Taxi from Colombo Airport (CMB) to Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is a hundred and sixty-five kilometres from the arrivals hall at Katunayake and about five hours away, and those two numbers do not sit comfortably together in most people's heads. A hundred and sixty-five kilometres is a couple of hours anywhere with a motorway. Here it is most of a working day, and a taxi from Colombo airport to Nuwara Eliya is best understood as a climb rather than a drive.

That is the whole subject of this page. The distance is modest and the time is not, because the road ends at nineteen hundred metres above the sea and every one of those metres has to be gained on two-lane hill road in a continuous sequence of bends. Nothing has gone wrong if you are three hours in and the map says you still have sixty kilometres to run. That is simply what the last part of this journey does, and no driver, vehicle or departure time changes it.

The journey at a glance

The bare facts first, because everything else follows from them:

• Distance: around 165 km by road from Bandaranaike International Airport to Nuwara Eliya.
• Time: about 300 minutes — five hours — door to door in ordinary conditions.
• Shape of the drive: expressway south from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo, then inland across the low country, then a long sustained climb into the central hills that occupies the last two hours or more.
• Altitude: sea level to about 1,900 m. That is the single number that explains the timing.
• The slow part: everything above the point where the tea begins. The last third of the distance takes something close to half the time.
• Daylight: the hill roads are slow, steep and worth doing in daylight. This is the one route from the airport where the hour you set off is a genuine planning decision rather than a preference.

Five hours is a realistic figure rather than a pessimistic one. It assumes an ordinary run with a short stop or two, no landslide diversions and no unusual weather. It can stretch in heavy rain on the upper sections, and it does not meaningfully shrink at any hour of the day or night, because the constraint is gradient and geometry rather than traffic.

Why five hours for a hundred and sixty-five kilometres

It is worth spelling out, because understanding it removes most of the frustration. The first half of this journey is flat and reasonably quick: expressway, then ordinary main road across the coconut and rubber country, through towns but on level ground. If you check the clock at the halfway point in distance you will feel you are doing well.

The second half is hill road. Two lanes, no bypasses, continuous gradient, hairpin bends stacked one above another on the steeper sections, and lorries and buses climbing them at the speed a loaded vehicle climbs a steep gradient. Villages are strung along the carriageway because the carriageway is the only flat ground for miles. There is nowhere to overtake for long stretches and nothing to be gained by trying. The average speed roughly halves, and halves again on the worst sections.

So the practical consequences:

• Do not build a tight schedule at the far end. If you want to be somewhere in Nuwara Eliya at a particular hour, give the drive an hour it does not need.
• Leaving later does not help. There is no quiet window on a mountain road. The freight and the estate traffic run all day.
• Rain matters far more than on the flat. The central hills make their own weather. It can be dry at the coast and wet from the tea belt upward, and in prolonged heavy rain earth slips occasionally close a hill road and send everyone round a diversion that adds real time.
• Stops cost more than their length. Twenty minutes at a waterfall is not twenty minutes if it puts you behind a different set of lorries on the climb. Plan any stop as three-quarters of an hour.
• Arriving in daylight is worth engineering for. More on that below, but if there is one thing to take from this page beyond the arithmetic, it is that.

What the altitude does to the driving

Everything about this journey is decided by altitude, and it is worth understanding what that means from inside the car rather than as a statistic.

The gradient never really stops

On the Kandy road up to the hill capital there is a pass to be climbed and then it is over. Here the climb starts somewhere in the middle of the day and does not finish until you arrive. There are short level stretches along valley floors and brief descents where the road crosses from one catchment into the next, but the general trend is up for two hours. The engine note changes and stays changed, second and third gear become the working gears, and a driver doing this well sounds unhurried throughout.

The bends are the time, not the slope

A steady gradient on a straight road is quick. What is slow is a gradient on a road that turns through a hundred and eighty degrees every few hundred metres, because that is the only way to gain height on a slope this steep. On the worst sections you can look up and see the road you will be on shortly, directly above you, and look down and see the one you were on before. A fine thing to watch, and a slow way to cover ground.

