The Kelani River at Kithulgala drops through a series of rapids graded from II to IV – making it the undisputed white-water rafting destination of Sri Lanka and the site of the National Rafting Championship. The surrounding rainforest is a location that will be familiar to film scholars as the principal setting for David Lean’s…

Sri Lanka’s highest town was designed by British planters as a Little England at altitude – Georgian bungalows, a racecourse, hedge-rowed gardens and a climate cold enough that open fires are standard at colonial-era hotels. The surrounding tea landscape is among the most photographically dense in Asia: emerald terraces rising into cloud, pluckers in bright…

The Knuckles Conservation Forest is named for the fist-shaped ridgeline visible from the Kandy plain – and its interior is a genuinely challenging, ecologically exceptional highland landscape of waterfalls, cloud forest patches, traditional mountain villages and streams that have never been commercially developed. It is among the least-infrastructure-heavy trekking destinations in South Asia.

Horton Plains National Park sits at over 2,100 metres altitude and holds the only significant montane grassland ecosystem in Sri Lanka – a plateau of cloud forest and patana grassland that ends abruptly at World’s End, a sheer 870-metre escarpment with views extending to the southern coast on clear mornings. The endemic wildlife here –…

Ella’s geography is its drama – positioned at the edge of Sri Lanka’s central highlands, it drops away to the south in a series of ridges and valleys creating a visual panorama of startling scale. The Nine Arches Bridge, engineered without steel reinforcement during WWI from brick and concrete, sits embedded in jungle so completely…