Ten days in Sri Lanka: a rock, a relic, a railway and the sea

Colombo's busiest temple and a magpie of a place: Sri Lankan, Thai, Chinese and Burmese styles piled on top of each other, a courtyard of donated Buddhas, vintage cars, and a shrine on stilts out in the lake reached by a walkway. Shoes off at the gate.

Half a kilometre of grass between the road and the sea, made into a promenade by the British in the 1850s and now the city's front room: kites, cricket, courting couples and a line of carts selling prawn fritters you eat standing up. Stay until it is dark.

Sri Lankan lagoon crab is enormous and Colombo cooks it better than anywhere else on the island, in pepper or butter. Book before you land, because the good kitchens fill every night.

Five caves under an overhang at the top of a long climb, holding more than a hundred and fifty Buddha figures and painted from floor to ceiling with murals that follow the curve of the rock. A king sheltered here in the first century BC and endowed it in thanks; every century since has added something. Monkeys work the steps, so carry nothing loose.

The rock a kilometre north of Sigiriya, about the same height, a fraction of the price, with a brick reclining Buddha in a cave halfway up and a proper scramble over boulders at the top. The summit gives you the classic view of Sigiriya, and the last hour of light is the one to be there for.

Sigiriya has almost no restaurants and the guesthouses cook, usually a rice and curry spread with eight or ten dishes, ordered a few hours ahead. Say yes to it.

The first thing inside the gate and the part everyone walks past: symmetrical pools, moats and channels laid out in the fifth century, with gravity fountains that still play in the wet season fifteen hundred years later.

King Kassapa took the throne from his father, expected his brother to come for him, and built his palace on top of a two hundred metre lava plug. What survives is remarkable: the cloud maidens painted in a sheltered pocket of the cliff, a polished wall covered in a thousand years of visitors' graffiti, a staircase rising between the paws of a vanished lion, and a summit of brick foundations, cisterns and a throne cut from rock. Three hours including the way down.

Eat near the gate or back at the guesthouse and then do nothing until half past three. This is the hottest part of the country and fighting it does not work.

Two national parks north of Sigiriya, joined by a forest corridor, with jeeps going out for the late afternoon drive. As the dry season goes on the elephants come down to the reservoirs in numbers, and in August a good evening means several hundred animals in one place. Insist on a driver who keeps his distance from the herd.

A small terraced park on the slope above the lake, part of the old palace grounds, with the best free view over the water and the temple roofs. Ten minutes, and a good place to sit while the afternoon cools.

The Sri Dalada Maligawa, which has held a tooth of the Buddha for centuries and with it the old claim that whoever keeps the relic rules the island. At evening puja the horn players and drummers line the corridor and the shrine room is opened for about an hour. You will not see the relic, which sits inside a nest of golden caskets.

Kandy eats early and shuts early. Kottu chopped on a steel plate, a curry buffet in one of the hotels above the lake, or rice and curry 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 used as a royal garden. Palm avenues, an orchid house, a Javan fig you can stand under, and enough lawn to lose everyone else on. Mountbatten ran the South East Asia Command from huts under these trees at the end of the Second World War.

Simple places by the garden gate do rice and curry and short eats for very little. Buy a few extra for the afternoon; there is nothing at the temple.

A village shrine whose drummers' hall has rows of wooden pillars carved with swans, wrestlers, dancers and a double-headed eagle, no two alike, cut in the fourteenth century and still holding the roof up. A caretaker will point out the famous ones and expects a small donation.

Kandy's covered market, two streets back from the lake, where tea and spices are sold to Sri Lankans as well as to visitors and the prices show it. Late afternoon, before it shuts.

Nine stone arches carrying the railway across a gorge in the jungle, built in 1921 without a girder or a rivet, supposedly because the steel was needed for the war. A handful of trains cross each day and half the hillside turns out to watch. Forty five minutes on foot from the town centre, either along the road or down the track.

A roadside shack with bench seating and a very short menu that has been feeding Ella for years. Order the pumpkin curry and the green mango curry, expect a wait, and take cash.

The little brother of the pilgrimage mountain, reached along the road past the tea gardens and then up steps to a grassy top. It looks into Ella Gap on one side and across at Ella Rock on the other, and at six in the morning it is nearly empty.

A wide fall about five kilometres south through the gap, thundering after rain and thin at the end of a dry spell. Stalls, monkeys and a car park, so not a wilderness, and still worth the twenty minutes.

The main street is all cafes, most of them aimed at visitors, and several of them very good. This is the one place on the trip where a smoothie bowl is easier to find than rice and curry.

A small green tea factory on the Passara road, half an hour's walk out past the foot of the hill, where the tour takes fifteen minutes and ends with a cup of something you will not find at home. Green tea is a fraction of Sri Lanka's output, which is what makes this worth the walk.

The Groote Kerk, finished in 1755 and still in use, its floor paved with the gravestones of Dutch merchants and their families. The organ loft and the canopied pulpit are original. Free, cool and usually empty.

The rampart circuit, about three kilometres of grass and stone with the sea on both sides and the whole town below. Allow ninety minutes with stops. Flag Rock on the southern point is where the crowd gathers at sunset and where boys jump off the wall into the water.

Pedlar Street and Church Street have the kitchens, several in old merchant houses with courtyards. Seafood is the obvious order. Book at weekends.

A white stupa on the top of Rumassala, built by Japanese Buddhist monks as one of a series around the world. The reason to come is the platform it stands on, with the whole coast laid out and the fort on its headland to the west.

A small cove below the pagoda, fifteen minutes down through the trees on foot. Sheltered, shallow, and the best snorkelling within reach of Galle, with reef fish a few strokes out. Go before the boats bring day trippers round at eleven.

The restaurants along Unawatuna bay put tables on the sand and cook whatever came in that morning. Ask the price of the fish by weight before agreeing to it.

A curving bay with a reef across the mouth of it, which is why people swim here rather than at the open beaches further along. The sand has come and gone with erosion over the years, so it is narrower than the photographs, and no less pleasant for it.

Tuna, seer and skipjack sold off the boats on the harbour side, loud and wet and over by mid morning. Buy nothing, look at everything, and stay out of the way of the men carrying trays.

The expressway runs from Galle past Colombo to the airport in about three hours. Buses do the same route for a fraction of the price and take a little longer. Aim to be at the terminal three hours before a long-haul flight.