Sri Lanka is not one trip — it is four, squeezed into one island

Visa for Indians is currently free — fill the Electronic Travel Authorisation before you board, print the confirmation, and you are through immigration in twenty minutes. Your driver meets you at arrivals and heads straight north-east, away from Colombo, through coconut groves and paddy fields. Stop somewhere along the A6 for your first rice-and-curry lunch: a steel tray with six small bowls, dhal poured over everything, papadam on the side. The vegetarian spread is the same as the non-vegetarian spread minus two bowls.

Four hours from the airport, you check in near Habarana. Sigiriya is visible from the road as a flat-topped column of rock above the treeline. Go to sleep early. Tomorrow is a five-thirty alarm.

The gates open at seven. You want to be at the base of Lion Rock by six-forty-five. The climb is 1,200 steps past the mirror wall — a fifth-century plastered surface covered in visitors' poetry scratched over twelve hundred years — and past the painted maidens, the Sigiriya Damsels, in a sheltered gallery halfway up. The palace platform at the top is the size of a small airport. By the time you come back down, the queue stretches past the ticket booth. That is why you left before breakfast.

Rest through the middle of the day. By three in the afternoon the driver takes you into Minneriya or Kaudulla national park in an open jeep — the rangers track where the elephants are that week, and they will tell your driver the night before. The gathering happens because the reservoir level drops after the monsoon and fresh grass appears on the lake bed. You may see twenty elephants or two hundred. Skip the national park if you are expecting a manicured safari; do not skip it if you want to see something you will not see anywhere else in Asia.

Dambulla is forty minutes from Habarana: five caverns cut into a golden rock above the plain, each one packed with gilded Buddhas, murals and the smoke of two thousand years of lamps. Remove your shoes at the base, not at the top — the path is rough but passable. Skip the lower museum; spend the time in cave three, where a reclining Buddha stretches twenty-eight metres across one wall.

Then south through Matale — a spice garden stop where someone peels cinnamon bark from a live branch and you realise it looks nothing like the powder in your kitchen. Arrive in Kandy by late afternoon. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth sits on the lake and the evening puja starts at half past six. Drummers in white line the corridor, the crowd presses in, and it is loud, serious and open to anyone who wears a sarong or a dupatta over their shoulders. Kandy is one night; the puja is the reason.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya are a kilometre from Kandy and open by eight. The avenue of royal palms is five hundred metres long, and the Javan fig at the centre has aerial roots that cover the area of a small house. One hour is enough. Then the road climbs — past Ramboda Falls, through villages where women with baskets pick leaves on steep slopes — for three hours to Nuwara Eliya, which sits at 1,868 metres and gets cold enough at night to need a blanket, even in January.

Stop at a working tea factory on the way up — most welcome visitors for a short tour, and the tasting at the end lets you compare orange pekoe with a broken-grade dust and understand why your airport tea tastes the way it does. Nuwara Eliya has colonial bungalows, a racecourse from the British period, and a night market near the clock tower. Eat at the market and sleep with the window closed.

The train leaves Nanu Oya station, four kilometres from Nuwara Eliya town, and your driver drops you there with the luggage. Buy reserved second-class seats in advance — the observation car sells out weeks ahead and you do not need it; a regular window seat in second class gives you the same view for a fraction of the price. Three hours of tea gardens, tunnels, and cloud forest, with village names called out in Sinhala by a conductor who sounds like he has been doing this his whole life. The ride ends at Ella.

Your driver meets you at Ella station with the bags. In the late afternoon, walk the kilometre from town to the Nine Arch Bridge viewpoint. Wait. A blue train crosses it every couple of hours — the same track you just rode — and the sight of it curving between the stone arches with the valley dropping away below is the photograph you will actually frame. Dinner is kottu roti from the shops on Ella's main street, chopped on a steel griddle with a sound like someone typing very fast.

Leave the guesthouse at five-thirty for Little Adam's Peak, a forty-five-minute walk up a clear path behind Ella village. The view at the top covers the whole hill country — you can see Adam's Peak itself sixty kilometres to the west on a clear morning, and below it the valley you descended by train. Back for breakfast, then the long drive south: past Ravana Falls, a curtain of water the Ramayana connects to Ravana's cave, and down through rubber and spice country to Bentota by evening.

Bentota is where the trip changes its tempo. The Bentota River meets the sea at a lagoon; the beach runs south for kilometres, and the water is warm enough at seven in the evening to feel like a reward for everything you climbed in the last three days. Do nothing tonight except eat at a fish shack on the beach and sleep to the sound of the Indian Ocean.

A two-hour morning boat through the Madu River wetlands: low arches of mangrove, small islands where families make cinnamon rope, a monitor lizard four feet long warming on a root. The boatman knows which channels are deep enough and which islands have the best cinnamon peel — trust him. Then the turtle hatchery at Kosgoda, fifteen minutes up the coast: rescued eggs hatch in guarded sand beds, hatchlings go to sea at dusk, and the whole operation runs on entrance fees and donations. Worth an hour.

The afternoon is free. The river mouth has water sports — jet ski, banana boat — if that is what you want. The beach works too. Bentota is one of those places where doing nothing is the correct choice, and we have scheduled it accordingly.

Drive south first. Galle Fort is a seventeenth-century Dutch walled city — lighthouse, churches, a cricket ground inside the ramparts, jewellers selling moonstones in doorways. Walk the top of the wall from the clock tower to the lighthouse, which takes twenty minutes, and you will have covered most of what needs to be covered. On the road back north, stilt fishermen post themselves on poles in the shallows; it is a photographic tradition as much as a fishing method, and tipping is expected.

The Southern Expressway gets you to Colombo in two hours. Evening is a short city loop: Gangaramaya temple by the lake, a walk along Galle Face Green as the kite vendors set up, and a last kottu roti from one of the Pettah street stalls. Your hotel is close to the airport road.

Half-hour transfer to Bandaranaike International Airport. Pack your tea — two hundred grams per person is safe through Indian customs; anything vacuum-sealed and labelled clears easily. Cinnamon is organic matter; declare it or leave it. Nine days, one island smaller than Tamil Nadu, and eight UNESCO World Heritage sites within reach of a single driver.