The air changes, and so does the light

You will notice the temperature drop through the open window somewhere in the tea belt, and it keeps dropping. The vegetation changes with it: coconut and banana give way to rubber, rubber to tea, and above the tea to eucalyptus, cypress and the pale grassland of the high plateau. By the last half hour the air smells different — cold, wet, a little of woodsmoke and cut grass rather than the warm dust of the low country.

Cloud

The cloud sits on the road for much of the afternoon in the upper sections, and this is normal rather than a sign of bad weather. It can be bright sunshine at a bend and thick white nothing two bends later, then clear again. Drivers handle it by slowing down and using the horn on blind corners, which is the local convention and not aggression. A passenger who has never driven in hill cloud may find the last hour more dramatic than it is.

The two ways up: Kandy and Ramboda, or Hatton and Ginigathhena

This is the most consequential thing on the page after the arithmetic, because the two approaches produce genuinely different days out of the same transfer, and most people are never told there is a choice.

The Kandy approach

The first option goes inland from Colombo towards Kandy, skirts or passes through the hill capital, and then turns south into the hills through Gampola, Pussellawa and Ramboda, climbing through the tea to Nuwara Eliya from the north. Coming from Kandy is the gentler of the two approaches. The gradients are long rather than savage, the road is generally in better order, and the estate country it runs through — the Kotmale valley on one side, the tea slopes rising on the other — is some of the most photographed landscape in the country for good reason.

It is also the approach that lets you stitch Kandy into the day if you want to, and the one on which Ramboda Falls sits. Because it shares its first two hours with the Kandy transfer, it is the more familiar road to most drivers on the route.

The Hatton approach

The second option leaves Colombo south-eastward, follows the Kelani valley inland through Kitulgala, climbs the Ginigathhena pass, and comes up through Watawala, Hatton and Talawakele to reach Nuwara Eliya from the west. Coming up this way is steeper. Ginigathhena is the sharper climb of the two and the one more often affected by weather, and the road through the upper Kelani valley is narrow in places.

What it gives you in exchange is a different and in some ways wilder country: the rafting reach of the Kelani at Kitulgala, the tea plateau around Hatton with the reservoirs below it, and the two great roadside waterfalls of the hill country, Devon and St Clair's, both on this road near Talawakele. It is also the approach that makes sense if Adam's Peak is anywhere in your plans, because the starting point for that climb is reached from Hatton.

How to choose

In practice the decision is made on three grounds:

• What you want to see. Ramboda Falls and the Kotmale country are on the Kandy road. Devon and St Clair's are on the Hatton road. You do not get both on one transfer, and being told otherwise is a good sign that whoever is telling you has not driven it.
• Where you are going next. If Kandy is in your itinerary either side of Nuwara Eliya, the Kandy approach lets you use the road once rather than twice.
• Comfort. If anybody in the car is prone to motion sickness or uneasy about mountain roads, the Kandy approach is the kinder one, and it is worth saying so when you book rather than discovering the difference at the seventh hairpin.

Both are ordinary main roads used by buses, lorries and school runs every day of the year. Neither is an adventure; they are simply slow, and one is steeper than the other.

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. People landing for the first time sometimes walk out into the baggage hall, see nobody holding a board, and start composing a complaint in their heads. Keep walking through to the covered area and look for your name there.

Give the flight number when you book

This matters more than the time you think you will land, and it matters more on this route than on most, because a five-hour drive has a way of eating any slack in a day. A driver who has the flight number can see that you are two hours late off the stand 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.

Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, which is the one time of day the road into Colombo is genuinely clear. That is an advantage on this route and it is worth using, for reasons set out further down.

