Taxi from Colombo Airport (CMB) to Sigiriya

Sigiriya is the first stop for a great many visitors who have no intention of spending a night in Colombo. The flight lands at Katunayake, the city is south of the airport, the Cultural Triangle is north of it, and the sensible thing is simply to turn the other way and go. That is the whole logic of this transfer, and it is why so many Sri Lankan itineraries begin with a rock rather than with a capital.

The drive covers about a hundred and fifty-two kilometres and takes in the region of two hundred and fifteen minutes — three and a half hours or so, door to door. It is a long way after a long flight, and it is also one of the easier long drives on the island, because almost none of it is uphill. This page is about what the road actually does, what waits at the other end, and the handful of decisions that make the difference between a good first day and a bewildered one.

The journey at a glance

The bare facts before anything else:

• Distance: around 152 km by road from Bandaranaike International Airport to Sigiriya.
• Time: about 215 minutes — three and a half hours — in ordinary conditions.
• Shape of the drive: expressway from Katunayake to the northern edge of Colombo, then inland and north through coconut country by way of Kurunegala, then a long straight run across the dry-zone plain to Dambulla, then a short hop east to the rock.
• The slow part is the beginning, not the end. The first hour does the least distance. Once you are past Kurunegala the road opens out and the last stretch is the quickest driving of the day.
• Direction of travel: you never enter Colombo. The route clips the northern fringe of the city and turns away from it, which is exactly why this transfer is not an hour longer than it is.

Three and a half hours is a realistic figure rather than an optimistic one. It can be a shade quicker on a pre-dawn run, when the towns on the way north are still shut and the road belongs to lorries and bakery vans. It stretches on a Friday afternoon, in heavy rain, or if you stop properly for lunch. What it does not do is collapse to the two hours the distance might suggest, because a good half of the route is ordinary two-lane road through places where people live.

North through the coconut triangle, and into the dry zone

The road changes character three or four times on the way up, and each change is a rough marker of how far along you are. Drivers on this route rarely narrate it, so here is the sequence.

Out of Katunayake and around the top of Colombo

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 early work. Three lanes, few junctions, nothing to look at. Most people sleep through it 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 your car ends up on it, that is why, and nobody has chosen it for pleasure.

The car leaves the expressway on the northern fringe of the city and turns inland rather than continuing south into it. This is the least agreeable stretch of the day: a few kilometres of dense suburban traffic through Peliyagoda and Kadawatha where buses stop without warning and three-wheelers fill every gap. It thins out. By the time the road settles into its northward run you have done the worst of the driving and the least of the distance, which is the honest shape of this transfer.

Coconut country

North and east of the airport the land is one enormous coconut plantation, and the region between Gampaha, Kurunegala and Puttalam is known locally as the coconut triangle for the good reason that it grows most of the island's crop. For a long stretch the view from the car is rank after rank of palms in disciplined rows, running away from the road at a slight angle, with the ground between them swept bare and brown.

It is a working landscape rather than a scenic one. Every part of the tree is used and the evidence lines the road: husks stacked for coir, shells burnt for charcoal, mats of copra drying on concrete, and stands selling king coconut, the orange ones, drunk from the shell.

Kurunegala and the rocks

Kurunegala is the largest town on the route and the point at which the landscape starts to announce that something has changed. The town sits at the foot of a group of enormous bare rock outcrops that stand straight out of the plain, the biggest of which is known as Ethagala, the elephant rock, because that is very much what it looks like from below. There is a large white Buddha figure on top of it, visible for some way as you approach.

Those outcrops matter beyond being a landmark. They are the same geology as Sigiriya: ancient granite domes, the worn-down cores of a far older mountain range, left standing when everything softer around them eroded away. From Kurunegala northward you will see them repeatedly — Dambulla is one, Pidurangala is one, Sigiriya is the most theatrical of them all. By the time you reach the rock you will have been looking at its relatives for much of the drive, which is part of why it does not look absurd when it appears. It looks like the biggest example of something the country has been showing you all afternoon.

The change into the dry zone

Somewhere north of Kurunegala the country changes, and it is one of the more satisfying transitions on the island because you can watch it happen through the window. The coconut thins out. The green goes from wet green to a harder, greyer, more olive green. Palmyra and tamarind appear. The soil turns from red laterite to something paler and dustier. The hills flatten into a plain with isolated rock domes standing on it, and the sky gets bigger.

