Four days in Kandy: cooler, holier and slower than the coast
Three nights by the lake: the tooth relic at evening puja, the botanical gardens, two carved temples in the hills, and a forest behind the town.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Kandy
- Places
- 9 across 4 days
Kandy sits in a bowl of green hills five hundred metres above the coast, which makes it several degrees cooler and considerably wetter than Colombo. A lake fills the middle of it, the old royal palace and the temple that holds the Buddha's tooth stand on the north shore, and the whole centre can be walked in an afternoon.
This was the last independent kingdom on the island. The Portuguese and the Dutch never took it, and the British only managed it in 1815, with the help of the king's own chiefs. Everything Sri Lankans think of as classical, the dancing, the drumming, the architecture with its carved wooden pillars, survived here because the coast fell and Kandy did not.
Three nights gives you an evening at the temple when the drums start, a full day in the gardens and the villages west of town, a day for the forest and the hill above the lake, and a quiet last morning before the train.
Highlights
- Drummers and horn players announcing the opening of the island's holiest shrine
- A botanical garden on a river loop where Mountbatten ran a world war
- Wooden pillars carved in the fourteenth century, in a village nobody stops at
- A rainforest with monkeys and hornbills, ten minutes uphill from the town centre
Where to stay
Kandy, three nights
The kingdom moved up here in the sixteenth century precisely because it was hard to reach: one road in through the hills, a jungle full of malaria, and a court that could retreat further inland whenever an invading army arrived. It worked for more than two centuries against three European powers.
The town below the temple is workaday and cheerfully ugly in parts, a covered market and a bus station and roads with far too much traffic for their width. Then you walk to the lake at six and hear drums from across the water, and the point of the place becomes obvious.
Day by day
Day 1 in Kandy
The lake, and the tooth relic at evening puja
The train up from the coast eats the middle of the day, so plan the afternoon around one walk and one temple. The lake is an artificial one, made by the last king in the early 1800s, and the path around it is a little over three kilometres of shade, water monitors and schoolchildren.
Then time the temple for the evening puja. Arrive twenty minutes early, leave your shoes at the stall outside, and follow the drums.
- 16:00
Royal Palace Park
VisitA small terraced park on the slope above the lake, built as part of the palace grounds, with the best free view over the water and the temple roofs. Locals use it for courting under umbrellas, so wander rather than stare.
- 17:00
Kandyan dancing and fire walking
NoteTwo or three halls near the lake run an hour of drumming, masked dancing and a fire walk at five, aimed squarely at visitors and enjoyable anyway. Buy the ticket at the door and sit near the front for the drums.
- 18:15
Temple of the Tooth
ReligiousThe Sri Dalada Maligawa, which has held a tooth of the Buddha since the relic came to the island, and with it the old idea that whoever holds it rules. Come for the evening puja: horns and drums, a corridor of pilgrims carrying lotus flowers, and the shrine room open for about an hour. The upper rooms hold the raised walkway and a stuffed elephant that carried the casket in the procession for decades.
- 19:45
Dinner in town
EatKandy eats early and closes early. Rice and curry, kottu chopped on a steel plate to a rhythm you can hear from the street, or a curry buffet in one of the hotels above the lake.
With more time: If the train got in early, the World Buddhist Museum shares the temple complex and puts the relic in the context of the whole Buddhist world, country by country. Half an hour is enough.
Day 2 in Kandy
Peradeniya's gardens and the carved temples west of town
West of Kandy the Mahaweli river makes a loop, and inside the loop is the best botanical garden in the country. Go at opening, when it is cool and empty, and give it two hours at least.
The afternoon belongs to two village temples in the hills beyond, both from the fourteenth century and both nearly deserted. They are twenty minutes apart on small roads, so agree a half-day tuk-tuk in the morning and let the driver work out the order.
Take water and something to cover your shoulders; these are working temples with priests who will unlock a door for you.
- 09:00
Royal Botanical Garden in Peradeniya
NatureSixty hectares in a bend of the river, laid out by the British in the 1820s on ground the Kandyan kings had already used as a royal garden. The avenue of royal palms, the orchid house and a Javan fig with a crown you can stand under are the set pieces. Lord Mountbatten ran the South East Asia Command from here at the end of the Second World War, from huts under the trees.
- 12:00
Lunch at Peradeniya
EatSimple places on the main road by the garden gate do rice and curry and short eats. Buy a few extra for the afternoon, because there is nothing at the temples.
- 13:30
Gadaladeniya Temple
VisitA stone temple of 1344 on a rock outcrop, unusually South Indian in its stonework, with a moonstone at the threshold and a whitewashed stupa on four pillars beside it. The views back over the valley from the platform are the other reason to climb up.
- 15:00
Embekka Temple
ReligiousA village shrine with the finest wood carving in Sri Lanka: the drummers' hall has rows of pillars cut with swans, wrestlers, dancers and a double-headed eagle, no two the same, all from the fourteenth century. A caretaker will point out the famous ones and expect a small donation.
With more time: Lankatilaka, on the same loop, is the third of these hill temples and the most dramatically sited of them, on a bare rock with a long flight of steps. Ask the driver to add it if the light is still good.
Day 3 in Kandy
Forest above the lake, the museum, and the white Buddha at dusk
The forest behind the temple was the king's private garden and is now a reserve, which means a patch of proper rainforest ten minutes uphill from a town centre. Go early for the birds and the monkeys, and take the loop path rather than trying to cross it.
Afternoon in the old palace complex below, where the museum occupies the building the queens lived in. It is quiet, dusty and much better than it looks from the door.
