Kandy City Highlights Private Day Tour: Temple, Viewpoints and Gardens

Kandy is small enough to walk and spread out enough that you will miss most of it if you do. This is the full-day private version: a driver and guide, a fixed loop of the city's sites, and time at each rather than a drive-past.

The Bahirawakanda Vihara Buddha sits on the hill above the town — a 27-metre white statue with the best free view over the lake and the roofs. The lake itself was dug by the last king of Kandy in 1807 and is a flat, shaded 3.5-kilometre walk. The Commonwealth war cemetery, a little out of the centre, is quiet and beautifully kept, holding the graves of servicemen who died in Ceylon during the Second World War, and almost nobody visits it.

The rest is the working city: a gem museum and cutting workshop, since Sri Lanka has mined sapphires for two thousand years and Kandy is where a lot of them are cut; a batik workshop; a wood carving studio; and the viewpoints above the town that make sense of how the valley is laid out.

A private guide is what makes this worth a full day rather than an afternoon — the sites are individually short, and the value is in the connections between them.

Kandy was the last capital of the Sinhalese kings, holding out against the Portuguese and Dutch until the British took it in 1815, and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic on the lake is why it matters: the relic, believed to be a tooth of the Buddha, is the most sacred object on the island and its custody once legitimised the kingship. The relic chamber opens for puja three times a day, at about 5:30, 9:30 and 18:30, when the drumming starts and the queue moves past the casket. Dress covers shoulders and knees, shoes come off at the entrance, and the Esala Perahera in July or August parades the casket on an elephant through the city for ten nights.