This is the dry zone, and the line between it and the wet zone of the south-west is a genuine climatic boundary rather than a figure of speech. The south-west monsoon that soaks Colombo between May and September largely misses this side of the mountains. The rain here comes later in the year, with the north-east monsoon, and it comes in a shorter and heavier season. The practical consequence for a visitor is worth knowing: when the west and south coasts are grey and wet in July and August, the Cultural Triangle is usually dry and hot. A great many itineraries are built around exactly that fact without their owners quite realising it.

The tanks

The other thing that arrives with the dry zone is water, which sounds like a contradiction until you understand what you are looking at. This plain has been farmed for well over two thousand years, and it has been farmed by storing the short, violent rains of one season to grow rice through the next. The results are the tanks: reservoirs made by throwing a long earth bund across a shallow valley, some of them small enough to serve a single village and some of them the size of a lake.

You will start to notice them from the car. A raised earth bank running level across the landscape with trees along the top of it, a sheet of water behind, and below the bund a staircase of paddy fields taking the water down. Egrets in the shallows, buffalo standing in the water in the heat of the day, and lotus and water lilies over whole bays of the bigger ones. The system is old, it was built and rebuilt by the kings whose ruined capitals you have come to look at, and much of it is still in use for its original purpose. Once you have seen the pattern once you cannot stop seeing it, and it makes the last hour of the drive considerably more interesting than a plain would otherwise be.

Dambulla, and the turn to the rock

Dambulla is where the roads meet. It is the junction town of the whole Cultural Triangle: the road from Colombo arrives from the south-west, the road up from Kandy arrives from the south, and the roads to Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Trincomalee and Jaffna leave from here. The town is strung along that junction and has the character of a place built to serve traffic, which is what it is.

A little before Dambulla the road passes the Inamaluwa junction, and this is where cars bound for Sigiriya turn east. From the junction it is a short run through scrub and paddy, past Kimbissa, to the rock. Sigiriya to Dambulla is seventeen kilometres and about half an hour, which gives you the scale of this final corner of the journey: the two places are close enough that where you sleep is a matter of taste rather than logistics.

Why the far end drives faster than the near one

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the route, and it is the opposite of what people expect from Sri Lanka.

On most long journeys here the second half is the slow half, because the second half is usually hills. This one is not. The dry zone is flat, straight and considerably faster than anything in the highlands. The run up from Colombo is long but easy, and the section through the Cultural Triangle between Dambulla, Sigiriya and Polonnaruwa is some of the most comfortable driving on the island — wide, level, lightly trafficked, with long sight lines and few surprises.

So the time goes early. The suburban crawl on the northern edge of Colombo, the strung-out towns of the coconut belt, Kurunegala's traffic: that is where your three and a half hours are actually spent. If you are two hours in and feel you have not covered much ground, you have not, and it is about to improve.

Two practical consequences follow. A mid-afternoon departure from the airport is a worse idea than the distance suggests, because the slow half of the route coincides with the busy part of the day. And stopping is cheap on this road in a way it is not in the hills, because you are not fighting back into a queue of lorries on a gradient afterwards.

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 of baggage reclaim, see nobody holding a board, and conclude 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 most useful thing 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 the delay rather than through a booked hour that expired while you were still in the air. A driver who has only a clock time is guessing.

It cuts the other way too. Flights from Europe and the Gulf land in a cluster before dawn, and the immigration queue at that hour varies a good deal. Nobody minds waiting; everybody minds not knowing.

Name the property, not the area

On this route in particular, say where you are actually going. Sigiriya is not a town with a high street where every hotel is a two-minute walk from every other one, and the difference between two addresses that both say "Sigiriya" can be a long stretch of unsealed track. There is more on this below, but the moment to deal with it is at the time of booking rather than at midnight at a junction.

Sigiriya and Dambulla: where you stay decides your day

These two places are seventeen kilometres and about half an hour apart, and between them they hold most of the accommodation in the Cultural Triangle. They are not interchangeable, and the choice quietly determines how the next few days work.

What staying at Sigiriya gets you

Proximity to the rock, which is worth more than it sounds. The single most important thing about visiting Sigiriya is being there early, and being close to the gate rather than a drive away changes the whole shape of that morning. It also puts you next to Pidurangala, in the middle of the quiet scrub country, and within easy reach of the tanks and the parks to the east.

What you give up is convenience of every other kind. There is very little in the way of shops, and you will eat where you are staying most nights, because the alternatives are a drive away in the dark on unlit roads.