What to sort out before you set off

Two minutes at the kerb saves a great deal later:

• Which way you are going. Kandy and Ramboda, or Hatton and Ginigathhena. Decide it now, not at the junction three hours later.
• Whether you want stops, and where. A waterfall, a tea factory, lunch. Each one has a real cost in a five-hour day.
• The property name, not the town. Nuwara Eliya accommodation is spread between the town itself and the estates above and around it, and those are quite different last miles.
• Warm clothes. Whether anything you will want on arrival is buried in a case in the boot. If it is, move it now.
• Motion sickness. Anyone who needs a tablet should take it before the car moves, not at the first hairpin.

The low country, briefly

The expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo is the only stretch of this journey that behaves predictably, and it does a good deal of the work quickly and dully. Sleep through it. 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.

After that the first half of the drive is flat, green and unremarkable in the best sense, much the same country whichever approach you take: coconut, rubber, paddy in the low ground, roadside towns where the shops open straight onto the tarmac and the overtaking is enthusiastic. On the Kandy road that means Nittambuwa, Warakapola and Kegalle; on the Hatton road, Avissawella and the Kelani valley.

This is where the distance gets covered, and it is the right part of the journey in which to stop, because once the climbing starts the opportunities thin out considerably. The moment the road begins to lift is the moment your average speed changes for the rest of the day, and it is usually obvious when it happens: the valley narrows, the engine note drops, and the horizon in front of you stops being sky and starts being hillside.

The tea country, and what estate landscape actually looks like

The last two hours run through tea, and it is worth describing properly, because photographs of it are so familiar that people arrive with a picture in their heads that is both accurate and misleading.

The bushes

Tea is grown as a continuous low mattress of pruned bushes, kept at about waist height so that the flush at the top can be picked standing. From a distance the effect is of a dense green corduroy laid over the shape of the hill, following every fold and gully, with paths worn through it in pale lines. Up close it is far scruffier and more interesting than it looks from the road above: gnarled woody stems, a canopy of new leaf, and drainage cuts running down the slope. The bushes are old. A tea plant is productive for a very long time, and much of what you are driving through was planted generations ago.

The shade trees and the shape of an estate

Scattered through the tea are tall thin trees with feathery foliage in rough grids — grevillea, mostly, brought in for shade and firewood. They are a reliable sign that you are looking at a working estate rather than a hillside that happens to have tea on it. So are the factory buildings: long, several storeys, louvred windows down the whole flank to let air through the withering lofts, corrugated roofs, and the estate name painted large enough to read from the far side of the valley.

The people

You will see the pluckers working the slopes in lines, with sacks or nets carried on the back and supported by a band across the forehead, filling them with leaf taken from the top of each bush. It is skilled, hard, weather-exposed work done to a daily weight. The estate housing — long low terraces of small rooms, known as the lines — sits in rows on the slopes, and the communities living in them are largely Malaiyaha Tamil, descended from labourers brought from southern India in the nineteenth century to open and work these hills. That history is a substantial part of the history of the country rather than decoration in the landscape, and it is worth knowing whose work you are driving through.

What else grows up here

Near the top the tea gives way in places to something that surprises first-time visitors: vegetables. The country immediately around Nuwara Eliya is Sri Lanka's temperate market garden, and the slopes are terraced into small plots of leeks, carrots, cabbage, beetroot and potatoes, often at gradients that look impossible to work. Lorries loaded with sacks of them come down these roads all night to reach the lowland markets by morning, which is part of why the road is never entirely empty.

The waterfalls

Water is everywhere here, and the falls are a feature of the drive rather than an attraction bolted on to it. On the Kandy approach the road passes Ramboda, where the falls come down in stages beside and below the carriageway and a short tunnel is cut through the spur. On the Hatton approach, between Ginigathhena and Talawakele, it runs past Devon Falls and St Clair's, the latter dropping in two broad curtains across a tea valley and usually described as the widest in the country. All are visible from the road, all are better after rain, and none needs more than a pull-in unless you want to walk down towards the base.

Nuwara Eliya's climate, said plainly

This deserves its own section because visitors arrive unprepared for it more often than for anything else in Sri Lanka.