Finish on the hill on the other side of the lake, where a white Buddha looks down over the whole bowl. It is worth timing for the last hour of daylight.
- 08:30
Udawattakele Royal Forest Sanctuary
OtherA hundred hectares of tropical forest immediately behind the Temple of the Tooth, closed to everyone but the court until the British opened it. Giant creepers, macaques, hornbills and a shrine or two along the paths. Go with someone rather than alone, and keep your bag zipped against the monkeys.
- 11:30
National Museum of Kandy
CultureThe royal collection in the former queens' quarters beside the palace: Kandyan jewellery, weapons, court dress, palm leaf manuscripts, and a copy of the convention of 1815 by which the chiefs handed the kingdom to Britain. The attendants are usually delighted to explain things.
- 13:00
Late lunch by the lake
EatSeveral upstairs terraces on the lake road serve a curry buffet through the afternoon, and a table by the window is the cheapest good view in Kandy.
- 16:30
Bahirawakanda temple
VisitThe huge white seated Buddha visible from every street in Kandy, on the hill south of the lake. You can walk up in half an hour or take a tuk-tuk to the gate. Come for the view down over the temple and the rooftops rather than for the statue, and stay while the lights come on.
With more time: The Central Market, two streets back from the lake, is the place to buy Ceylon tea and spices from people who sell them to Sri Lankans rather than only to visitors. Late afternoon, before it shuts.
Day 4 in Kandy
The garrison cemetery, then the train
One short walk before you go, and it is a strange, moving one: the British cemetery on the slope above the lake, hidden behind a gate that a keeper opens for anyone who rings.
Then the station. If you are heading for the hill country, the Kandy to Ella line leaves in the morning and the reserved seats sell out days ahead, so buy in advance rather than on the day.
- 09:00
British Garrison Cemetery
HistoricA small walled cemetery of colonial graves on the wooded slope behind the temple, closed for a century and now kept by a caretaker who knows every stone. Almost nobody here died of anything violent: malaria, cholera, sunstroke, one man trampled by an elephant. It says more about early colonial Ceylon than any museum in town.
- 11:00
On to the next place
TravelTrains south to Nanu Oya for Nuwara Eliya and on to Ella leave Kandy in the morning and take most of the day. Buses west to Colombo and north to Dambulla run every half hour from the station square.
With more time: With a later departure, the Ceylon Tea Museum on the Hantana road is a converted 1925 factory with the old rolling and drying machinery still in place, and a tasting room on the top floor with a view over the hills.
Before you go
Where to stay
The lake shore is the obvious base and is walkable to everything in the centre. The hillsides above it, particularly the road up towards Hantana, have the views and the breeze, at the cost of a steep climb or a tuk-tuk every time you go out.
Kandy fills completely during the Esala Perahera in July or August, when rooms with a view of the procession route are booked a year out and priced accordingly.
Getting here, and getting around
The train from Colombo Fort takes about three hours and climbs the whole way, which is the reason to take it rather than the faster expressway bus. Sit on the right leaving Colombo. Kandy station is a ten minute walk west of the lake.
In town, walk. Everything else, tuk-tuk: the temples west of the city, the gardens at Peradeniya and the Hantana road are all fifteen to forty minutes out, and drivers will happily do a half-day loop for a fixed price agreed in advance.
The temple, and how to behave in it
White or pale clothing, shoulders and knees covered, shoes and hats off at the entrance. Bring socks, because the stone courtyard gets hot. Security is thorough and bags are searched; the temple was attacked with a truck bomb in 1998 and it has not forgotten.
Puja is held three times a day and the evening one, around half past six, is when the drummers and horn players line the corridor and the doors of the inner shrine are opened. You will not see the relic itself, which stays in its nest of golden caskets, and the queue past the shrine moves quickly.
Do not turn your back on a Buddha image for a photograph. It is treated as a real offence in Sri Lanka rather than as bad manners.
When to go
Kandy is comfortable all year, roughly 20 to 30 degrees, and it rains more than the coast in most months. October to December is the wettest stretch, when afternoons close in with real downpours.
The Esala Perahera fills ten nights in July or August with torchlight, dancers and tuskers in costume, and is one of the great processions in Asia. It is also completely full, expensive and hard to see from the street without a paid seat, so decide deliberately whether to come for it or to avoid it.
Kandy asks for early mornings and late afternoons, with the hot middle of the day spent somewhere with a fan and a pot of tea. Do that and three nights feels generous rather than tight.
From here the line climbs south into the tea country, the road north drops to the dry plains and the ancient cities, and Colombo is three hours back down the hill.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is three nights too long for Kandy?
- Not if you use the hills. The town itself is a day, but the gardens at Peradeniya, the carved temples west of the city and the forest reserve are all worth half a day each and most visitors miss all three.
- Should I go to the Pinnawala elephant orphanage?
- Many people now choose not to. It is about an hour west of Kandy and it does hold a large herd, but it is run commercially, the elephants are chained at times and the river bathing is a staged show for ticket holders. If seeing elephants matters, the national parks at Udawalawe and Minneriya show them wild.
- What is the train from Kandy to Ella like?
- Slow, crowded and one of the best rail journeys anywhere: seven hours through tea estates, cloud and waterfalls. Reserved second class is the seat to want, and it needs booking well ahead. Third class is unreserved, so you stand or sit in the doorway.
- Can I see the tooth relic itself?
- No. The relic sits inside seven nested caskets and is almost never displayed. What you see at puja is the shrine, the caskets and the ceremony around them, which is the point.
- Can I change this plan?
- Yes. Copy it into the planner and move, cut or add anything; the days, times and places all stay editable.