What staying at Dambulla gets you

A road junction, which is exactly what it sounds like and also genuinely useful. From Dambulla you are on the main north–south route with everything radiating from it, which suits a trip that is going to move around a lot: the cave temple is on your doorstep, Kandy is a straightforward run south, and Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa are on opposite arms of the same crossroads. There are shops, cash machines, pharmacies and a hospital, which matters more than scenery does on the day you need one.

Arriving: Sigiriya is an area, not a town

This is the point at which more transfers go wrong than anywhere else on the route, and it is worth being blunt about it. The hotels are scattered across a wide area of scrub rather than gathered in a town, and several are a long way down unsealed side tracks, so the name of the property matters more here than anywhere else on the island.

The village side

There is a real village at Sigiriya, on the eastern and southern side of the rock, and it is a small place: a few lanes, a school, a temple, a scattering of guesthouses and homestays, some of them very good, most of them family-run. If you are staying here you can walk to the site gate, which is a genuine advantage on the morning of the climb, and you are in a working village rather than a resort, which some people like a great deal and others find quieter than they bargained for at eight in the evening.

The Inamaluwa and Kimbissa road

The road in from the main highway runs east through Kimbissa, and a good number of hotels sit along it or just off it. These are the addresses that sound close to Sigiriya and are in fact a drive from the gate rather than a walk — which is fine, but it is a different morning. Several of them are down long side tracks, unsealed, unlit and unsigned after dusk apart from a small board at the turning.

Kandalama and the tank hotels

South-west of Sigiriya, on the road from Dambulla, the country around Kandalama tank holds a cluster of larger hotels, several of them with the tank on their doorstep and the rock visible across the water. It is a beautiful setting and a genuinely remote one; you are committing to eating in and driving out for everything.

Habarana

North-east, at the next junction, Habarana is the base for the national parks and has a long-standing cluster of safari-oriented hotels. If elephants are the main reason you have come, staying at that end can make sense, at the cost of being that much further from the rock in the morning.

What this means in practice

• Give the exact property name when you book, spelt out. Several places in this area have similar names, and more than one has a name that is also the name of the district it sits in.
• Have the property's own phone number with you, not just the booking reference. The last kilometre is often a phone call.
• Say if you are arriving after dark. The tracks are navigable and unremarkable in daylight and genuinely hard to find at night.
• Ask the hotel how they describe the turning. Out here, directions are given by landmark rather than address, and the landmark is often a junction, a tank bund or a particular shop.

Choosing a vehicle

The road itself asks very little of a car on this route. It is surfaced the whole way, flat for the second half, and there is no pass to climb. What shapes the choice is the length of the drive, the heat at the far end, and the last few hundred metres to the door.

Two people with two cases

A standard saloon is entirely adequate. Air conditioning is the thing to care about rather than size, and it matters here more than on most routes because the dry zone in the afternoon is hot in a way the coast is not — a dry, flat, insistent heat with no sea breeze in it.

Families and groups

For four or more with luggage, a high-roof van is the usual answer and worth the difference over three and a half hours. The headroom and the ability to shift about matter more on a long flat run than people expect; it is the monotony rather than the difficulty that wears passengers down on this road.

Ground clearance, for the last kilometre rather than the first hundred

Nothing on the highway needs a high vehicle. The hotel tracks sometimes do. If you know your accommodation is down an unsealed lane — and many of them are — mention it when booking, and a driver will either bring something suitable or tell you honestly that the last part is walkable and the bags will be carried. This is a much better conversation to have in advance than at the turning.

What your taxi will not do

It will not take you into a national park. Minneriya, Kaudulla and the rest are entered in registered safari jeeps arranged locally, and your car waits at the gate. Plan the safari as a separate arrangement made through your hotel or your driver a day ahead, and treat the taxi as the thing that gets you there.

Keeping the car for the days you are there

More than on most routes, this destination rewards keeping the same car and driver rather than booking transfers piecemeal. Almost everything you have come to see is spread across the roads around you, none of it comfortably reached on public transport with a schedule to keep, and most of it wanting an early start. A day hire for the Polonnaruwa or Anuradhapura day, or a multi-day booking that runs from the airport through the Triangle and onward, is the arrangement that actually fits how people use this area.

Climbing Sigiriya

The rock is a fifth-century citadel built on top of a granite dome standing alone out of the plain, and it is the single most-visited ticketed site in the country. Allow three to four hours for a proper visit including the climb, the gardens and the walk back.