Nuwara Eliya is cold. Not cold by the standards of northern Europe, but genuinely cold by any standard a person applies after a week on a tropical island, and cold enough that it drops to single figures at night. Days are mild and often lovely, the sort of temperature you would call a good spring day, but the sun goes down early in the tropics and from about six in the evening the temperature falls quickly and keeps falling. Add the wind and damp the high country usually supplies, and the effect on somebody dressed for Colombo is considerable.

The specific problem is that people fly in for a beach holiday, spend a few days in lowland heat, drive up here and find that everything warm they own is at home. The town's shops do a brisk and entirely deserved trade in fleeces and woollen hats for exactly that reason.

What the year does

• December to February is the coldest period, with clear cold mornings and the sharpest night-time drop. Frost on the grass at the higher plateau in the early morning is not unheard of.
• March and April are the brightest and the most settled, and April is the town's season — more on that below.
• May to September brings the south-west monsoon against these slopes: wind, driving mist, and days when the cloud does not lift at all. The tea likes it. Visitors like it less.
• Cloud can arrive at any time of year. The high country makes its own weather, and a clear morning is not a promise about the afternoon.

The practical consequences

Take a proper warm layer, something windproof over it, and shoes that cope with wet grass. Heating in accommodation ranges from a fireplace and a hot water bottle to nothing at all, and hot water can be temperamental at altitude. And ask for a car with working heating if you are travelling in the evening — it is one of the few places in the country where that is a real question rather than a joke.

The town: a colonial hill station and what remains of it

Nuwara Eliya exists because British planters and administrators in the nineteenth century wanted somewhere cool and built a town to remind them of home in a valley at nineteen hundred metres. The result is one of the odder places in South Asia, and the oddity is a large part of the appeal.

The layout

The town sits in a bowl with the bulk of Pidurutalagala — the highest mountain in the country — rising immediately behind it to the north. The centre is compact and easy to find your way around, with a main road running through it and the hotels mostly on or just off that road. Around the centre are the survivals of the hill station: hedges, clipped lawns, brick chimneys, mock-Tudor gables, a red-brick post office with a clock tower, old club buildings, and gardens of roses, geraniums and hydrangeas that grow here as they grow nowhere else in Sri Lanka. Between and behind all of that is an ordinary busy Sri Lankan provincial town with a market, a bus stand and a great deal of vegetable traffic, and the two versions of the place sit on top of one another without much apology.

The racecourse

In the flat bottom of the valley is a full turf racecourse, laid out in the nineteenth century and still in use. For most of the year it is a large green open space that people walk across. In April it is the centre of the town's social life: the racing season coincides with the Sinhala and Tamil New Year holidays, families from Colombo come up in numbers, the hotels fill completely, and the town takes on a crowded, festive, slightly Edwardian character, with a motor hill climb on the road above it in the same season. Travelling in April means booking early and expecting a busier drive up; for the quiet version of Nuwara Eliya, come at any other time.

Gregory Lake

The lake at the southern edge of the town is not natural. It was made in the eighteen-seventies under a British governor whose name it still carries, by damming the stream that runs through the valley. Today it has a path around much of it, boats for hire, ponies, and on a weekend a considerable crowd of local families. It is the town's front garden rather than a wilderness, and a pleasant walk in the late afternoon — with the caveat that the late afternoon is when the cold arrives.

Victoria Park

In the middle of the town is a formal Victorian park, laid out in the jubilee year that gave it its name, and it is better than that description suggests. It is properly kept, with lawns, mature trees, a stream, and beds of temperate flowers that are genuinely startling to anyone who has been travelling in the lowlands. It is also a well-known spot for birdwatchers: several hill-country species that are hard to find elsewhere turn up in the scrub along the stream, particularly early in the year. It is ticketed and small, and an hour in it is well spent on an arrival afternoon when you do not want to get back in a car.

