A Glimpse of Culture

Upon arrival to the Colombo airport, meet and greet and transfer to your hotel in Colombo, followed by the rest of the day at leisure.

Pick-up from your hotel in Colombo around 06:00 hrs and transfer to Kandy, Sri Lanka’s second-largest city. Heading inland, the climes become cooler, the landscapes ever more verdant and the countryside hillier before arriving at this ancient city. Contemporary Kandy is renowned for its beautiful lakeside location, framed by lush hills, and an all-pervasive divinity. En route, visit a tea factory in Giragama. On arrival to Kandy, visit the botanical gardens. Pause for lunch in Kandy (not included). After lunch, take a city tour including the famous Temple of the Tooth Relic, arts and crafts centre, a gem museum and witness a cultural show in the evening, followed by dinner. Overnight at hotel in Kandy. Breakfast and dinner included. Camara permitted only in Temple of the Tooth Relic.

ake to the road after a delicious breakfast. Begin with a visit to a spice garden en route before you continue on a high with a climb up the fifth-century Sigiriya fortress, which sits atop a rock that dramatically rises almost 200 metres above the rainforest. King Kashyapa built a citadel at the top of this giant boulder known as the ‘Lion Rock’, which was the innermost stronghold of a vast fortified city. In time it came to be abandoned and forgotten, covered by dense overgrowth until the British encountered it and began a painstaking archaeological exploration. Today, the terraced gardens and cisterns, the moat, the ‘Mirror Wall’ and the fragile frescoes of the ‘heavenly maidens’ among the other remnants of this once thriving city offer only a tantalising indication of what once stood here. Pass through the lion’s ‘belly’ and climb to the top via a spiral staircase that snakes its way around the rock. From the summit, enjoy breathtaking views over the surrounding landscape and beyond into the horizon. Lunch at a local restaurant in Sigiriya. Continue to the Golden Temple of Dambulla and explore this 2,000-year-old sacred pilgrimage site carved deep inside a mountain. This awe-inspiring complex of five caves is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that features thousands of metres of painted walls and ceiling, and contains more than 150 images of the Lord Buddha as well as a few of deities and Sri Lankan kings. Each cave dates from a different era and tells its own story, with defining aspects such as a colossal 14-metre Buddha statue chiselled out of the rock or a frescoed ceiling with more than 1,500 images of Buddha. Afterwards return to respective hotel in Colombo.