The hill country on foot: which walks are worth the day

It is also a place where the guidebook description and the actual morning frequently do not match. So here are the walks we build, with real difficulty, real timings, and the conditions that decide whether they are worth your day.

The weather rule that governs all of it

Two things, and both are about the hour rather than the month.

The mist closes in mid-morning, most days, most of the year, above about 5,000 feet (1,525 m). This is why every serious walk here starts before dawn and why an itinerary that puts Horton Plains at ten in the morning has wasted your money.

The western hills are wet from May to September, when the southwest monsoon hits them, and the eastern hills are wet from late October to February. Ella and Haputale sit on the drier eastern side in the southwest monsoon, which is why a July trip can still walk. Which month to visit has the region-by-region table.

Temperatures: the hills sit in the 60s°F (about 16 to 20°C) by day and drop to the low 50s°F (about 11°C) at night, and Horton Plains at dawn is colder than that and occasionally near freezing. Most hill hotels have no heating. Bring a fleece and a waterproof, in every month.

Horton Plains and World’s End

Difficulty: easy underfoot, hard on the alarm clock. Distance: about 6 miles (9.5 km) round. Time: 3 to 3.5 hours. Season: year round, best December to March.

A high plateau above 7,000 feet (2,130 m) of montane grassland and cloud forest, ending at a cliff that drops around 2,900 feet (880 m) to the plain below. It is the most famous walk in Sri Lanka and it is genuinely worth doing, on one condition: you are there for the gate opening.

The mist usually closes in mid-morning and there is nothing to see afterwards, so the party that leaves the hotel at half past four and stands at the cliff by seven gets the view, and the party that leaves at eight gets a walk in a cloud and a large entry fee. That is the entire decision, and we build the hotel location around it.

The loop is a flat, well-made circuit taking in Little World’s End, World’s End and Baker’s Falls. It is an early start, a cold hour and a very good twenty minutes.

Ella, Little Adam’s Peak and Ella Rock

Little Adam’s Peak: easy, about 1.5 hours round, best at sunrise.

Ella Rock: moderate, 3 to 4 hours round, a real climb, a guide worth having.

Ella is beautiful and it has become busy, and both halves of that sentence matter. Little Adam’s Peak is a short, gentle climb up a tea slope to a ridge with the gap at Ella below it, and at sunrise it is one of the best half hours in the country. By nine it has a queue for the photograph at the swing.

Ella Rock is the better walk and the harder one: an unmarked route along the railway line, across a stream and up through eucalyptus and tea, and it is genuinely easy to get wrong. People do get lost, and the helpful stranger who appears at the junction is sometimes a paid guide who has appointed himself. We arrange one in advance, which costs little and removes the problem.

Also at Ella: the Nine Arches Bridge, a fine ten-minute walk from town and now a crowd. On the train itself, reserved seats release 30 days before departure and often sell out the same day in season, which is a subject of its own in the Kandy to Ella train.

The Knuckles range, which is the real walking

Difficulty: moderate to hard. Time: half day to three days. Season: driest roughly January to April and July to September. A guide and a permit are required.

The Knuckles massif northeast of Kandy is where we send people who actually want to walk. Ridges up to about 6,200 feet (1,890 m), cloud forest, montane grassland called patana, villages that still farm cardamom, and a fraction of the visitors of anywhere else in this article.

It is a conservation area with a permit system and mandatory local guides, which is a good thing rather than an obstacle: routes are unmarked, the weather changes fast, and the paths are used by people rather than maintained for visitors. Days range from a four-hour circuit out of Meemure to a serious two- or three-day traverse with a village night in the middle.

The honest warnings. Leeches, in numbers, after rain, from roughly May to December and in any wet week. They are harmless and they are relentless: socks, long trousers, and the acceptance that you will stop to deal with them. Mist and rain, which arrive without notice. The paths are slippery and there is real drop in places. This is walking rather than sightseeing and we say so before we book it. It is in trekking Sri Lanka in 13 days.

Adam’s Peak, or Sri Pada

Difficulty: hard, and it is stairs. Around 5,500 steps. Time: 3 to 4 hours up, usually starting between one and three in the morning. Season: the pilgrimage season runs roughly December to May.

A pilgrimage climb of about 7,360 feet (2,243 m) that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians have all climbed for centuries, done at night so that you are at the summit for sunrise and for the shadow the mountain casts across the plain.

It is worth doing and it is worth being honest about. It is a staircase, in the dark, for three to four hours, and on a poya day in season the queue on the upper steps can be dense enough that you climb at the speed of the person in front for the last hour. The descent hurts more than the climb, and the next day is a rest day rather than a driving day. Outside the pilgrimage season the path is quiet, the stalls are closed and the weather is less reliable.

We book it for people who want it and we do not put it in a standard route, because a party of four usually contains one person who did not understand what they were agreeing to.

Walking between the tea estates

The quieter alternative to all of the above, and increasingly the thing we recommend most.

The estate tracks around Haputale, Deniyaya, Bogawantalawa and the Uva slopes make excellent walking on their own terms: three to five hours between villages, through working plantations, past pluckers and factories and Hindu shrines, ending at a bungalow with a cook. A waymarked long-distance route now links a chain of these stages through the tea country, walkable in single days or as a multi-day chain with vehicle support. Stages, access and waymarking change from season to season, so we confirm the current position with our ground team rather than printing a stage list that ages.

For most travellers, two of these days inside a normal trip beats one set-piece climb, and they suit any fitness level because the length is decided by where the car meets you.

Sinharaja, if the forest is the point

Difficulty: easy to moderate. Time: half day. Season: year round.

Lowland rainforest in the southwest, with the best biodiversity on the island: endemic birds, mixed-species feeding flocks, purple-faced langur. You walk slowly with a guide and look at small things. It is not a view walk, and people who came for a view are disappointed. Leeches, again.

What we would tell you before you book any of it

• Start before dawn. Every walk in this article is better at six and worse at ten.
• Take a guide on the unmarked ones, meaning Ella Rock, everything in the Knuckles and anything in Sinharaja. It is cheap and it is the difference between a walk and an incident.
• Nothing here is high altitude. Sri Lanka tops out below 8,300 feet (2,530 m) and altitude is not a factor, which makes it an unusually easy walking country compared with Nepal. The comparison across the region is in trekking in Asia compared.
• Boots with grip, not trainers. Wet rock and red mud.
• Leeches are a fact rather than an emergency. Socks and salt or repellent on the socks.
• A rest day after Adam’s Peak. Genuinely.

Plan this trip

Tell us how much you actually want to walk and we will build the hill country around it, from two dawn starts to a three-day traverse. Free, and with no obligation.

Start planning

Keep reading

• Sri Lanka: the complete guide to planning your trip
• Trekking Sri Lanka, 13 days
• The Kandy to Ella train, and how to actually get a seat
• The best two-week route through Sri Lanka
• Trekking in Asia, compared honestly
• Sri Lanka, planned around the monsoon that actually matters

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