Taxi from Colombo Airport (CMB) to Kandy

Kandy is the first place a great many visitors go after landing at Katunayake, and for most of them the drive up is the first proper look they get at Sri Lanka that is not through an aeroplane window. A taxi from Colombo airport to Kandy covers a hundred and twenty kilometres in about three and a quarter hours: not a long journey by the standards of this island, but not the ninety minutes the distance suggests either. The gap between those two numbers is the whole subject of this page.

The short version is that the road spends its first half on the flat and its second half climbing, and the climbing part is where the time goes. Nothing has gone wrong if you are still an hour out with only thirty kilometres to run. That is simply how the Kadugannawa pass works, and it has worked that way since the road was cut through it in the eighteen-twenties.

The journey at a glance

The bare facts, before anything else:

• Distance: around 120 km by road from Bandaranaike International Airport to the centre of Kandy.
• Time: about 195 minutes — three and a quarter hours — door to door in ordinary conditions.
• Shape of the drive: expressway south from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo, then the A1 east and inland, then a long steady climb into the hills.
• The slow part: the last thirty to forty kilometres, from about Mawanella upward. Expect roughly half the total time to be spent on the final third of the distance.
• Direction of travel: you never go into Colombo. The route skirts the top of the city and turns inland, which is the main reason this transfer is not longer than it is.

Three and a quarter hours is a realistic figure rather than an optimistic one, and it is the figure the fares above are built around. It can be a little quicker before dawn, when the road out of Katunayake is genuinely empty, and it can stretch on a Friday evening or in heavy rain over the pass. What it does not do is shrink because you left later. There is no time of day at which Kadugannawa is fast.

What the drive is actually like

It is worth knowing the sequence, because the road changes character three or four times and each change tells you roughly how far along you are. Drivers on this route rarely narrate it, so here it is.

Out of Katunayake and around Colombo

The expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo is the only stretch of road on this journey that behaves predictably. It runs south from the airport past Ja-Ela and Wattala, three lanes, no junctions to speak of, and it does the first part of the work quickly and dully. This is the section people sleep through, and there is no reason not to.

The old road through Ja-Ela and Wattala is still there and still used when the expressway is closed, but it runs through the middle of every town on the way and takes very much longer. If you find yourself on it, that is why, and it is not a shortcut anybody has chosen for fun.

Somewhere around the northern fringe of Colombo the expressway ends and the car turns inland rather than continuing into the city. Traffic thickens immediately. There is a stretch of a few kilometres through Peliyagoda and Kadawatha that is nobody's favourite driving, with buses stopping without much warning and three-wheelers filling every gap. It clears.

The A1 through Nittambuwa, Warakapola and Kegalle

Once the road settles into the A1 — the Colombo to Kandy road, the oldest metalled route in the interior — the character changes again. This is two-lane road through more or less continuous roadside settlement: Nittambuwa, Warakapola, Kegalle. Not open country, but not city either. Shops open straight onto the tarmac, schoolchildren walk along the verges in the morning, and the overtaking is enthusiastic.

The land is flat to gently rolling here and mostly green: coconut, rubber, paddy in the low ground, and the sort of dense roadside greenery that makes first-time visitors reach for a camera at the wrong moment. This is where you notice the country is not the beach you may have pictured. It is also where most of the distance gets covered, because although the road is busy, it is not steep.

Warakapola is the usual place for a stop if anybody wants one, and Kegalle a little further on is the largest town on the route before Kandy — a district capital in a valley, with a bus stand, a market and a permanent queue of lorries grinding through the middle of it. The traffic in Kegalle is the first sign that the second half of the journey will not behave like the first.

Mawanella, and the start of the climb

After Kegalle the road begins to lift. Mawanella sits at the foot of the hills, and it is the point at which the drive stops being a drive across a plain and starts being a drive up something. The valley narrows, the roadside plantations change, and the spice gardens appear — this stretch is the traditional spice-growing belt and the gardens along it are the ones every driver on the route knows.

From here the gradient is continuous. It is not dramatic in the way the Nuwara Eliya road is dramatic, with hairpins stacked above one another; it is a long, steady, grinding ascent with bends. The engine note changes and stays changed.

