Knuckles Range

Almost everybody who says they have been to the Knuckles has been to Riverston. That is not a gotcha and not a criticism of anyone: Riverston is a genuinely good day out. But the two things are not the same size, and nobody draws the distinction, which is why a certain number of visitors arrive at a windy gap in a road, look at the cloud, and feel obscurely that they were promised something else.

Riverston is a pass in a ridge with a road over it, a viewpoint above the road, a short walk out across open grassland to a cliff edge, and a couple of waterfalls within reach on the way up or down. You can do the whole of it from Kandy between breakfast and dinner, in an ordinary car, in ordinary shoes. The Knuckles is a mountain range: a whole massif of ridges, cloud forest, savannah, rivers and inhabited villages that takes days to cross on foot, requires permission and a guide, and has long stretches with no phone signal and nothing that could be called a facility. It is one of the very few places left in Sri Lanka where a visitor can walk for a day and meet nobody.

Both versions are worth having. They are simply different holidays. This page separates them and is straightforward about the thing that governs everything here: the range manufactures its own weather, and will often decline to show you anything at all. Getting there is a route page's job; this one is about the mountain.

What the Knuckles actually is

A mountain massif north-east of Kandy, straddling the boundary between the Kandy and Matale districts, and standing distinctly apart from the rest of the central highlands. Deep valleys cut it off on the southern and eastern sides, and the country falls away northwards towards the dry plains. That isolation is the whole reason the place behaves as it does. It is not a shoulder of the main highland block. It is a separate lump of high ground sitting on its own in the weather.

It is also not one mountain. The range is a tangle of ridges radiating from a high core, with summits, saddles, hidden basins and side spurs, and no single point from which the shape of it can be seen. There is no equivalent here of standing at the foot of a rock and looking up at the thing you came to climb. The Knuckles is understood by moving through it, and a visitor who never leaves the road sees the outside edge of one flank.

The name, and the shape that produced it

The English name is a description made from a distance. Seen from the Matale side, the summit ridge shows a row of separate rocky points standing up in a line, and to nineteenth-century British eyes that outline looked like the knuckles of a closed fist. The name stuck to the whole range, though the shape shows only from certain angles and on days it is not in cloud.

The Sinhala name comes at the same place from the opposite direction. Dumbara Kanduvetiya means, near enough, the mist-laden mountain range, and the country around the southern flank has been called Dumbara for far longer than anyone has called it the Knuckles. One name describes the outline; the other describes the atmosphere. Anybody who has spent a day up there will tell you the Sinhala name is the more accurate of the two.

Three landscapes within a few kilometres

The unusual thing about the Knuckles, and the reason ecologists care about it out of proportion to its size, is that it compresses several entirely different environments into a short horizontal distance. You cross between them in the time it takes to drive over a ridge.

The mechanism is a barrier standing alone in front of two different weather systems. Because the range rises abruptly from lower country on every side, and because it sits where the island's two monsoons overlap, its western and southern slopes are drenched by the wind coming off the south-west for one half of the year, while its northern and eastern flanks take the north-east monsoon around the turn of the year. Most of the hill country is dominated by one season. The Knuckles is worked over by both, from opposite directions, and each flank spends part of the year in the rain shadow of its own summits.

Layer altitude on top of that and you get the result. On the wet slopes and in the high basins there is montane and sub-montane cloud forest, dark and dripping, hung with moss and epiphytes, with tree ferns in the gullies. On the most exposed ridges that forest shrinks: mature trees grow to shoulder and waist height, wind-pruned and thick with lichen, which is what people mean when they mention dwarf or pygmy forest. Open plateaus carry wet patana grassland, short and springy underfoot. The drier northern and eastern flanks carry dry patana, a savannah of coarse grass and scattered fire-hardened trees that looks more like Africa than like anything else in the highlands. Along the streams there is riverine forest, and at the lowest edges the vegetation shades into the semi-evergreen dry-zone forest of the plains below.

The consequence is a landscape that keeps changing character, and a range holding species found nowhere else, including lizards and amphibians restricted to particular ridges and stream systems. Most of them go unnoticed without somebody pointing them out, but they explain why the ground is protected as tightly as it is.

Why it is World Heritage, and what the listing changed

The Knuckles Conservation Forest forms one of the components of the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka on the World Heritage list, alongside the Peak Wilderness and Horton Plains. The inscription is for ecology and endemism rather than for anything anybody built, which is a slightly unusual thing in a country where most of the famous protected places have a temple or a ruin somewhere in them.

