7-Day Sri Lanka Adventure: From Mountains to Beaches

You're Gonna Do Something Very Few Travelers Ever Do

Consider this.

You travel somewhere new. Your phone is buzzing with the same social media notifications. The hotel lobby is everywhere. You take the same photos as everyone else.

Does that sound familiar?

That's what happened to Melbourne's Sarah last month. She paid for what seemed like the ultimate tropical getaway. Seven days. Lovely beaches. Five-star reviews.

She came back with a gorgeous tan and 200 photographs that were just the same as everyone else's.

Think for a moment about this comment: seven days here is never too long for a holiday. It changes the entire way you see the world.

Why?

The Island That Breaks Every Rule

Sri Lanka shouldn't be. It's not that large compared to Ireland, and yet it has misty mountains, temple ruins, leopards running wild, and beaches that make the Maldives seem lackluster.

All the travel brochures will tell you about the sights. Check the boxes. Tell you where to go and what to look at.

That isn't what this is about.

It is in this way that a week in Sri Lanka changes individuals. The way they come back changed. The way they start making arrangements to come back before they've even left.

Day One: The First Agreement

You come to Colombo expecting chaos. You discover it.

Tuk-tuks rumble down roads that somehow work but obviously don't. Hawkers cry out in three languages. Colonial buildings stand tall amidst glass giants that shine through the fog.

Most tourists whizz through Colombo to reach someplace "better."

They miss the point.

Walk down to Galle Face Green at night. Buy an is to wade from a street stall. The prawn fritter sears your tongue, but you consume it because the sear is somehow integral to this place.

Watch kids carry kites to soar above the sea. Watch the way the businessman next to you has loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves up. Watch the grandmother and her granddaughter going to run with the wind.

You're not watching a TV show. You're experiencing it.

Spend an evening in Colombo. Allow the rhythm of the city to beat into your very being.

Nothing will be the same the day after tomorrow.

Day Two: Into the Sacred Hills

The train to Kandy does not just chug 115 kilometers into the countryside. It takes you back in time.

Rolling green hills stretch out outside your window. Villages come into and out of sight. Fruit vendors sprint alongside the train, waving up mangoes and bananas like yellow offerings.

Kandy covers a lake like an enigma. At its center, the Temple of the Tooth, where Buddha's tooth relic rests in a golden coffin.

Will you be religious? Your choice.

Will you feel something?

Yes.

Drummers begin their evening ritual. Incense drifts through ancient doorways. White pilgrims walk the sacred lake, prayers muttered into steam-scented air.

This is not tourism. This is looking.

Attend the classical dance recital if you want to see how beat and fire can unravel histories that predate your country.

Sleep in Kandy, bells of the temples rocking you to sleep.

Day Three: The Scenic Train Ride

That is what travel writers do not reveal about the Kandy-Nuwara Eliya train. It spoils all your other scenic rides that you ever have.

Sit beside the open door in the seat ahead. Yes, it is okay. No, you will not be ejected. But perhaps you will fall in love.

The blue train ravages tea gardens that cover the mountains in impossible green. Waterfalls flow off cliff sides you might touch if you stretched very far.

Women wearing flash saris float among the tea bushes like colored birds, fingers snapping across leaves.

Your phone will die trying to soak it. Good.

Nuwara Eliya is "Little England," but it's all, absolutely Sri Lankan. The air is redolent of eucalyptus and potential.

Visit a tea factory. Not out of duty, but to witness masters convert leaves to liquid gold is to be a bearer of witness to alchemy.

Drink your tea on the border of the fields it was planted in. Not relish it, but taste earth, rain, the hands that picked it.

Sleep between mountains, beneath stars you can see.

Day Four: Where Travelers Live

Ella isn't a place. It's the mood.

This small hill town has drawn tourists who came in for the day and stayed for months. There is something in the air here. Maybe it is the altitude. Maybe it is a sense of liberation.

Hike Little Adam's Peak in the morning before you have had breakfast. It is not difficult, but the view will make you question why you ever live anywhere else.

The Nine Arches Bridge suddenly materializes out of trees like a fairytale. If you are lucky, a blue train thunders by just as you are snapping your picture.

And the beauty of Ella is that it's not so much about the view. It's about how much space you have to linger. To sip Ceylon tea for hours on end. To talk to strangers who chat till midnight.

To remember who you are when nobody's watching.

Remain behind. Maybe two evenings. Ella has its own beat.

Day Five: Where Civilization Meets Wild

Between Ella and Yala, the road curves through a landscape hacked out like a movie set. Chilly hills yield to arid plains. Eucalyptus forests yield to thorny scrub.

Yala National Park is where Sri Lanka shows its teeth.

Literally.

Your safari driver halts tightly and puffs gently when he sees fresh leopard prints in the reddish ground. His eye roams the trees as a tracker does. A man is a guest in Yala.

Will you see a leopard? Maybe. Sri Lanka has more leopards than anywhere else on earth, but they will only condescend to reveal themselves when they please.

You'll definitely see elephants. Big, old, smart. They'll look you up, then walk away with a sense of, "You're interesting, but I have some pressing elephant matters to take care of."

Peacocks strut down the street as if they own it. Which, technically, they do.

Bend by the park. Sleep to the sounds of animals you can't even see. It's the most divine lullaby ever.

Day Six: Paradise Found

Mirissa Beach is what a painter envisions in their dreams as the ideal tropical paradise, then brings to life.

Soft golden sand that's sinking friendly but not puddle prone. Palm trees at exactly the right angle. Waves breaking in exactly the same sets.

It's here you find out why beaches are. Not for photographs. For feeling.

Bath in warm water. Sunbath beneath palm trees whose leaves filter sun into golden coins on your skin. Do nothing with the enthusiasm of a man who's learned at last.

At sunset, eat at a restaurant on the beach which is illuminated by candles packed into glass bottles. Eat crab curry. Drink an array of drinks. Hear waves which sound like the earth breathing.

This is why you're here. Even if you didn't know when you booked your holidays.

Day Seven: The Best Farewell

Galle Fort is not a World Heritage site. It's proof of the theory that beauty can survive anything.

These walls have braved Portuguese sieges, Dutch rule, British colonial rule, and the tsunami of 2004. And they're still there. Still very pretty. Still very stubborn.

Walk along cobblestone streets between 400-year-old walls. Step into art shops within colonial walls. Drink iced coffee while waves crash against stone walls.

Your final day, yet it does not feel like an end. It feels like a start.

Return to Colombo for your departure flight, yet you're not the same person who departed seven days ago.

This is what you do actually have within a week in Sri Lanka.

You are a tourist on day one. You are something different on day seven. The island does not simply carry you somewhere. It carries you somewhere within yourself.

You find you can live with disarray and be serene within. You find hot food makes absolute sense completely when you fight it no more. You find that conversing with strangers is more to the point than sociable conversation with acquaintances.

You know why Marco Polo called Sri Lanka "the finest island of its size in all the world."

Above all, you know seven days is long enough to fall in love. With a place, with an experience, with the person you become when you step out of everything you have ever known.

The Part Travel Guides Don't Mention

You'll be taking more than memories. You'll be taking a new definition of what traveling is meant to be.

You'll discover your friends asking you why you missed it. You'll struggle to explain that it wasn't about checking boxes and accumulating things. It was seven days when all your senses came alive.

The flavor of breakfast hoppers. The ring of the temple bells at morning time. The scent of tea factories. The sight of wild elephants racing. The feel of train doors swung open to mountain winds.