What you are actually looking at

The history is a family quarrel. In the fifth century a king took the throne of Anuradhapura from his father by force and, expecting his brother to return with an army, moved his capital to the top of a rock nobody could approach unseen. He reigned there for under two decades before the brother did come back. The capital then returned to Anuradhapura and the site became a monastery for centuries, which is much of the reason anything survives.

What makes it remarkable is the planning around the rock as much as the rock. The approach from the west runs along a formal axis through symmetrical water gardens — pools, channels, islands and fountains fed by gravity from the tank beyond, some of which still run in the wet season. Beyond them the ground rises into the boulder gardens, where the architecture was fitted around and on top of enormous fallen rocks, and then into terraces cut into the base of the dome. Most visitors hurry through all of it towards the stairs, which is a pity; it is better appreciated on the way out.

The climb itself

The route up goes in stages, and knowing them helps.

• The gardens and the boulder terraces. Level to gently rising, shaded in places, easy walking. Longer than people expect.
• The lower staircases. Stone steps up the terraces to the foot of the rock face, steep in sections but conventional.
• The spiral stair to the frescoes. An iron staircase bolted to the rock face, climbing to a sheltered pocket where the surviving paintings of court women are. It is enclosed, it is narrow, and it takes traffic in both directions, which is where the queue forms.
• The mirror wall and the gallery. A long, narrow ledge along the western face with a plastered parapet on the outside of it, polished originally to a shine — hence the name. Visitors from the eighth century onward scratched verses into it, many of them about the paintings, and the wall is consequently one of the older bodies of graffiti anywhere in the world. It is protected now and you are asked not to touch it.
• The lion's paws. The gallery leads out onto a broad terrace where the final staircase begins between two colossal carved paws. The rest of the lion — a head and shoulders through which the stairway once passed — is gone, and the scale of what is left tells you how large it must have been.
• The last stairways. Open metal steps up the exposed northern face to the summit. This is the section people mean when they talk about the climb: it is out in the air, it is fully in the sun, and there is nothing above you.
• The summit. A sloping plateau of brick foundations, terraces and a cistern cut into the living rock, with the plain running away in every direction and the tanks glittering in it.

Along the way you will pass wire-mesh shelters and signs asking for quiet. They are there because of hornets, which nest on the rock face; the shelters are a sensible precaution rather than a suggestion, and the request for quiet on those sections is worth honouring.

The early start, and what it means for your driver

Start the climb before eight. By eleven the rock face is in full sun and the steps are crowded in both directions, and the two problems compound each other: the queue on the spiral stair and the gallery is what turns a warm climb into an uncomfortable one, because you are standing still on hot metal rather than moving.

The site opens early precisely because everybody knows this. The first hour after opening is the best hour of the day on the rock by a wide margin — cooler, emptier, better light for the view, and no waiting at the pinch points. It is also the hour in which the resident troop of monkeys is most in evidence around the ticket area, which is charming and a reason to keep food out of sight.

The consequence for your transport is straightforward and worth arranging the night before rather than at breakfast. If you are staying any distance from the gate and want to be climbing at opening, the car leaves your hotel in the half-dark. Your driver's day starts before yours does, and the courteous thing is to agree the time the previous evening, so that it is a plan rather than a request made at six in the morning. Most people visit the rock at first light and want a driver waiting afterwards rather than a fresh booking, which is another argument for a day hire over a one-way transfer on the days you are here.

Practical points

• Water, more than you think, and a hat. There is no shade above the terraces and the last stairways are metal in direct sun.
• Shoes with grip. The steps are worn smooth in places and there is a good deal of stepping down on the return.
• Photography is not permitted in the fresco pocket and you will be told so; photographing yourself with your back to a Buddha image anywhere in this country is taken very badly.
• Coming down takes longer than people allow for, partly because of two-way traffic on the narrow sections and partly because knees object.
• The ticket covers the whole site, so somebody who does not want to climb can spend a very pleasant hour in the water gardens and the boulder gardens and still have seen something worth seeing.

Pidurangala: the view of the rock rather than from it

Directly north of Sigiriya stands a second rock, lower and rougher, with a working temple at its base and a reclining brick Buddha part of the way up. It is climbed for one reason above all: from the top you are looking straight at Sigiriya, which is the one view of the rock that the rock itself cannot give you. The best photograph of Sigiriya is taken from here, and everybody who has seen the famous image of the citadel standing out of the jungle has seen it from Pidurangala.