Kadugannawa

This is the section everybody remembers and the reason the arithmetic works out the way it does. The road climbs through the Kadugannawa pass in a series of long curves cut into the hillside, and it is the only sensible way through the ridge that separates the coastal plain from the Kandyan highlands. The railway does the same thing alongside, through tunnels and along ledges, and you may see a train working its way up on the other side of the valley.

What governs the speed here is lorries. This is the main freight route into the central province, and a loaded lorry on a gradient goes as fast as a loaded lorry on a gradient goes. Behind it there will be a bus, and behind that everything else. Overtaking happens in short bursts where the road opens out, and a good driver takes the ones that are there and does not invent the ones that are not. There is no version of this pass in which you make up lost time.

The compensations are real. The view opens westward over the plain you have just crossed, sometimes for a very long way. Bathalegala — the flat-topped hill that colonial surveyors named Bible Rock, because that is what it looks like from below — stands out to the south-west and is visible for a good part of the ascent. At the top of the pass there is a slender white obelisk beside the road, put up to the memory of the British engineer who laid out this route through the gap in the first place. It is easy to miss at speed and easy to see when you are crawling, which you probably will be.

Peradeniya and the last few kilometres

Over the top of the pass the road runs down slightly into the Kandy basin through Pilimatalawa and Kadugannawa town, and then reaches Peradeniya, where the Mahaweli river makes its great loop and the botanical gardens and the university sit inside it. This is effectively Kandy's western suburb and the traffic behaves like a suburb's — steady, slow, and thickening as you approach the junction where the roads from the hills and the roads from the coast combine.

The final stretch from Peradeniya into Kandy town is short in kilometres and unreliable in minutes. In the middle of the day it moves. At the end of the school day, or on a Friday evening, or during a festival, it can take a surprising slice of the journey on its own. This is worth mentioning to anybody who watches the map on their phone and starts wondering why the last centimetre is taking so long.

Why the second half takes as long as the first

It is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most useful thing to understand about this route and it catches people out constantly.

The first sixty or seventy kilometres are flat, partly expressway, and go by at a decent average. The last fifty are hill road: two lanes, continuous gradient, heavy freight, towns strung along the carriageway, and no bypasses of any consequence. The average speed roughly halves. That is why a hundred and twenty kilometres takes three and a quarter hours rather than under two, and why a journey that is going well at the halfway mark can still have half its time left to run.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out:

• Do not schedule tightly on the far end. If you have a booking in Kandy for a particular time — a temple puja, a dinner, a train onward — build in an hour that you do not need.
• Leaving later does not help. There is no quiet window on the pass in the way there is on the road out of Colombo. Lorries run through it all day and much of the night.
• Rain matters more here than on the flat. The hill section in heavy rain is slower and the visibility on the bends drops. The central hills make their own weather and can be wet when the coast is not.
• Stops cost more than their length. A twenty-minute stop at Pinnawala is not twenty minutes if it puts you back into the pass behind a different set of lorries. Plan a stop as an hour.

Leaving the airport and meeting your driver

Arrivals at Katunayake opens onto a covered set-down area. Drivers wait past the exit rather than inside the hall, and meeting outside the terminal building is normal here rather than a sign that something has gone wrong. First-time visitors sometimes walk out, see no one holding a board in the baggage hall, and assume the booking has failed. It has not. Keep walking through to the covered area and look for your name there.

Give the flight number when you book

This is the single most useful piece of information you can hand over, and it matters more than the time you think you will land. A driver who has the flight number can see that you are two hours late off the stand in Doha and will wait through it rather than through a booked hour that expired while you were in the air. A driver who has only a clock time is guessing.

It also protects you in the other direction. Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn and immigration queues at that hour vary a great deal. Nobody minds waiting; everybody minds not knowing.

The first half hour

There is a natural temptation to do everything at the airport — currency, a local SIM, a coffee — and it is not a bad instinct, because you will not pass anything as convenient for a while. But it is worth being honest that most of it can wait. Kandy has banks, cash machines and phone shops, and the drive is more comfortable when it starts promptly and you sleep for the first hour.