It is administered by the Forest Department as a conservation forest rather than by the wildlife authorities as a national park, and that produces most of the practical differences a visitor notices. There is no grand entrance with a car park and a visitor centre, and no circuit that jeeps drive. Access is arranged through forest offices at several separate points around the range, entry is ticketed and priced separately for foreign visitors, and the rules are enforced by people managing a catchment rather than running an attraction.

The protection also reversed a period of real damage. Cardamom was grown for decades under the canopy inside the range, which meant clearing the understorey over large areas; the grasslands were burnt and grazed; the lower edges were encroached. Much of that has been wound back, and some of the trails walked today follow tracks cut to service cardamom plots.

Underneath all of it is water. The streams rising on these ridges feed the river system the dry zone depends on, and the reservoirs downstream are why the state takes this forest as seriously as it does. When a forest officer tells you to keep out of a stream, that is what is behind it.

Riverston, described honestly

Riverston is where the road from Matale climbs onto the western shoulder of the range and crosses a gap in the ridge. Above it, high ground carries a telecommunications installation, and a short steep path of steps and worn rock climbs to the viewpoint. That is the sum of the infrastructure: no gate, no building, no cafe worth the name, and whatever a roadside stall is offering.

The first thing to understand is the wind. The gap funnels it, and on most days it is not a breeze but a sustained shove that makes people brace, snatches hats, catches car doors and makes conversation an effort. It is loud. Photographs never convey this, and it is the detail that most surprises anybody who packed for the tropics.

The second thing is what you can see, when you can see it. On a clear hour the ground falls away to the north and west over the Matale valley and out towards the plains, an enormous open sweep with the light moving across it, while behind you the ridges of the range stack away into the interior. On most days, for most of the day, you can see white. Cloud sits on this shoulder more often than it does not, and it arrives and leaves in minutes.

The third thing is that much of the appeal is the road rather than the destination. The climb onto the ridge is one of the more spectacular stretches of tarmac in the country: narrow, hairpinned, running along open grassland with drops on one side and cloud pouring across it. Plenty of people who came for the viewpoint go home talking about the drive.

What Riverston is not is remote. At weekends and on holidays there is a line of vans at the popular pull-ins, music from some of them, litter at the edges of the laybys, and a queue on the steps. On a weekday morning it can be almost empty. The difference between those two visits is entirely a matter of which day you choose.

Pitawala Pathana and the grassland edge

The best short walk on this side of the range is at Pitawala Pathana, a shelf of open montane grassland reached from the same road, a little below and apart from the Riverston gap itself. A made path leads out from the roadside across the grass to the edge of an escarpment, and it is level, obvious and short. Twenty minutes or so each way at a gentle pace covers it.

The grassland is the point rather than the destination. Short wiry turf over thin soil, cropped by wind rather than by animals, with rock breaking through and small hardy flowering plants in it. Around the fringes stand patches of the stunted cloud forest described above, full-grown trees at head height, so thick with moss that the branches look upholstered. Little else in Sri Lanka looks like this, and on a clear morning with the light low across the grass it is the best thing at Riverston.

Then the ground stops. The plateau ends at an escarpment and the land drops into the valley below, with the far side of the range standing across the gap. There is no meaningful barrier at the edge, the wind comes up the face, and there is no reason whatever to walk to the lip to see how it feels. Children need holding onto here, and that is not a formality.

Two rules matter on this walk. Stay on the path, because the grassland is a thin skin over rock and the informal shortcuts trampled beside the main route are visibly damaging it. And walk slowly, looking down as much as out: the rocks hold lizards, the turf holds small flowering things, and hurrying across a grassland to photograph a drop is a way of missing the better half of the place.

Mini world's end, and why the name turns up more than once

The escarpment at Pitawala Pathana is universally advertised as a mini world's end, borrowing the name from the famous drop at Horton Plains. That is fair enough as far as it goes, but the label is applied loosely around this range. There is another well-known viewpoint sold under the same name on a forest trail on the western side of the massif, reached on foot from a forest office rather than from a car, and various other edges get called it by whoever is standing at them.

So if a driver or a listing offers a mini world's end in the Knuckles, ask which one, because they involve completely different days. The Pitawala Pathana edge is the one nearly every Riverston day trip means, and the one reachable in a short flat walk from a vehicle.

