Kandy to Ella Guided Transfer with Peradeniya Gardens and Ramboda Falls

If you are moving from Kandy to Ella anyway — and on almost every Sri Lanka itinerary you are — this is the sensible way to do it. Rather than paying separately for a transfer and then day-tripping back to the same places, the drive becomes the sightseeing.

The route starts at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Peradeniya, 60 hectares in a loop of the Mahaweli river with a palm avenue, an orchid house and a Javan fig that shades most of a lawn. Then the climb begins, through Gampola and Pussellawa, with a spice garden stop where cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and vanilla grow in the same plot.

Ramboda Falls is the halfway mark, a 100-metre drop a short walk from the road, and above it the country turns entirely to tea. A working factory visit follows the leaf through withering, rolling, oxidation and firing to the grading table.

Nuwara Eliya comes next — the hill station at 1,900 metres, with the racecourse and the cold air — and then the descent into Ella, where you are dropped at your hotel with your luggage, having seen everything between the two towns instead of driving past it.

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.