Two monsoons, and one dry coast at any time of year

At a glance

What this country actually is

Sri Lanka is about the size of Ireland and takes three times as long to cross as the map suggests. That single mismatch explains most of what goes wrong on badly planned trips here: distances look trivial, roads are slow, and an itinerary drawn with a ruler produces a fortnight of driving.

Inside that small area are four distinct countries’ worth of material. The cultural triangle in the dry north-centre holds the rock fortress at Sigiriya, the medieval capital at Polonnaruwa and the painted cave temple at Dambulla, and around them the vast man-made tanks by which Sinhalese kings stored half a year of rain against the dry months. The hill country in the middle is tea, cloud and railway. The south and west coasts are beach, fort and expressway. The east and north — Trincomalee, Arugam Bay, Jaffna — are a separate proposition on a separate weather clock and are barely visited by comparison.

The other thing worth knowing is that the country is unusually easy to travel in. Drivers commonly double as translators and informal guides, English is widely spoken, the food is better than its international reputation, and the sites are close enough together that a nine-night itinerary can be genuinely unhurried. It is the country we most often suggest to travellers who want South Asia but are nervous about India.

What it is not is a beach destination with some culture attached. The coast rewards two or three nights at the end of a route; a fortnight of it is a different holiday and there are better islands for that.

How many nights, and what breaks if you take fewer

Nine to twelve nights covers the triangle, the hills and one coast without a rushed day in it. That is the shape almost every good Sri Lanka itinerary takes, and the arithmetic underneath it is unforgiving.

Three nights belong to the cultural triangle, because the rock, the ruined capital and the cave temple are three separate half-days and stacking two of them into one morning ruins whichever comes second. Two belong to Kandy. Two belong to the hill country, and the arrival there should be by rail rather than by road. Two belong to the coast. That is nine, on top of a Colombo night that exists purely because long-haul flights land at three in the morning.

Take nights out and the first casualty is the middle. An eight-day trip usually drops to one night at Sigiriya, which means climbing the rock on the morning after a four-hour drive, and skips the train, which is the thing half the travellers on the island came for.

Where judgement is needed is on the way up. A fourteen-night trip can reach the east coast and a sixteen-night one can take in the north as well, but neither will compress into eleven: the drive to Jaffna eats a whole day and the city then wants two nights before the road makes sense. Bolting a second coast onto a shorter itinerary means giving up Kandy or the south, and the smaller idea carried out properly is almost always the better purchase.

When to go: two monsoons, one dry coast

The island has two monsoon systems running on different clocks, which is why it can be visited in any month if you know which coast to stand on.

The practical rule is simple: plan the west and south coasts between December and March, and the east coast between June and August. A route ending at Galle is a December-to-March route; the same triangle and the same train followed by Trincomalee is a June-to-August route. They are different trips with different hotels, and the honest thing for an operator to do with a July enquiry is to flip the second half of the journey rather than sell the south in the rain.

The uplands are the part no operator can guarantee. Both systems throw rain at Kandy, the tea belt and Ella, so cloud sits on them in any month of the year, which is one good argument for putting the train in the middle of the day instead of at first light. The wet coast, whichever one it happens to be, has a genuine upside: rates drop, the sites thin out, and the tanks and waterfalls are running. The whole Asian year is set out on when to go.

Getting there, getting around, and the trains

Long-haul traffic all comes into Colombo (CMB), an airport that stands well north of the capital and considerably closer to Negombo, and most European and Australian routings put you on the ground somewhere between midnight and dawn off a Gulf or Southeast Asian connection. A first night with nothing scheduled after it, either by the airport or down in the Fort district, is not a night thrown away. It is what makes the following day usable.

On the ground the default is a car with a driver, and few countries in Asia repay that arrangement as well as this one: the roads are slow, and the driver generally turns out to be the most useful person on the trip. Reckon on USD 50 to 70 a day for an air-conditioned saloon and USD 70 to 90 for a van carrying three to six, with the fuel, the tolls, the parking and the driver’s own meals and bed all inside those numbers. A tip of USD 5 to 10 a day is expected on top and is rarely built into a tour price.

The railway is the exception an itinerary should be shaped around. From Colombo up to Kandy the train takes about three hours against three and a half to four in a car, which makes it one of the few rail journeys in Asia that simply beats the road. The celebrated stretch is the one beyond it: some 120 km from Kandy to Ella in six or seven hours, climbing out of the valley into tea, running along contour lines above open drops and crossing the Nine Arch Bridge towards the end. The class to ask for is Second Reserved and the class to avoid is air-conditioned First, whose sealed glass removes the only reason to be aboard; on this direction of travel the views sit on the right-hand side. Between December and April the seats go months in advance. The obvious arrangement is for the driver to take the luggage round by road and be waiting at the far end.

What it costs on the ground

Sri Lanka sits in our middle band, roughly USD 250 to 360 per person per day for a private journey, land only. It is more expensive per day than India or Nepal and considerably less than Bhutan or Japan.

Party size moves the number more than the hotels do. The vehicle and driver are a fixed daily cost carried by however many people are in the car, so two travellers can pay something like a third more per head than a party of five on an identical route with identical rooms. Entrances are the other variable, and they are the one set of figures we will not print here. Ticket prices for foreigners at Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa, Dambulla and Anuradhapura are fixed between the Central Cultural Fund and the archaeology department, they are revised without much warning, and anything published on a page like this one ages badly. What a quote should say instead is that every entrance is covered at whatever the rate is on the day of invoicing.

The place where an upgrade actually returns something is the tea country and the southern coast, where a small number of estate bungalows and old merchant houses earn their rate in a way that a larger room near the ruins does not. Around Sigiriya, the best place to sleep and the dearest place to sleep are not the same address. What a day costs in every country we sell, before anybody’s margin, is on cost by country.

In pictures

When to skip it

• If you want the south coast between May and September. That is the southwest monsoon landing on precisely the beaches most itineraries end at. The answer is to go east to Trincomalee or Arugam Bay instead, not to book the south and hope.
• If neither the stair at Sigiriya nor the scramble up Pidurangala opposite is within reach of the party. Those three triangle nights are built around the rock, and it does not have a viewing terrace at ground level.
• If this is meant to be a beach holiday with culture attached. Two nights at Galle is a fort with a sea view, not a resort strip, and a route built around sand would need four or five nights on one stretch of it and a completely different shape.
• If sleeves are a step too far. Covered shoulders and knees are required at the Temple of the Tooth, at Dambulla and at every shrine still in use, and posing with your back turned to a Buddha figure is dealt with here under the criminal law rather than by a raised eyebrow.
• If the plan is to reach Jaffna or the east without lengthening the trip. This is a small island that moves slowly, and an extension to the north or the east has to earn its drive with at least two nights of its own.

Journeys that go here

Sri Lanka in eleven days runs Colombo to Galle by way of Sigiriya, Kandy, the hill-country train and the south coast, and it is written for the December-to-March window for the reasons set out above. Ask for a June-to-August departure and the same triangle and the same train are followed by Trincomalee instead of the south.

With nineteen days, the better buy is usually not a slower version of the island. Sri Lanka and south India in nineteen days runs Colombo to Kochi and pairs the island with Kerala across a short flight; the two halves are close enough to combine easily and different enough that the second does not feel like a repeat of the first. The Kerala half on its own is ten days from Kochi to Trivandrum.

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