Expectations are worth calibrating rather than inflating. This is a real escarpment with a real drop and a long view down a valley, well worth the walk out to it, but it is not the Horton Plains escarpment and setting the two side by side flatters neither. The pleasure at Pitawala is the grassland, the wind and the emptiness. Arrive wanting depth specifically and you have come to the wrong edge.

What the day trip gets you, and what it does not

A Riverston day gets you: a long, slow, genuinely beautiful mountain road; a wind gap with a view that may or may not be there; a short walk across rare grassland to a cliff edge; one or two waterfalls; villages and smallholdings seen from a car window; and an unusually large amount of weather for a single day. That is a full and satisfying outing and there is nothing second-rate about it.

It does not get you the interior. On a day trip you will not walk under closed cloud-forest canopy for hours, cross a river on a fallen trunk, come over a ridge into a basin with a village in it that no road reaches, or be out of earshot of an engine for any length of time. You are on or beside a road all day, and usually in company.

It also does not get you the other half of the range. Riverston approaches from the west and north; the eastern side, with its passes and remote villages, is a different approach on different roads and cannot be bolted onto the same day. People try, and spend the day driving.

The way to hold the two in your head is that Riverston is the balcony. The range is the building. Standing on a balcony is a good thing to do and you can see a long way from it, but you have not been inside.

The road in, and why the driving is most of the day

From Kandy the usual approach runs north to Matale and then climbs east through Rattota onto the ridge, and the character changes completely once the climb starts: narrow tarmac, tight hairpins, blind bends, broken edges and frequent wet patches where water runs across the surface. From the northern side there is an approach through the Laggala country towards Ilukkumbura and Pallegama, which comes at the same high road from the other end.

Whichever way you come, the driving is slow in a way maps do not convey. The lower stretches carry buses and lorries that cannot be passed for long distances; the upper ones carry cattle, dogs, school children and oncoming vans on bends where somebody has to reverse. A vehicle with reasonable ground clearance is worth having, and a large van is a liability on the tightest corners.

Three practical consequences. Leave early, because a late start means arriving in the afternoon when the cloud has already settled in. Accept that the driving is a large share of the day rather than an inconvenience wrapped around it, and treat the stops along the way as the day rather than as delays. And do not be on this road after dark. There is no lighting, cloud can cut visibility to a few metres, the drops are unguarded in places, and there is nothing at the top worth the risk of finding out.

Food is worth settling in advance. There is little at the top beyond a stall selling tea, and it may not be open, so eat in Matale on the way through or carry a picnic and take the rubbish out again.

Sera Ella and Bambarakiri Ella

Two waterfalls sit close enough to the Riverston road to be built into the day, and they are very different from each other.

Sera Ella

On the northern side of the range, near Ilukkumbura, a path leaves the road and drops steeply through trees, by steps and worn earth and a small bridge, into a wooded gorge where the water comes down in stages. It is a proper little walk rather than a viewpoint: the descent is steep and slippery after rain, and the climb back up is the part people underestimate. Anyone with unreliable knees should look at the first section and make an honest decision there rather than halfway down.

There is a pool at the bottom and people do bathe in it. The flow changes enormously with rain, and the sensible rule is that if the water is loud, coloured or pushing, you do not get in. Ask at the top; local people know exactly what the river is doing.

Bambarakiri Ella

On the Matale side near Rattota, and much easier. A short walk from the road brings you to a broad, low fall spreading over a rock face into a shallow pool in a hollow of trees. It is wide rather than tall, and it is a picnic waterfall rather than a wilderness one: at weekends there will be local families in the water and food being cooked nearby, which is a pleasant scene if you are not expecting solitude.

The same warning applies at both, and at every waterfall in this country. The rock around the flow is coated with algae and is far more slippery than it looks, and the water in a mountain river can rise within minutes from rain falling on a ridge you cannot see. Accidents here are almost always a slip on wet rock or a river coming up, not a swimmer running out of strength.

The range proper: what walking the Knuckles actually involves

Now the other version of the place. Trekking here is not a longer Pitawala walk. It is a different activity with different requirements, worth knowing before you decide you want it.