Around the edges

Within easy reach, and better done as a day than as part of the transfer, are the working tea estate and factory on the slopes east of the town, the walk up Single Tree Hill, the botanical gardens at Hakgala on the Badulla road with the small Hindu temple below them, the dairy pastures at Ambewela and the open grassland of Moon Plains. None is far in kilometres, and all of them are hill-road minutes rather than flat-road minutes.

Arriving, and where accommodation actually sits

The town is compact and easy to find your way around, and the hotels are mostly on or just off the main road through it. That makes the last mile straightforward compared with, say, Kandy. But there is a distinction worth understanding before you book, because it shapes the whole stay.

In the town

Staying in the centre means walking to the park, the market, the lake and somewhere to eat, which makes it the practical choice for a single night and for anyone without a car. It is also noisier, and the town is not beautiful in the evening in the way the estates are.

On the estates above

The other Nuwara Eliya is out on the tea above and around the town: converted planters' bungalows and estate houses, some a good distance up single-track access roads, with lawns, fireplaces and a view over the bushes. Much of the character of the region is out there, and for two or three nights it is often the better choice. The costs are real, though. Everything is a drive, and the access roads are narrow, steep and unlit — which is why a driver wants the property name and ideally a telephone number rather than the word Nuwara Eliya. Arriving at one of these for the first time after dark is markedly harder than arriving in daylight.

Down at Nanu Oya and along the Kandy road

There is a third group strung along the approaches — around Nanu Oya below the town, and down towards Ramboda — which suits people using the train or moving on quickly. These are lower, warmer and further from anything you can walk to. None of it is a problem as long as it is a decision rather than a surprise, and the way to keep it a decision is to say exactly where you are staying when you book the car.

Choosing a vehicle for a long climb

The right car for this route is not quite the right car for a coastal transfer, and the differences are worth a moment.

Engine and gearbox matter more than size

Five hours with two of them spent climbing is real work for a vehicle. A small underpowered car will do it, but slowly and in low gear, and everybody in it will feel that. Be clear about how many people and how much luggage you actually have, so that whatever turns up is not working at its limit all afternoon.

Ground clearance

The main roads are surfaced the whole way. The estate access roads at the far end frequently are not, or are surfaced in the way a steep concrete strip with a gutter down the middle is surfaced. If you are staying out on the tea, a vehicle with a bit of height under it is worth having, and it costs nothing to mention when booking.

Heating, and this is not a joke

Air conditioning is what everybody asks about for Sri Lankan journeys, and for the first three hours of this one it is the right question. For the last hour, and for any evening driving once you are up, heating is the question that matters. Ask for it.

Families and groups

For four or more with luggage a high-roof van is the usual answer, and the extra room matters more on five hours of bends than it would on an hour of expressway. Against that, a van is a larger thing on a hairpin and a larger thing on a single-track estate road, so if your accommodation is somewhere awkward it is worth saying so and letting whoever is arranging the car weigh the two considerations up.

The driver

A driver who knows the road is worth more than an upgrade in vehicle class. Hill driving here has its own conventions — the horn on blind bends, the way a bus is given room, the judgement about which overtake on a gradient is real — and somebody who does it regularly makes the day faster and calmer. If the driving feels unhurried on the climb, that is the right kind of driving.

The train, honestly, and why the station is at Nanu Oya

The hill railway is one of the genuinely great journeys in the world and anybody with the time in their trip should do a section of it. What it is not, on this particular corridor, is a sensible substitute for the transfer from the airport.

Why not as an airport transfer

The trains for the hill country leave from Colombo Fort, and getting from Katunayake to Colombo Fort with luggage is itself a journey, on precisely the congested approach into the city that your car would otherwise skirt entirely. So the honest comparison is not car against train but car against transfer-plus-wait-plus-train-plus-transfer, at the end of a long-haul flight, with cases, on a service whose reserved seats are limited and frequently taken well in advance.