If somebody in the party is prone to motion sickness, sort that out before you get in rather than at Mawanella. The flat part will be fine. The pass will be a series of long bends taken slowly, which is exactly the combination that finds people out.

What to agree before you set off

Two minutes at the kerb saves an hour of confusion later. Confirm the destination by property name, not by area. Say whether you want to stop on the way and where. Say if you need to reach Kandy by a particular time. And if you are heading somewhere on the ridge above the town rather than into the centre, say that too, because the last ten minutes of the journey are quite different depending on the answer.

Arriving in Kandy, and the town's traffic

Kandy sits in a bowl. The lake is at the bottom of it, the town is wrapped around the lake's northern and western sides, and hills rise on every side beyond that. It is a compact place — genuinely walkable in the centre — and the road layout reflects a town that grew inside a valley rather than one that was planned across open ground.

The one-way system and the lake

The streets on the lake side are narrow and one-way in places, so a driver will often suggest meeting on a main road rather than at a doorway. This is not laziness. Several hotels and guesthouses on the lake circuit sit on stretches that can only be approached from one direction, and getting to a particular door can mean a full circuit of the water.

Traffic in the centre is heaviest around the bus stand and the market on the western side and along the road past the temple. Late afternoon on a weekday is the worst of it. If your arrival lands in that window, the last kilometre may take longer than the ten before it, and there is nothing to be done about it except know in advance.

Kandy town and the hotels above it

There is a real distinction here that catches people out when they book accommodation. Kandy town is the strip of streets around the lake and the temple: dense, noisy in a cheerful way, everything within a fifteen-minute walk. The other Kandy is on the ridges above — Rajapihilla and the roads climbing south of the lake, and the slopes to the west and north — where a great many of the larger and quieter hotels are, with the view over the lake and the temple roofs that appears on every postcard of the town.

Both are Kandy and neither is wrong, but they are different holidays. Up on the ridge you get the view, the cooler air and the quiet, and you get into a car every time you want dinner, because the walk down is pleasant and the walk back up is not. In town you walk everywhere and hear the traffic. Decide which you want before you book, and tell your driver which one you have, because the access roads to the ridge hotels are steep, narrow and easy to overshoot in the dark.

Choosing a vehicle for this route

The right vehicle for the Kandy run is not quite the right vehicle for a south-coast run, because of the climb and because of what most people do next.

Two people, two cases

A standard saloon or small estate is entirely adequate. The road is surfaced the whole way and there is nothing about the pass that demands a big car — it demands patience, which is free. Air conditioning is the thing to care about, not size, and it matters most in the low-country section where it is hot and the windows stay shut against the roadside dust.

Families and groups

For four or more with luggage, a high-roof van is the usual answer and it is worth the difference for a journey of this length. The extra headroom and the ability to move about a bit matter more on three and a quarter hours of bends than they would on an hour of expressway. Vans also swallow the case configuration that families actually travel with, rather than the tidy pair of suitcases that boot capacity is quoted for.

Ground clearance, if you are going on into the hills

If Kandy is a stop rather than a destination and you are continuing to Nuwara Eliya or Ella afterwards, a car with reasonable ground clearance is worth having. The hill roads beyond Kandy are surfaced but not smooth, and the difference between a low saloon and something with a bit of height under it is noticeable on the second day rather than the first. If your onward plans are already decided, mention them when you book the transfer — it is easier to put the right vehicle on the first journey than to change it in Kandy.

The driver, not just the car

For a route with a mountain pass in it, a driver who knows the road is worth more than an upgrade in vehicle class. The pass rewards judgement about which overtaking opportunities are real, and it punishes impatience. If the driving feels unhurried on the climb, that is the right kind of driving, not a slow one.

The taxi, the train and the bus

A private taxi is not the only way up. All three options exist and all three are used, and the honest comparison is more useful than a sales pitch.