The routes are a patchwork: forest paths, old cardamom tracks, village footpaths worn by people going to their fields, stretches of open grassland with no path at all, and sections that simply follow a stream bed. There is no waymarking. No blazes on trees, no signposts at junctions, no map board at a trailhead, no numbered routes. There are also no huts and no shelters. Nights are spent camping or in village homestays, and both need arranging in advance.

The ground is hard work. Steep climbing on wet rock and root, grassland hiding holes and loose stone under the turf, and unbridged stream crossings that are ankle-deep one day and impassable an hour after a storm on the ridge above. A day's walking here takes far longer in hours than the horizontal distance implies, and the classic traverses are counted in days.

There is no phone signal across large parts of the range, no shops once you leave the road, and stream water needs treating. There is no evacuation route in any meaningful sense: if somebody turns an ankle badly, the answer is a long carry by whoever is present.

What you get in exchange is the thing that has become genuinely scarce in Sri Lanka. Not solitude at dawn before the crowds arrive, but real emptiness: whole days of walking through forest and grassland and river valley without meeting another visitor, in country where the only other people are the ones who live there.

Permits and entry points, in general terms

Entry to the conservation forest is controlled and goes through Forest Department offices around the edge of the range rather than through one central gate. Day entry to the accessible parts is ticketed, with a separate rate for foreign visitors. Anything overnight, and any route crossing the interior, needs permission arranged beforehand rather than negotiated on the morning.

There are several separate approaches, and which one you use determines which part of the range you see. The Riverston and Pitawala side serves the west and north and is the one reached by the road described above. There is an approach on the western flank near Elkaduwa with a forest office and marked walking trails leading up into the forest. On the south-eastern side, a pass above Hunnasgiriya opens the way towards the eastern villages. And from the north, the Laggala country around Ilukkumbura and Pallegama gives access to the northern flank.

The precise arrangements change — which office issues what, which trails are open in a given season — and no page including this one should be relied on for them. This is one of the strongest arguments for engaging somebody locally: an established guide handles permissions as routine, where a visitor attempting it cold on the day often loses the morning to it.

The standing rules are consistent wherever you enter. Rubbish comes out with you, and at some entrances plastic is checked and refused at the boundary. No fires except where permitted, and the closing time on a day trail is enforced, because a search after dark in this terrain is a serious undertaking.

Why a guide is not optional here

In some protected areas a guide is a rule to comply with and an enhancement to the day. In the Knuckles interior the reason is blunter: navigation, and safety.

There is no trail network to follow. Paths fork constantly, and a village track to somebody's cardamom plot looks exactly like the route over the ridge until it stops in the middle of a garden. Long stretches of grassland carry no path at all, only a line of flattened grass that ends. And the moment cloud comes down, every landmark you were navigating by is gone, all at once, in country where the ridges genuinely do look alike. People get lost in this range more often than the visitor numbers would suggest, and finding somebody in it is slow.

Beyond navigation, a guide is doing several other jobs. He knows which river crossing is safe at today's water level and which is worth an extra hour of walking to reach. He knows when weather on a ridge means turning round now rather than in twenty minutes. And he has the standing to take a party of strangers through inhabited land, which is not something you have.

For the day-trip side the calculus is different and should be described honestly. Nobody needs a guide to walk the made path across Pitawala Pathana. A local guide will still improve it, and hiring one at the roadside is a modest and worthwhile thing to do, but it is a matter of getting more out of the walk rather than a matter of getting back safely. Do not let anyone blur the two, in either direction.

The eastern side, and the villages under the rock

The far side of the range is the part that stays in people's memory, and it is reached from the south-east rather than from Matale. A pass above Hunnasgiriya carries a road over the shoulder of the massif, with a viewpoint looking out over ridge after ridge, and several of the classic walking routes begin there.

Beyond it a long rough track leads to Meemure, a village at the eastern end of the range with a reputation as one of the most isolated in the country. It went without electricity long after the rest of the island had it, the signal is patchy at best, and the road in is poor enough that the journey takes hours from Kandy. Standing over it is a near-vertical rock spire that dominates the valley and carries a place in local tradition connected to the Ramayana. Climbing it is a serious scramble with real exposure, not a walk, and not something to attempt without somebody who knows the line.

Meemure is worth being clear about. It is a working village of farmers, not an attraction, and it repays an overnight stay in a homestay far more than it repays a car arriving, circling and leaving. Given the state of the road, a day trip there from Kandy is mostly a day in a vehicle. If the eastern side appeals, give it a night.