Why the station is called Nanu Oya

Nuwara Eliya has no railway station. The main line to Badulla was built along the contours that a nineteenth-century railway could manage, and Nuwara Eliya sits in a bowl above and away from that alignment. Rather than take the line into the town, the engineers put the station at Nanu Oya, on the slope below and to the west, and everybody has been driving up from it ever since. The road link between station and town is short in kilometres and, like everything else here, longer in minutes than it looks. Anybody arriving by train needs transport waiting at Nanu Oya, and at busy times the three-wheelers and taxis on the station forecourt are outnumbered by the people wanting them.

The sensible arrangement

Take the car up from the airport and the train later, on the stretch where it is genuinely at its best — the section from Nanu Oya eastward through Haputale and Ella. A car meeting you at the far end, with your luggage travelling in it rather than on your knees, is what makes that work, and it means you are choosing the railway for pleasure on a rested day rather than asking it to do a job it is badly shaped for on your worst-slept one.

Horton Plains and World's End: the morning after

This is the most common reason people go to Nuwara Eliya beyond the town itself, and it is genuinely one of the finest things in the country. It also has a rigid timetable, and this is the part visitors most often get wrong.

What it is

Horton Plains is a high plateau of grassland and cloud forest at around 2,100 m, with a landscape unlike anything else on the island: open moor, tussock grass, stunted twisted forest, streams and no settlement. World's End is the point at which the plateau simply stops and the escarpment drops away nearly a kilometre to the country below. The standard visit is a loop walk of about nine kilometres taking in Little World's End, World's End itself and Baker's Falls, and it takes about four to five hours including the drive up and back. It is ticketed, and it is a national park with the rules that implies.

The timing, which is not negotiable

Be at the gate by six in the morning. The cloud comes in mid-morning and World's End becomes a view of nothing at all — not a poor view, but a white wall, with people who have driven up and walked two hours standing at a railing looking at it. Working backwards from a six o'clock gate means leaving in the dark and in the cold, in the part of the day when Nuwara Eliya is at its sharpest. There is no way round it, and it is entirely worth it.

What this means for your transfer day

If Horton Plains is the plan, arriving in Nuwara Eliya at nine in the evening after a five-hour drive on the day you land, and then getting up at half past four the next morning, is a rough way to arrange a holiday. Either land early and drive up in the morning so that you arrive with an afternoon and an evening to settle, or give yourself a full day in between. This is the single strongest argument for treating the arrival day as a travel day and nothing else.

Practicalities

• It is properly cold at that hour at that altitude. Warm layers, and something waterproof, because the plateau catches weather.
• Proper shoes. The loop is not technical but it is uneven, wet in places and long enough to matter.
• Nothing in plastic beyond what is permitted at the entrance; the park is strict about what may be taken in, and bags are checked.
• Arrange the car the night before and agree the departure time out loud. Half past four means half past four.

Travelling with children on a five-hour climb

This is a manageable journey with children and a demanding one, and the demanding part is not the first half.

Break it in the right place

The useful stop is before the climbing starts, not during it. Once you are in the bends there are few good places to pull off and every stop costs more time than it takes. A proper break in the low country — food, a walk about, fresh air — pays for itself over the following two hours. A short second stop at a waterfall on the climb works well: it is brief, it is outside, and there is something to look at.

The last hour is the hard hour

Children who have been fine for three hours can come apart in the fourth, and the fourth has the tightest bends in it. Keep what helps within reach rather than in the boot: water, plain food, a warm layer each, and something to do that does not involve looking down at a screen.

Practical points

• Child seats are not standard equipment. Ask when booking, and give the ages so the right size is found.
• Toilet stops need planning on the upper sections. Take the opportunity when it is offered rather than when it is needed.
• Once you are up, Nuwara Eliya suits children well: the park, the lake, the boats and the ponies, open space, and a town small enough to walk across.
• Horton Plains is a nine-kilometre walk at altitude in the cold before breakfast. Be honest about whether that is a family morning or an argument.

Motion sickness on hill roads

Worth its own heading, because this is the route on which it comes up, and because it affects adults who have never had a problem with it anywhere else.