The train

The Colombo to Kandy railway is one of the genuinely lovely journeys in the country, and the section through the hills is worth doing at some point in a trip. But as an airport transfer it has a structural problem: the trains run from Colombo Fort, and getting from Katunayake to Colombo Fort is itself a journey with luggage, on the same congested approach to the city that your car would otherwise skirt entirely.

So the realistic comparison is not car against train. It is car against transfer-plus-wait-plus-train-plus-transfer, at the end of a long-haul flight, with cases. Reserved seats on the better services are limited and are often taken well in advance, which is a poor thing to discover in the booking hall at Fort at seven in the morning.

The sensible arrangement, and one a great many people use, is to take the car up and the train somewhere else — from Kandy onward into the hills, for instance, with a car meeting the train at the other end. That gets you the railway journey worth having without asking it to do a job it is badly shaped for.

The bus

Buses run this corridor constantly and they are the cheapest way to move between the two places by a wide margin. They are also the wrong tool for an arrivals hall. You would need to reach a Colombo terminus first, luggage space is not a design consideration, and the pass in a full bus is a long piece of your day.

None of that is a criticism of the buses, which do an enormous amount of work extremely cheaply and are an entirely reasonable way to travel once you are in the country, settled, and carrying a daypack rather than a suitcase. It is a statement about what the first three hours after a fourteen-hour flight should be like.

When the taxi is obviously right

• You are arriving before dawn, which is when most long-haul flights land and when public transport is thinnest.
• You have more than a small bag each.
• You want to stop at Pinnawala or a spice garden on the way, which no scheduled service will do for you.
• You are three or more people, at which point the arithmetic starts to move in the car's favour anyway.
• You are going to one of the hotels on the ridge rather than into the centre of town.

Worthwhile stops on the way up

The Colombo–Kandy road has a long-established stopping culture, some of it genuinely good and some of it a commission arrangement in a nice building. Here is what can be said with confidence.

Pinnawala

The elephant orphanage at Pinnawala, off the main road near Kegalle, is a state-run herd of orphaned and injured animals, and it is the stop most people make on this route. It works properly at one time of day and rather poorly at others: go for the river bathing, which happens late morning and mid-afternoon, when the herd is walked down the lane to the Maha Oya and spends an hour or so in the water. Outside those hours there is much less to see.

Allow two hours for the visit itself, plus the detour off the A1 and back. This is a real decision rather than a small one — it is most of a morning added to a transfer that is already three and a quarter hours. It fits well if you have landed early and your Kandy room will not be ready before the afternoon anyway, which is a common enough situation on this route that it is worth checking your check-in time before you decide.

The spice gardens around Mawanella

The stretch of road from Kegalle up through Mawanella is the traditional spice belt, and the gardens along it are a genuine feature of the area rather than an invention for visitors. A walk round one is a decent half hour: you are shown cinnamon being stripped, cardamom, pepper vines, cocoa pods, a vanilla orchid, and the various plants explained in terms of what they are used for.

Be clear-eyed about the model. The tour is free or nearly so, and it ends in a shop, and the pressure to buy oils and balms at the end varies from gentle to considerable. That is the arrangement and it is not dishonest as long as you know it going in. Go for the walk, enjoy the botany, buy something small if you want to, and feel no obligation beyond that. If you would rather not stop at all, say so at the airport rather than at the gate — it is a much easier conversation early.

Kegalle, and the road itself

Kegalle is not a sight. It is a working district town in a valley, and the reason to mention it is that it is the natural place for a break on a long transfer: it is roughly at the point where a driver will want a tea and where children have run out of patience with the car, and it comes just before the climb rather than during it, which is the right order.

The pass itself is the other thing worth stopping for, and it costs nothing. There are one or two places on the ascent where a car can pull off safely and the view runs back west across the plain with Bathalegala standing up out of it. Ten minutes there is a better memory than most paid attractions on this road, and it is the moment when people realise they have actually arrived in the hill country rather than merely driven towards it.

Ambuluwawa, if you have the day

Further on and slightly off the direct line, near Gampola south of Kandy, there is a narrow spiral tower on a hilltop that is climbed for a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view over the central hills. It is a genuine curiosity and a genuinely alarming climb: the staircase narrows to little more than a handrail near the top, and there is two-way traffic on it. Go early, before a queue makes that worse, and do not take anyone who is uneasy with heights. It is better as a day out from Kandy than as a stop on a transfer, but it belongs on the list.