Allow two to three hours for a morning. It is ticketed at the temple, and it is a scramble rather than a staircase: a stepped path for the first two-thirds through forest, then a genuine clamber over and between large boulders for the final section, using hands as well as feet. That last part is not for everybody, and there is no shame in stopping at the reclining Buddha, which is worth the walk on its own.

The classic arrangement is to climb Pidurangala for sunrise and do Sigiriya afterwards. It works: you get the light on the rock face from across the gap, you come down as the main site opens, and you are up the stairs before the heat. It also means walking up in the dark with a torch, so tell your driver the evening before — the whole plan lives or dies on departure time.

Dambulla cave temple

The cave temple is the other unmissable thing in this corner of the island and a complete contrast to the rock. It sits under an overhanging cliff above the town, reached by a long flight of steps from the car park, and inside are a series of caves that have been in continuous religious use for a very long time — sheltering a king in exile in the first century before Christ, according to the tradition, and made into a temple in gratitude afterwards.

Inside are chambers packed with Buddha images in stone, brick and painted plaster, of every size and in every posture, with the natural rock ceiling above them painted from wall to wall. The paintings follow the curve and fall of the rock, so the ceiling is a continuous surface of pattern and narrative running over your head in a way no built interior could manage.

Practical notes. The climb is a real flight of steps in the open, so go early or late rather than at midday. Shoes come off at the terrace, which means crossing hot stone barefoot; socks solve that entirely. Shoulders and knees covered. The monkeys on the stairway are practised thieves. Pair it with the drive in or out, since it sits directly on the road.

The Cultural Triangle, and how people actually string it together

Sigiriya is the corner of the Triangle most visitors sleep in, but it is one site among several, and the region only makes sense when you see how the pieces relate. The three points are the ancient capitals — Anuradhapura in the north, Polonnaruwa in the east, and Kandy in the south — with Sigiriya and Dambulla in the middle, and the parks around the tanks scattered between them.

Polonnaruwa

The island's medieval capital, and the easier of the two ancient cities to visit. It is a compact, walkable ruin field beside an enormous tank, and it takes three to four hours. The great advantage over Anuradhapura is concentration: the royal palace, the audience hall, the quadrangle with its circular relic house and its dagobas, the standing brick shrines and finally the Gal Vihara at the far end, where four colossal Buddhas — seated, seated in meditation, standing and reclining — are carved from a single face of granite, are all strung along a single north–south line.

Hire a bicycle at the gate. The site is too spread out to walk comfortably and too compact to drive, and the ride between the monuments under the trees is one of the more agreeable hours in the Triangle. There is a museum at the entrance which is genuinely worth the twenty minutes before you go in rather than after. Go early or go late; the middle of the day on open ground here is punishing.

Anuradhapura

The older and much larger capital, and a different sort of visit. Where Polonnaruwa is a ruin field, Anuradhapura is a living sacred city spread over a wide area, with active shrines drawing pilgrims in white among the archaeology. The sacred bo tree, grown from a cutting of the tree the Buddha sat under, has been tended on the same spot for more than two thousand years, and around it stand brick dagobas on a scale best appreciated from the foot of one.

Two practical differences matter. First, it is spread out enough that you want the car with you inside the site rather than parked at a gate; bicycles work for the energetic and are a long day. Second, it is a place of active worship, so dress conservatively, and be ready to go barefoot on sand and stone that has been in the sun all day. Socks, again, are the answer, and unlike at Dambulla they are close to essential.

How the days are usually arranged

Most people give the Triangle two to four nights based in one place, and build days out of it rather than moving hotel every night. The common shapes:

• Two nights. Arrive, rest. Day one: Sigiriya at first light, Dambulla in the late afternoon on the way back. Day two: an afternoon safari, or Polonnaruwa, and then move on.
• Three nights. As above with Polonnaruwa given a full day of its own and the safari on the same afternoon, which works because they are on the same side of the map.
• Four nights. Adds Anuradhapura, which really wants a whole day rather than a morning, and leaves room for the smaller sites.

Pairing matters more than order. Polonnaruwa and Minneriya are east of you and belong in the same day. Anuradhapura is north-west and belongs in its own. Sigiriya and Pidurangala are one morning. Dambulla fits onto the beginning or end of almost anything because it is on the road.