The combination that causes trouble is a continuous sequence of slow bends with a gradient, taken over two hours or more, in a warm sealed cabin. That is an exact description of the second half of this journey. People who are completely fine on a motorway or on a coastal road can be miserable here.

What actually helps, in rough order of usefulness:

• Take the tablet before you leave the airport. Most over-the-counter remedies need time to work and are close to useless once somebody has started feeling ill. This is the single biggest difference between a good and a bad afternoon.
• Sit in the front, and look far ahead. The horizon steadies what the inner ear is reporting. Looking down at a phone or a book does the opposite.
• Fresh air rather than a sealed cabin. A window open a little is better than air conditioning alone, and it gets easier to justify as the temperature drops.
• Eat something light before the climb rather than nothing. An empty stomach is not the safe option people assume.
• Say something early. A driver who is told at the foot of the climb will take the bends differently and stop when it helps. A driver who is told at the top can only sympathise. Nobody on this route is surprised by the request.
• Consider the gentler approach. If someone in the party is badly affected, the Kandy and Ramboda road is the kinder of the two.

Luggage, and the warm clothing problem

Nothing about this route is hard on luggage, but two things are worth saying.

The first is the ordinary one: 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 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 — tripods, golf clubs, a folded pushchair — are the usual cause of a last-minute vehicle swap, so mention them.

The second is specific to this route, and it is the one people get wrong. Pack the warm clothing where you can reach it. You will get into the car in tropical heat, and five hours later you will get out of it into single figures after dark, with your bags going straight to a room while you stand outside in the cold working out where reception is. A fleece and a pair of socks in the daypack solves an evening. Nobody who has arrived without them forgets the lesson.

One further note: things dry slowly up here. Damp clothes hung up in a Nuwara Eliya room in the evening are frequently still damp in the morning, which is worth knowing before you wash anything on the first night.

Early journeys, late journeys, and arriving in the dark

On most airport routes the departure hour is a matter of preference. On this one it shapes the day.

The pre-dawn start, which is the best version

Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, and that is the one time of day the road out of Katunayake is genuinely clear. Leaving the airport at four or five in the morning gives you the good version of this journey: the flat section done while everything is shut, the sun coming up somewhere in the low country, and the whole of the climb through the tea in daylight, arriving in the early afternoon with time to find your feet, walk into the town and get warm before dark. If your flight lands at that hour, take advantage of it rather than stopping for breakfast for two hours.

Arriving after dark, and why the hills are different

An evening landing means the whole climb in the dark, and it is worth being straightforward about what that involves. These are main roads with traffic on them, not empty tracks, and they are driven at night every day of the year. But the hill country at night is genuinely different from the coast at night. There is little or no street lighting on the estate sections. The bends are blind and the drops beside them are real. Cloud that is atmospheric at three in the afternoon is a wall of reflected headlight at nine in the evening. Lorries come down loaded with vegetables. And at the end of it you have to find a particular property, possibly up an unmarked and unlit access road on an estate.

It is also a waste. The tea country is the reason for this drive, and in the dark you see none of it.

So if your flight lands in the evening, consider one of two things. Either break the journey and go up in the morning — Negombo is a short run on ordinary roads from the terminal and is the usual answer — or, if you must go straight up, have the property's own telephone number to hand, tell them roughly when to expect you so somebody is at the desk, and accept that the journey will feel longer than five hours even if it is not. For families with young children, breaking the journey is almost always the better arrangement, and the morning drive up is a far better introduction to the country than a night one.

The return leg

Coming back down is the same road and it is not faster. Nuwara Eliya to Colombo is the same hundred and sixty-five kilometres and the same five hours, and people consistently assume the descent will save an hour. It does not. The bends are the same bends, the lorries are the same lorries, and a car going down a sustained gradient safely is not going down it quickly.

For a flight out, work backwards properly and without optimism. Take the five hours for the drive. Add three hours for an international check-in. Add a real margin for weather in the hills and for the possibility of a diversion. If the arithmetic produces a departure time you dislike, that is the arithmetic telling you something true, and it is better heard now than on a hairpin above Ramboda with a gate closing.