Kandy's setting and layout

Understanding the shape of the town makes the last twenty minutes of the drive, and the first evening, much easier.

The lake

The lake in the middle of Kandy is not natural. It was made at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the last king of Kandy, who dammed a stretch of paddy in the valley floor to create it, and the low decorative parapet along its southern edge dates from the same period. It is walkable all the way round in about an hour, and that walk is the single best orientation exercise a new arrival can do — it puts the temple, the town, the ridge and the forest into their proper relation to each other in a way no map does.

The temple, the old palace buildings and the museums sit along the northern shore. The commercial centre — the market, the bus stand, the shops — is west of the water. The southern and eastern shores are quieter, with houses and guesthouses climbing away from the road.

Bogambara and the western side

West of the lake is the busier half of Kandy: the Bogambara area with its stadium and the grounds of the old prison, the bus stand, the clock tower, the market building and the streets of shops behind it. This is where the town does its actual business and where you will feel that Kandy is a provincial capital of some size and not a heritage set. The railway station is in this quarter too, which matters if you are going on by train.

The ridge and the forest

Behind the temple, on the slope to the north of the lake, is Udawattakele — a forest reserve that was once the royal park, now a genuine patch of woodland immediately behind the middle of a town. It is a strange and pleasant thing to walk in, with monkeys, birds and a good deal of shade, ten minutes from the traffic.

Above the town on the western hill stands a large white Buddha figure, floodlit at night and visible from most of the valley, which is the easiest landmark for working out where you are. South of the lake the ground rises to the Hantana range, and it is on those slopes and the roads that climb them that most of the view hotels sit. The temperature drops perceptibly as you go up, which is one of the quiet pleasures of staying above the town and the reason Kandy has always been where lowland Sri Lankans go to be cooler.

The Temple of the Tooth, and what a Poya day means

The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, on the north shore of the lake, is the most important Buddhist shrine in the country and the reason a great many visitors come to Kandy at all. It is ticketed, it takes an hour or two, and it is a working place of worship rather than a monument, which shapes everything about visiting it.

Puja times

The shrine is opened for offerings three times a day — early morning, mid morning and evening, at roughly half past five, half past nine and half past six — and those are the times to go. Drumming announces the ceremony, the inner chamber is opened, and there is a queue to pass in front of it. Outside puja hours the building is calm and the room is closed, which is a different and much less interesting experience.

The evening puja is the busiest and the one most visitors choose. If your flight lands in the morning and the drive goes normally, you can be in Kandy in comfortable time for it on your first day — though whether you want to be, after a night in the air, is a fair question.

Dress and conduct

Shoulders and knees covered, for men as well as women. Shoes come off at the entrance and there is a place to leave them. Hats off inside. Photographs of yourself with your back to a Buddha image are taken very badly here, and that is worth knowing before somebody suggests it rather than afterwards.

Full moon days

Poya — the full moon day of each month — is a public holiday in Sri Lanka and a significant religious day, and it changes Kandy noticeably. The temple is much busier, with a long procession of local worshippers carrying lotus flowers and trays of offerings, which is genuinely worth seeing but means queues and a slower visit. White clothing is common. Many shops and eating places adjust what they serve or close for part of the day, and the roads around the lake carry much more traffic than usual.

None of this is a reason to avoid Kandy on a Poya day; for a lot of people it is the better day to be there. It is a reason to know in advance, to allow more time, and not to plan a tight schedule around a temple visit that afternoon.

Perahera season

Once a year, over ten nights in the July–August period, Kandy holds the Esala Perahera: a nightly procession of caparisoned elephants, dancers, drummers and whip-crackers that grows in size each night and ends with the largest of them all. It is one of the great processions in Asia and the town fills completely.

