Private Horton Plains Tour from Ella with the Scenic Train to Ohiya

Horton Plains is the strangest landscape in Sri Lanka: a plateau of montane grassland and cloud forest at around 2,300 metres, wind-scoured and cold, with dwarfed trees hung with moss and lichen. It looks more like Scotland than the tropics, and the species living in that altitude band exist nowhere else.

World's End is the reason people come. The southern escarpment ends abruptly and the ground falls about 870 metres in a sheer face, with the plain and, on a clear morning, the south coast visible far below.

Getting there by train to Ohiya is what distinguishes this from the usual road trip. Ohiya is the highest station on the hill line, the ride up crosses the best of the tea country, and it turns the approach into part of the day rather than a two-hour drive in the dark.

The loop is nine kilometres and three to four hours, walked anticlockwise so that Little World's End and World's End come before the cloud and Baker's Falls falls on the return.

Private hire matters here mainly for pace: the plateau rewards stopping, and a group walking to a schedule tends not to.

Sambar deer are common. The Sri Lankan leopard lives here and is effectively never seen.

Ella is a village at 1,040 metres in the southern hill country, reached by the train from Kandy that most people rate the finest railway journey in Asia, and its sights are all within a few kilometres: the Nine Arch Bridge, a brick viaduct of 1921 in a gorge of tea, which a train crosses several times a day; Little Adam's Peak, a 40-minute walk through tea to a ridge; Ella Rock, a harder three-hour climb; and Ravana Falls on the road down to Wellawaya. Mornings are clear and afternoons in the wet months bring cloud into the gap, so the walks are done early. Tuk-tuks are the transport, and every guesthouse can find one.