Ceylon Sunset Romance – Sri Lanka Honeymoon Tour

You leave the coast and head inland. There is a stop at an elephant care foundation, a charity that looks after domesticated elephants, where the keepers explain how each one arrived.

After lunch you carry on to Sigiriya. The rock is kept for the late afternoon when the heat has gone. It is over a thousand steps past the fifth century frescoes and the lion paws to the citadel on the summit.

Polonnaruwa in the morning, the capital from the eleventh to the thirteenth century and the best preserved ancient city on the island. You walk the main group with your guide: Lankathilaka, Thuparamaya, the royal palace, Rankoth Vehera and the Buddhas cut from the rock at Gal Viharaya.

In the afternoon you take a jeep into Minneriya or Kaudulla with a tracker, wherever the elephants have moved to that week.

A scenic drive to Kandy, the last capital of the Sinhalese kings, built around a lake with the hills close on every side.

The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic holds the most important Buddhist relic in the country and your visit is timed around the puja. In the evening there is a performance of dances and drumming from different parts of the island.

A slow day in Kandy. The Udawattakele forest reserve sits right above the town and is quiet at any hour. The market streets are not.

Walk the lake, take in the view from Upper Lake Drive, then drive out to the Peradeniya botanical gardens, the largest in the country, where lunch is best eaten on the grass.

The train from Kandy up to Hatton is the most scenic stretch of the upcountry line. It climbs through tea estates and round high passes with the valleys open below, and it is a working service, so it is rarely quiet and rarely on time.

At the top you check into a planter's bungalow above Castlereigh lake. It is cold enough in the evening for a fire, which is unexpected two hours after you left the heat.

A tea day and the quietest of the trip. You walk the estate with someone who works it and watch the pluckers take two leaves and a bud, then follow the leaf into the factory to see it withered, rolled, oxidised and fired.

The tasting is what makes sense of the rest. The afternoon is for the lake, a bicycle or a long walk, and then the fire again.

A long drive west and down, out of the tea and through the paddy to the coast. The landscape changes three times before lunch.

You stop by a river on the way. Bentota is the destination, a wide beach on the west coast, and the rest of the day belongs to it.

South along the coast to Galle. The fort is a Dutch walled town on Portuguese foundations, still lived in, with the ramparts, the lighthouse, the churches and the old warehouses among the cafes and shops.

You walk it with your guide and keep the afternoon for the lanes. The best hour is the last one, on the wall, when the town comes out to watch the sea.

A day with no plan. Lunuganga is fifteen minutes inland, the garden Geoffrey Bawa spent fifty years making, and lunch on the terrace there is the best way to spend the middle of the day.

Otherwise there is a boat up the Madu river through the mangroves, water sports on the lagoon, or the beach.

Your driver-guide takes you to the airport. From Bentota it is about two hours on the expressway, and we leave enough time for the check-in queues.