If you are travelling then, understand what it does to the practicalities. Accommodation in and above the town is booked far ahead. Roads around the lake close in the evenings, so a transfer arriving at that hour will be set down further out than usual and you will walk the last part. Journey times into the centre go up. It is entirely worth it, but it wants planning rather than improvising.

Travelling with children

This is a manageable journey with children and a slightly demanding one, and the demanding part is not the length. It is the last hour.

Motion sickness on the pass

The Kadugannawa section is continuous slow bends on a gradient, which is the combination most likely to affect a child who is fine on ordinary roads. Deal with it before Mawanella rather than after. Front-facing seating helps, air rather than a sealed cabin helps, and a stop at Kegalle before the climb — food, a walk about, fresh air — helps more than anything done in the middle of the ascent, where there is nowhere good to stop.

Breaking the journey

Pinnawala is genuinely useful here beyond its own merits: it comes at the right point in the drive, it involves elephants, and it converts a three-hour sit into two shorter ones with something in between that children actually want to do. If you have children and are landing in the morning, it is close to the obvious answer.

Practical points

• Child seats are not standard equipment. If you need one, ask at the time of booking rather than at the kerb, and say the ages so the right size can be found.
• Carry more water than you think and something plain to eat. The roadside shops sell both, but not always at the moment you want them.
• There are proper stopping places at Warakapola and Kegalle with clean facilities; between Mawanella and Peradeniya there is much less. Time accordingly.
• Once you are up, Kandy suits children well. The lake walk, the forest, the elephants down the road and a compact centre are an easy few days.

Luggage

Nothing about this route is hard on luggage, but a few things are worth saying because they come up.

Boot capacity, not seat count, is what limits a car. Four adults with four large cases do not fit in a vehicle that seats four, and the honest answer at the airport is a van. When booking, say how many cases and roughly what size, not just how many people. Nobody minds being told; everybody minds a rearrangement in the set-down area at five in the morning.

Long items — golf clubs, tripods, a folded pushchair, anything that will not bend — are the usual cause of a last-minute vehicle swap. Mention them. Surfboards are rare on this particular route, for obvious reasons, but if you are coming up to Kandy before heading to the coast later, say so and they can be planned for once rather than twice.

If you are leaving a bag behind for part of the trip and collecting it later, most Kandy hotels will hold luggage, and if you are keeping the same car and driver across several days there is no need to move anything at all. That is one of the quiet advantages of a multi-day arrangement over a series of separate transfers.

Early arrivals and late ones

Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, which is the one time of day the road out of Katunayake is genuinely clear. That has real consequences for this transfer, both good and awkward.

The pre-dawn run

Leaving the airport at, say, four in the morning gives you the best version of this drive. The expressway is empty, the towns on the A1 are shut, and even Kadugannawa is quieter than it will be later, though never empty — the freight runs at night. You will watch the sky come up somewhere around Kegalle and reach the hills in the early light, which is the best hour to see them.

The awkwardness is the other end. Arriving in Kandy at half past seven with a room that is not ready until two in the afternoon is a long morning if you have not planned for it. The options are all reasonable: ask the hotel in advance about an early check-in, plan Pinnawala or a spice garden into the drive so you arrive later and having done something, or arrive, leave the bags, and walk the lake and the temple for the morning puja before the room is ready. The one thing not to do is arrive with no plan and sit in a lobby.

Late arrivals

An evening landing means driving the pass in the dark, which is slower and less pleasant but perfectly routine — this is a main road with constant traffic, not an empty mountain track. What changes is the last part. Finding a particular guesthouse on the lake circuit or a hotel up an unlit access road on the ridge is markedly harder at eleven at night than at three in the afternoon.

If you are landing late, it is worth having the property's own phone number to hand rather than only an address, and worth telling the hotel roughly when you expect to arrive so somebody is at the desk. If the flight is very late, some people prefer to stay the first night near the airport — Negombo is a short run on ordinary roads from the terminal — and drive up to Kandy in daylight the next morning. That is a perfectly sensible way to arrange it, and for families it is often the better one.

The return leg

Coming back down is the same road and it is not faster. People assume the descent will save time and it does not: the same lorries are on the same gradient in the other direction, and the traffic through Peradeniya and out of Kandy in the morning is at its heaviest when everybody is going to work and school.