The villages inside the conservation area

The Knuckles is not wilderness in the sense of being empty of people. There are villages inside the protected area and around its fringes, some of them old and some of them very hard to reach, and walking here means walking through inhabited country: terraced paddy in the valley bottoms, pepper and cardamom gardens, kithul palms tapped for treacle, cattle on the grassland, and footpaths that exist because somebody uses them to get to work.

That imposes a standard of behaviour a national park does not. You are crossing people's land and passing their doorways. Ask before photographing anybody and take a refusal without argument, which applies particularly to women and children. Do not cut across a planted field. Do not give children sweets, pens or coins, a habit that is corrosive anywhere and worse where visitors are still a novelty. Cover up before walking into a village, even if you have been in shorts all morning.

There is a real tension here. Visitors are one of the few sources of cash income in these valleys, and also the fastest way to change a village that has been as it is for a very long time. The arrangement that does least harm is the obvious one: come with somebody local, stay a night rather than passing through, buy what is offered, pay properly, and treat the place as somewhere people live rather than as scenery with people in it.

Leeches, and the small amount of kit that solves them

Terrestrial leeches are present through the wet forest and along the streams whenever there has been rain, which is most of the time on the wetter flank. They are worth taking seriously and they are not a reason to stay away.

The useful thing to know is that the problem is not uniform across this range, which sets it apart from the rainforest in the south-west. On the open dry grassland at Pitawala Pathana in a dry spell you may not see a single one. Drop off the same ridge into wet forest after rain and they are everywhere. So the day tripper and the trekker have genuinely different exposure, and a day visitor who has read a horror story about leeches elsewhere in the country should not cancel on that basis.

For anyone going into the forest, the kit is trivial and effective. Leech socks worn over the trousers, tied above the calf, are most of the answer, and they can usually be bought locally. Tuck trousers into socks and shirt into trousers, because gaps are what they exploit. Soap or repellent rubbed onto boots and sock tops discourages them at the point where they climb aboard. Check your ankles deliberately at every stop rather than occasionally. To remove one, slide a fingernail under the thin end and flick it off, or leave it to finish and drop away on its own. Do not burn them and do not tear them off.

The bite itself is harmless. What causes trouble on a multi-day walk is the aftermath: the wound bleeds far longer than seems reasonable, and the itchy spot gets scratched for three days in warm wet clothing until it turns septic. Carry antiseptic and plasters, cover each bite, then leave it alone.

Cloud, wind, and a range that makes its own weather

This is the factor that decides more Knuckles visits than the route does.

A high massif standing on its own in front of moist wind is a machine for producing cloud. Air pushed up the flanks cools and condenses, and the result is that the range can be wrapped in white while Matale below it sits in sunshine. Visitors regularly check a forecast for Kandy, see a clear day, drive for hours and arrive in fog. A forecast for the towns around the range tells you almost nothing about the ridge.

The earlier hours are the better bet, since cloud thickens as the day warms. That improves the odds; it settles nothing. Cloud here is not a curtain that rises at a set hour. It comes and goes in pulses, and a gap that is solid white can open for four minutes and close again, so the right behaviour at a viewpoint is to wait a little rather than photograph the fog and drive off.

Rain, when it comes, is heavy rather than persistent, and its effects outlast it: rock and clay stay slippery, grass stays soaked to the knee, and streams in the interior can rise fast enough to cut a route while you are on the far side of it.

Then the wind, and the temperature that comes with it. The air itself is not especially cold. Wet clothing plus a sustained wind at height is another matter, and people who packed for a tropical island get properly chilled at the gap in ordinary conditions. A windproof layer, not a thick one, is the most useful thing to have in the car. On clear days the opposite applies: the sun burns faster up here than at the coast and there is no shade on the grassland. One day can contain both.

When to come, and when to keep away

Because the range takes rain from two directions, there is no single good season for the whole of it. The western and southern slopes take the worst of the mid-year monsoon; the northern and eastern flanks take the turn-of-year one. Each side has a quieter window while the other is soaked, and locals on each flank give a confident answer that contradicts the one you got on the other side. Neither is wrong. Treat it as odds rather than a promise, and ask about the side you intend to visit.

