Private Sigiriya Day Tour from Kandy with an Elephant Safari and Spice Garden

This is the private version of the big day north, and what it buys is the ability to move at your own speed. On a shared van the day runs to a timetable; privately, if the climb takes you longer, or you want an hour at the spice garden instead of twenty minutes, that is simply what happens.

The route north goes through Matale, with the Sri Muthumariamman Hindu temple and its painted gopuram, and a spice garden where cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and nutmeg all grow in the same plot.

Sigiriya is the centrepiece: 1,200 steps past the mirror wall frescoes to a fifth-century royal citadel on top of a granite plug, with the water gardens laid out symmetrically below. Dambulla follows, five painted caves under a rock overhang, cool and dark and holding around 150 Buddha images.

The safari closes the day. Late afternoon at Minneriya or a neighbouring park is when the elephant herds come down to the reservoir, and in the dry season that gathering is the largest of its kind in Asia. You are back in Kandy in the evening.

Sigiriya is a 200-metre column of rock rising out of the dry-zone plain, on which King Kasyapa built his palace in the fifth century after seizing the throne, and it has been a UNESCO site since 1982. The climb is about 1,200 steps on stairways and iron walkways, past the mirror wall with its thousand-year-old graffiti and the sheltered gallery of frescoes, to the lion's paws that give the rock its name and the palace foundations on the summit. It takes an hour and a half up and down for most people and is best started at 7:00, before the heat and the coaches; the ticket for foreign visitors is one of the most expensive in the country, and Pidurangala, the neighbouring rock, gives the classic view of Sigiriya for a fraction of it.