For a flight out, work backwards properly. Take the three and a quarter hours for the drive, add three hours for an international check-in, and add a real margin for the fact that the first hour of the journey is Kandy's morning traffic and the second is the pass. If the arithmetic gives you a departure time you do not like, that is the arithmetic telling you something true, and it is better to hear it now than at Peradeniya with a boarding gate closing.

Two habits make the return easier. The first is booking the airport run before you need it rather than on the morning — a driver who already has your flight time can advise on the departure hour, which is the useful part. The second is keeping the same driver for the outbound and the return if your itinerary allows, because somebody who has already found your hotel once will find it again in the dark without a phone call.

If you are ending your trip in Kandy rather than passing through, it is worth knowing that going on to Colombo is a slower journey than the airport run despite being roughly the same distance, because it ends in the middle of a city rather than skirting it. Give that one more time than you think it needs.

Where people go on from Kandy

Kandy is the hinge of most Sri Lankan itineraries. It sits between the dry plains of the north and the tea country of the south, and almost every route that visits both passes through it. That is the real argument for coming here first rather than starting on the coast.

South, into the hills

Nuwara Eliya is seventy-five kilometres and about two and a half hours, and that ratio tells you everything about the road: it climbs to nineteen hundred metres through tea estates in continuous bends and cannot be hurried. It is one of the best drives in the country in daylight and a waste in the dark.

Ella is a hundred and forty kilometres and four hours, further round the same high country. A great many people do part of this by train and part by car — the hill railway between Nanu Oya and Ella is the famous stretch — with a driver meeting them at the station. That works well and is worth arranging in advance rather than at the platform.

North, to the Cultural Triangle

Dambulla is seventy-two kilometres and about an hour and three quarters, and Sigiriya is ninety kilometres and a little over two hours. Both are downhill and northward onto the plain, and both are much quicker per kilometre than anything in the hills because the roads flatten out and straighten as you leave the central province.

The common shape of a two-week trip is airport to Kandy, Kandy to the Cultural Triangle for the rock and the ancient cities, back through Kandy or around it into the tea country, then down to the south coast. Kandy appears twice in that plan and it is not an accident of geography — it is the geography.

Closer to hand

If you are staying put for a few days, the Knuckles range north-east of the town is a full day and a good one: cloud forest, grassland and villages, with its own weather and views from the Riverston side that do not require a serious hike. The road up is narrow, high and often in cloud, so it is a drive to enjoy rather than hurry, and not one to do after dark. A car for the day is the right way to see it, and the same is true of the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, the tea estates on the Hantana slopes and Ambuluwawa near Gampola — all of them close, none of them easily strung together on public transport.

How to book, and what to tell us

The fares above are per vehicle rather than per person and are fixed at the time of booking, so the number you see is the number you pay regardless of how long Kadugannawa decides to take on the day. That is the point of booking ahead rather than negotiating at the airport with a fourteen-hour flight behind you.

What actually helps when you book:

• Your flight number. More useful than a landing time, for the reasons above.
• The property name in Kandy, not just "Kandy". Town and ridge are different last miles.
• Passengers and cases, honestly counted, so the vehicle is right the first time.
• Any stop you want — Pinnawala, a spice garden — decided before departure rather than at the junction.
• What you are doing next, if you already know, because it affects which vehicle is sensible.

A one-way airport taxi to Kandy is booked at book a taxi. If you want the car and driver for a full day in and around Kandy — the Knuckles, Peradeniya, a temple circuit — that is a day hire rather than a series of transfers, and it works out better for a day with several stops in it. For an itinerary that runs Kandy, the Cultural Triangle and the hills over a week or more, a multi-day booking keeps the same car and driver throughout, which means your luggage stays where it is and nobody has to find your hotel for the first time twice.

However you arrange it, the thing to carry away from this page is the arithmetic. A hundred and twenty kilometres, three and a quarter hours, and half of that time spent on the last third of the road. Plan around that and the journey up to Kandy is one of the better first days a visitor to Sri Lanka can have.