Udawattakele Bird Watching Morning from Kandy with a Guide

Udawattakele is the strangest thing about Kandy: 103 hectares of genuine forest sitting immediately behind the Temple of the Tooth, in the middle of a city. It was the royal forest garden of the Kandyan kings, off limits to commoners, and it was protected as a reserve in 1856 — which is why there is still primary-adjacent forest inside a capital.

Go at dawn and it is full of birds. Layard's parakeet, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, brown-capped babblers, orange-billed babblers, and, with luck and a guide who knows where to look, the Sri Lanka spurfowl calling from the undergrowth. A guide matters here more than at most sites, because much of what is worth seeing is heard first.

The walk also takes in what is left of the Kandyan period: the Senkanda cave, where the hermit the city may be named after lived, old royal ponds, and the British-era paths that still form the trail network. Giant squirrels, purple-faced langurs and monitor lizards are all common.

The going is easy — made paths, gentle gradients — and the whole thing is done by late morning, which leaves the rest of the day for the city.

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.