Minneriya, Kaudulla and the elephant season

The parks east of Habarana are the other reason people come to this corner of the island, and the way they work is worth understanding, because a safari booked on the wrong day in the wrong park is a long dusty drive for very little.

The principle is water. Through the dry months the reservoirs shrink back from their banks and leave a wide apron of fresh grass on the exposed lake bed, and the elephants come out of the forest to graze on it. Because they gather on open ground rather than staying dispersed in scrub, you can see very large numbers at once. Dry-season grazing around the Minneriya tank draws hundreds of elephants together in what is known as the Gathering, roughly July to October.

Two pieces of advice matter more than anything else you will read about this.

Go in the afternoon, not the morning. The animals come out to the grass as the heat goes off the day, and a late-afternoon drive puts you on the lake bed at the right hour with reasonable light. A morning safari here is not the same experience.

Ask which park the herd is actually in. It moves between Minneriya and Kaudulla as the water levels change through the season, and the answer this week is not necessarily the answer last month. The people who know are the drivers and the hotels, who talk to each other daily about it. A booking made on the strength of a name rather than current information is the commonest way to be disappointed here.

Outside the Gathering months the elephants are still there, but they are dispersed rather than concentrated, and a drive becomes an ordinary safari with good odds rather than a spectacle. That is not a reason to skip it, but it is a reason to adjust your expectations rather than to feel cheated.

Elephants on the roads

This is the one genuine reason not to plan a late arrival at Sigiriya, and it deserves stating plainly rather than dramatically. Elephants cross the roads around the reservoirs at dusk. The stretches between Habarana, Minneriya and Polonnaruwa are the ones where it most often happens, and it is a normal feature of the area rather than a rare event.

What follows from that is simply about timing and behaviour. Arrange your driving in this corner of the country to finish in daylight where you can. If you do meet an elephant on the road, the sensible thing is to stop, keep back, stay in the vehicle, keep the noise down and wait rather than trying to squeeze past. Local drivers know this and behave accordingly, and it is worth knowing so that you understand why the car has stopped and is not going anywhere for the moment.

Travelling with children, and who should not climb

The drive is the easy part. Three and a half hours on flat roads with a stop at Kurunegala is a much gentler introduction to Sri Lankan travel than the hill routes, and children generally do it well.

The rock is a different matter, and it is worth being honest rather than encouraging.

The climb is not for everybody

Sigiriya is a long, steep, hot ascent with exposed sections. The last stairways are open metal steps on the outside of a rock face with the plain a long way below, the spiral stair to the frescoes is enclosed and narrow with people passing in both directions, and the gallery is a ledge. None of it is technical and none of it requires anything but ordinary fitness, but several things about it are genuinely difficult for particular people:

• Anyone uneasy with heights will find the upper stairways hard, and the hardest part is often coming down rather than going up.
• Small children can manage the steps but cannot be carried easily on the narrow sections, and a tired child on an open staircase in a two-way crowd is not a comfortable position for anybody.
• Anyone with knee or hip trouble should think about the descent specifically. There is no other way down.
• Heart or breathing conditions deserve honest consideration given the combination of sustained climbing, heat and no shade.
• Pushchairs and wheelchairs cannot go past the gardens.

The good news is that the site is generous to people who do not climb. The water gardens, the boulder gardens and the lower terraces are level or gently stepped, shaded in places, and among the most interesting parts of the site. Somebody can spend an hour and a half there quite happily while the rest of the party goes up, and meet them at the bottom having enjoyed themselves rather than having waited.

What works well with children

• The safari, above everything else. An afternoon in a jeep looking for elephants beats any ruin ever built, from a child's point of view.
• Bicycles at Polonnaruwa, which turns an archaeological site into an afternoon out.
• Pidurangala only for older children who are steady on rough ground. The final scramble is a real one.
• Early starts, which children mind less than their parents do, and which get the outdoor part of the day done before the heat.

Practical points

• Child seats are not standard equipment. Ask when booking, and give ages so the right size is found.
• Carry more water than seems reasonable. The dry zone dehydrates people who are used to humid heat rather than dry heat.
• Monkeys at all three sites will take food, bags and anything shiny that is not held. Explain this to children before rather than after.

Luggage

Boot capacity rather than 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 rather than only how many people. Nobody minds being told in advance; everybody minds a rearrangement in the set-down area at five in the morning.

