Negombo and Colombo City Tour by Tuk Tuk

This is a tuk tuk tour, and it is worth saying so plainly — three wheels, open sides, no doors and no air conditioning. It is also the reason to do it. You sit at street level with the noise and the smells of two very different towns going past you, and the driver can turn into lanes a car would never attempt.

Negombo comes first. It is a fishing town with a long Catholic history, a legacy of Portuguese rule that still shows in the churches, the saints' names on the boats and the shrines at road junctions. The lagoon and the old Dutch canal cut through it, the fish market on the beach works hard in the morning, and there is the option of a short boat run on the water if you want it.

Then you head south into Colombo, a city that was a Portuguese port, then Dutch, then British, and still wears all three. In Fort the colonial-era banks and warehouses stand alongside new towers, and the Dutch Hospital — the oldest building in the district — has been turned into a courtyard of restaurants and shops. Pettah next door is the opposite in every way: a grid of covered streets where each one trades in a single thing, and the striped red-and-white Jami Ul-Alfar mosque of 1908 rises out of the middle of it.

There is time for the other set pieces too — Gangaramaya Temple with its mix of Sri Lankan, Thai, Indian and Chinese styles, Independence Square where the 1948 handover is commemorated, and Galle Face Green, the colonial promenade where the isso wade carts appear as the light goes.

Shopping is built into the day, so if you want tea, spices, batik or gems, tell the driver what you are after and he will take you to the right street rather than the nearest commission stop.