffet.

Not a spa menu. A physician, a diagnosis, and a week of food, oil and sleep prescribed against it.

Start at the market picking jak and gotu kola, finish at a table of eight curries you made on a clay hearth.

Kottu hammered on hot steel, isso wade off Galle Face, and a short-eats counter that has not changed in forty years.

The spice the island was named for, still peeled by hand. A morning on a southern estate, then a table under the trees.

Aged coconut spirit, tasted properly in a Dutch colonial room after dark. Sri Lanka's answer to rum, and older.