Seven days in Sri Lanka's hill country: the slowest train you will ever be glad you caught

A large white seated Buddha on the hill south of the lake, floodlit at night and visible from every street in Kandy. Come for the view back down over the temple and the rooftops in the last of the afternoon light rather than for the statue itself.

The Sri Dalada Maligawa, which holds a tooth of the Buddha and, with it, the old claim that whoever keeps the relic rules the island. The evening puja brings drummers and horn players into the corridor and opens the shrine room for about an hour. You will not see the relic, which sits inside a nest of golden caskets, and it does not matter.

Kandy eats early. Kottu chopped on a steel plate, a curry buffet in one of the hotels above the lake, or rice and curry in a workaday place in town for a few hundred rupees.

Sixty hectares in a loop of the Mahaweli river, laid out by the British in the 1820s on ground the Kandyan kings had already used as a royal garden. Palm avenues, an orchid house, a Javan fig with a canopy you can stand under, and enough lawn to lose the crowds on. Mountbatten ran the South East Asia Command from huts under these trees at the end of the Second World War.

Simple places along the main road at Peradeniya do rice and curry and short eats. Eat before you head back up the hill.

A tea factory of 1925 on the Hantana estate above Kandy, kept as a museum with its rolling and drying machines still in place and a library of the industry's history. The top floor is a tasting room with a view over the hills you are about to travel into.

Kandy's covered market, two streets back from the lake: fruit, spices, dried fish, herbal tonics and tea by the kilo, sold at prices that are still negotiable but not absurd. Late afternoon, before it shuts.

A red brick post office with a clock tower and Tudor gables, in the middle of town and still working. It is the best of the town's colonial oddities and takes five minutes, and you can post a card from it, which is the only reason to go in.

The town's lake, dug in the 1870s under a British governor whose name it still carries, with a park along the edge and a path around it. Late afternoon light on the water with the hills behind it is worth the walk out; the pedal boats and jet skis are not.

Dinner at the Hill Club, founded by British planters in 1876 and still run as though the empire were merely delayed. Jacket and tie are required in the dining room after seven and both are lent at the door, the waiters wear white gloves, and the food is a five course period piece. Book in the afternoon.

A high plateau of grassland and cloud forest above two thousand metres, and nothing else like it in Sri Lanka. The loop takes in Baker's Falls and two cliff edges, the smaller one and then World's End itself, where the ground simply stops and falls away the better part of a kilometre to the plain. Sambar deer graze the moor at first light. The entrance fee is one of the steepest in the country and plastic is confiscated at the gate.

The row of budget restaurants near the main street do enormous plates of rice and curry and South Indian food, and after four hours on the plateau you will want all of it.

A working factory on the estate east of town, at about nineteen hundred metres, where the tour follows the leaf from the withering lofts through the rollers to the driers and finishes with a cup of what you have just watched being made. Paths run out into the tea from the gate and the pickers are working through the afternoon.

A waterfall of about thirty metres on the same road, reached through a tea estate and named for a prince and his lover who are supposed to have jumped from it. Ten minutes' walk from where the tuk-tuk stops, and the last of the light comes down the valley behind it.

Nine stone arches carrying the railway across a gorge in the jungle, built in 1921 without a girder or a rivet in it, supposedly because the steel went to the war instead. A train crosses a handful of times a day and the whole hillside gathers to watch it. Forty five minutes' walk from the town centre, either along the road or down the track itself.

A roadside shack with bench seating and a very short menu that has been feeding Ella for years. The pumpkin curry and the green mango curry are the orders, the portions are large, and there is usually a wait.

A viewpoint at nearly two thousand metres where the hills fall away in every direction and, on a clear morning, you can see most of the way to the south coast. Be there by half past six; the cloud usually arrives before eight. There is a tea hut at the top and nothing else.

The factory Thomas Lipton built below the viewpoint, still processing leaf from the estates around it. The tour is quick and unsentimental, the smell is the best part, and the shop sells at estate prices rather than airport ones.

Nothing special either way, but the bakeries on the road are good for short eats and the guesthouses in Ella will feed you at any hour.

A wide fall about five kilometres south of Ella through the gap, spectacular after rain and reduced to a trickle at the end of a dry spell. It is right beside the road with stalls and monkeys, so it is not a wilderness experience, and it is still worth the twenty minutes.

The small brother of the pilgrimage mountain, a gentle climb east of town along the road past the tea gardens and then up a flight of steps. The summit looks straight into Ella Gap and across at Ella Rock, and at six in the morning you will have it nearly to yourself.

Buses south to the coast and west to Colombo leave from the main road, and the train down to Badulla or back up the mountain goes from the station in the middle of town. Book ahead if you want a reserved seat back to Kandy.