Best of Sri Lanka

North to Anuradhapura, the island’s first great capital, where kings ruled from the fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD. Its heart is the Sri Maha Bodhi, grown, the chronicles say, from a branch of the tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha found enlightenment, and planted here in the third century BC. Pilgrims in white come every day to lay flowers at its foot.

Around it stand the great dagobas: the white dome of the Ruwanwelisaya, raised by King Dutugemunu in the second century BC; the Thuparama, said to be the oldest on the island; and the brick mountains of the Abhayagiri and the Jetavanarama. Then the stone pillars of the Brazen Palace, the Samadhi Buddha seated in meditation, the twin bathing ponds of Kuttam Pokuna, and the rock temple of Isurumuniya, with its carved lovers and the elephants cut into the rock at the water’s edge.

In the afternoon, Mihintale, where the monk Mahinda, son of the Emperor Ashoka, is said to have met the king of Anuradhapura in the third century BC and brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka. A granite stairway climbs the hill past dagobas, relic houses and the caves of the first monks to the meditation rock at the top. Back to Dambulla for the night.

South into the hills, with a stop at a spice garden in Matale: cinnamon, which is native to Sri Lanka, with cardamom, pepper, cloves and nutmeg, grown as they are on the island’s farms, and a guide to show you how each goes into Sri Lankan cooking.

Then Kandy, capital of the island’s last kingdom, which held out against the Portuguese and the Dutch and fell to the British only in 1815. In the afternoon, the Temple of the Tooth, Sri Dalada Maligawa, one of the holiest places in the Buddhist world. It keeps a tooth of the Buddha that, the story goes, was carried from Kalinga, on India’s east coast, in the fourth century AD, hidden in a princess’s hair; it lies in the inner shrine, under a golden canopy. In the evening, a performance of Kandyan dance: drummers, and dancers in the beaded costume and silver headdress of the ves.

The road climbs out of Kandy through the tea estates to Nuwara Eliya, at about 1,900 metres, the hill station the British built as a cool retreat and the planters called Little England. Tea came to these hills in the late nineteenth century, after a blight wiped out the coffee plantations, and Ceylon tea is still picked by hand.

On the way, a tea factory and its estate. The pickers, mostly Tamil women whose families came from South India to work the estates in the nineteenth century, take two leaves and a bud from each bush; in the factory the leaf is withered, rolled, left to oxidise, dried and sorted into the grades you see on the packet. Nuwara Eliya is cold once the sun goes down.

An early breakfast, then a jeep safari in Yala National Park, protected as a national park since 1938, on the dry south-east coast. Most drives are in Block I, the most visited part: scrub jungle and open plains, lagoons, and rocky outcrops running down to the sea.

Yala is known above all for its leopards. The drivers know where they have been seen, but leopards are wild and shy, and no one can promise a sighting. You are far more likely to see elephants, spotted deer and sambar, water buffalo, wild boar, crocodiles at the waterholes and mongooses, and birds everywhere, resident and migrant.

A day with nothing planned, on the beach at Bentota. If you want more than the sea: a boat up the Bentota River through the mangroves, or Lunuganga, the country garden the architect Geoffrey Bawa made for himself on a lake a few miles inland.

A last morning by the sea, then the drive up the coast and around Colombo to the airport at Katunayake for your flight home.