Two habits make the return easier. Book the airport run before you need it rather than on the morning, because a driver who already has your flight time can advise on the departure hour, and that advice is the useful part. And where the itinerary allows, keep the same driver for the outbound and the return: somebody who has already found your estate bungalow once will find it again in the dark without a telephone call.

One further note for early departures: mornings up here are cold and often thick with valley mist, which lifts as the sun gets on to it. A very early start from Nuwara Eliya frequently begins slowly for that reason and speeds up once you are down out of the cloud. Allow for it.

Where people go on from Nuwara Eliya

Few people treat Nuwara Eliya as a destination on its own. It sits in the middle of the hill country, and almost every itinerary that includes it continues through it.

East to Ella

Ella is fifty-five kilometres and about an hour and three quarters, which by the standards of this region counts as quick. The road runs east along the top of the escarpment past Hakgala and down through Welimada, or via Haputale on the higher line, and it is one of the best short drives in the country. This is also the classic place to swap car for train for a stretch: the railway between Nanu Oya and Ella is the famous section, and a driver taking the luggage round by road to meet you is a common and sensible arrangement. If Lipton's Seat above Haputale is on your list, that is a dawn trip on this side of the hills — the cloud closes it in by about nine, so leaving Haputale before six is the difference between the view and a white wall.

North to Kandy

Kandy is seventy-five kilometres and about two and a half hours, which tells you everything about the road: it is the Ramboda descent in reverse, and the ratio of distance to time is the same hill-country ratio as everything else here. It is a fine drive in daylight and a waste in the dark, and it is the usual way people move between the tea country and the cultural sites of the north.

West to Adam's Peak

Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak, is a pilgrimage mountain climbed through the night so as to reach the summit at sunrise, and the season runs from December to May. The usual arrangement is to start from Dalhousie at around two in the morning, which is reached from the Hatton side. If it is in your plans, it changes the shape of your route: the Hatton approach to Nuwara Eliya passes the turning, and it is worth building the two around each other rather than doubling back. Arrange the pick-up for late morning — nobody comes down quickly.

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 figure you see is the figure you pay whatever the weather does to the climb on the day. On a five-hour hill route that certainty beats negotiating in an arrivals hall with a long-haul flight behind you.

What genuinely helps when you book:

• Your flight number. More useful than a landing time, for the reasons above.
• The property name in Nuwara Eliya, not just the town. Town centre and estate bungalow are different last miles, and one of them is a single-track road in the dark.
• Which approach you would prefer, if you have a view — Kandy and Ramboda, or Hatton and Ginigathhena — and any stop you want on it.
• Passengers and cases, honestly counted, so the vehicle is right the first time on a route where the vehicle has work to do.
• Heating, if you are travelling in the evening or going on to Horton Plains before dawn.
• What you are doing next. Horton Plains, Ella, Adam's Peak and the train all shape which day you should arrive on and which way you should come.

A one-way taxi from Colombo airport to Nuwara Eliya is booked at book a taxi. If you want the car and driver for a full day once you are up there — Horton Plains before dawn, then Hakgala, Ambewela and a tea factory — that is a day hire rather than a series of separate transfers, and it works out better for a day with an early start and several stops in it. For an itinerary that runs the airport, the tea country, Ella and the coast over a week or more, a multi-day booking keeps the same car and driver throughout, which on hill roads is worth more than it sounds: the luggage stays where it is, nobody has to find your bungalow for the first time twice, and the person driving the hairpins already knows who in the car does not enjoy them.

However you arrange it, carry the arithmetic away with you. A hundred and sixty-five kilometres, five hours, and nineteen hundred metres of climb, most of it in the last third of the road. Plan the day around that — arrive in daylight, bring a jacket, and do not book anything for the evening you land — and the drive up into the tea country is one of the best days a visitor to Sri Lanka can have.