Two things are more reliable than the season. The first is the hour: early beats late, every month of the year. The second is the day of the week. Riverston is a popular domestic destination, and on weekends, public holidays and Poya days the laybys fill with vans, the steps to the viewpoint queue, and the grassland path carries a steady stream of people. A weekday visit to the same place can be nearly solitary. If you have any flexibility at all in an itinerary, spend it here rather than anywhere else.

For trekking, avoid the heavy monsoon on the flank you plan to cross. It is not the discomfort that matters, it is the rivers, and a swollen stream in the interior is the thing most likely to strand a party.

Fitness, children and an honest word on access

The parts of this place ask for very different things.

• The Pitawala Pathana walk is short, level and on a made path. Most reasonably mobile people manage it comfortably, including older visitors and children, though the unfenced edge needs real supervision and the wind can push a small child about.
• The climb to the Riverston viewpoint is brief but steep, on steps and worn rock that are slick when wet. It is a matter of a few minutes of effort rather than endurance.
• Sera Ella is the one that catches people out. Going down is easy and going back up is not, and it is a poor choice for anybody with knee trouble or a heart condition.
• The interior treks are sustained rather than technical, but they involve hours of rough uneven ground, unbridged crossings, wet rock and no way of getting somebody out quickly. They are not suitable for anyone who cannot walk unaided over broken ground for several hours in the rain.

On wheelchair access the honest answer is that there is very little. The grassland path is unsurfaced, the road pull-ins are rough and cambered, and there are no adapted facilities on the route. What is genuinely available, and is more than it sounds, is the drive: the road over the range is one of the finest in the country and can be had entirely from a vehicle, stopping where the view opens. For a visitor with limited mobility that is a real day out rather than a consolation, provided the driver understands the plan.

Getting there

Only briefly, since the route pages do this job. The range sits around 175 kilometres from Colombo and the drive runs to about four and a half hours, which is why almost nobody comes at it directly from the coast. Kandy is the practical base: it is close enough to make a full day at Riverston work, and it is where drivers who know the mountain road are found.

• Colombo to Kandy — 115 km, about 210 minutes.
• Bandaranaike International Airport to Kandy — 120 km, about 195 minutes.
• Dambulla to Kandy — 72 km, about 105 minutes.
• Sigiriya to Kandy — 90 km, about 135 minutes.
• Nuwara Eliya to Kandy — 75 km, about 150 minutes.
• Ella to Kandy — 140 km, about 240 minutes.

From Kandy the Riverston side is a morning's driving each way with the day in the middle, which is why it is a day hire rather than a transfer: the car waits, and nobody can say in advance how long you will spend at a viewpoint waiting for cloud to move. The eastern side is a different road on a different day, and should be planned as an overnight. Where the shape of the trip is settled already, there is a car for the day or a one-way transfer, and everywhere else on the island has its own destination guide.

A sensible plan

1. Decide first which version you are doing. A day at Riverston and a trek into the range are different holidays with different kit, different bookings and different lead times. Trying to have both in one day produces neither.
2. For the day trip, base in Kandy and leave early. The morning is the better half of the day for cloud, and an early departure also keeps you off the mountain road in the dark on the way home.
3. Pick a weekday if you possibly can. It is the single biggest difference between a peaceful Riverston and a crowded one.
4. Treat the road as part of the outing. Stop at the laybys and do not measure the day by time spent at the viewpoint.
5. Walk out to the Pitawala Pathana edge before you do anything else, while the visibility is at its best, and go slowly across the grassland rather than straight to the drop.
6. Add one waterfall, not two. Bambarakiri Ella if you want something easy, Sera Ella if you want a proper walk down and are honest with yourself about the climb back.
7. Carry a windproof layer, water, sun protection and something to eat. There is little at the top and the weather changes faster than you will.
8. If the gap is white, wait a bit. Twenty minutes often buys a gap. Two hours rarely does, and there is plenty else on the road.
9. For the range proper, arrange a guide and permissions before you travel, allow at least two days, and build in a spare one, because weather here moves plans more often than legs do.
10. If the eastern villages appeal, give them a night. A day trip to that side is mostly a day in a car.

The Knuckles rewards a visitor who has understood what they are choosing. Go up for the day and you get a superb mountain road, a wild little grassland, a cliff edge, and a fair chance of standing inside a cloud for an hour, which is its own kind of memory. Go into it properly and you get something the island has almost run out of: days of walking through forest, savannah, river and village with nobody else on the path. The mistake is not choosing the smaller version. It is thinking you have had the larger one.