Two things are specific to this destination. The last stretch to a good many properties here is unsealed, and soft bags left in an open boot on a track come out grey. And if you keep the same car and driver onward, nothing needs unpacking and repacking more than once, which over a week of moving between the Triangle, the hills and the coast is a larger convenience than it sounds.

Early starts and late arrivals

The pre-dawn transfer

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 gives you the best version of this drive: the suburban section is empty, the towns of the coconut belt are shut, and you watch the light come up somewhere around Kurunegala with the rock outcrops appearing out of the haze. You will reach the dry zone in the cool of the early morning, which is the best hour it has.

The awkwardness is at the far end. Arriving at half past eight with a room that will not be ready until the afternoon is a long morning if you have not planned for it: ask about early check-in, or build the cave temple at Dambulla into the drive so that you arrive later and having done something. What is not a good idea is to land before dawn, drive three and a half hours and then attempt the rock the same afternoon, in the worst heat of the day on no sleep.

Arriving after dark

An evening landing means arriving in the Triangle at night. The driving is routine — these are main roads with traffic on them — but two things change. Finding an unlit property down an unsealed track is markedly harder at eleven at night than at three in the afternoon, so have the phone number and tell the hotel roughly when to expect you. And the last stretch is elephant country at dusk, which is a reason to be unhurried rather than a reason to be alarmed.

The return leg

Going back to the airport is the same road and takes about the same time, and the arithmetic is the thing to get right. Take the three and a half hours for the drive, add three hours for an international check-in, and add a real margin for the fact that the slow part of the return is the last part — the approach to the northern edge of Colombo in the morning, which is when everybody in the region is going to work.

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

If you are ending in Colombo rather than flying out, note that Sigiriya to Colombo is a hundred and seventy-five kilometres and about four hours — longer than the airport run over much the same ground, because the extra time is spent inside the city.

Where people go on from Sigiriya

The Triangle sits at the top of most itineraries and hands you on southward, so the onward leg is usually the second serious drive of a trip.

Kandy

Kandy is ninety kilometres and about two and a quarter hours, south down the plain and then up into the hills. It is the standard next move and it works well, because it is short enough to leave after a proper morning and still arrive in time for the evening puja at the Temple of the Tooth. The road is quick until it starts to climb and slow afterwards, in the reverse of the pattern you experienced coming north.

Dambulla

Dambulla is seventeen kilometres and half an hour, which makes it less an onward journey than an errand. Most people fold it into another day rather than treating it as a move, and the natural version is to see the cave temple on the way out towards Kandy or on the way in from the airport.

Colombo and the coast

Colombo is a hundred and seventy-five kilometres and four hours, and for anyone heading to the beaches that same road is the first part of the journey. Treat a run from here to the south coast as a full travelling day rather than a morning, and break it somewhere worth breaking it.

How to book, and what to tell us

The fares shown above this article are per vehicle rather than per person and are fixed when you book, so the figure you see is the figure you pay whatever the road does on the day. That is the whole point of arranging it in advance rather than negotiating at the airport with a night flight behind you.

What genuinely helps when you book:

• Your flight number, which is more use than a landing time.
• The exact name of the property, spelt out, and its phone number if you have it. This matters more on this route than on any other in the country.
• Whether you are arriving after dark, and whether the approach is an unsealed track.
• Passengers and cases, honestly counted, so that the vehicle is right the first time.
• Any stop you want on the way — Kurunegala for a break, the cave temple at Dambulla — decided before departure rather than at the junction.
• What you intend to do the next morning. If the answer is the rock at first light, say so, because that shapes the following day for your driver as much as for you.

A one-way airport transfer is booked at book a taxi. For the days you are in the Triangle — Polonnaruwa and a safari in one go, or Anuradhapura, or a circuit of the smaller sites — a day hire is the right shape, because these are days with several stops and long waits rather than journeys from one place to another. And if the Triangle is one chapter of a longer trip that goes on to the hills and the coast, a multi-day booking keeps the same car and driver throughout, which means your luggage stays where it is, the early starts are agreed rather than requested, and nobody has to find your hotel for the first time twice.

The thing to carry away from this page is the shape of the drive and the shape of the morning after it. A hundred and fifty-two kilometres, three and a half hours, most of the difficulty in the first half and most of the pleasure in the second. Then an early alarm, a short run in the half-dark, and a climb that is very much better at seven than at eleven. Plan those two things properly and the rest of the Cultural Triangle arranges itself around them.