Taxi to Horton Plains and World’s End, private transfers at a fixed price

In practice that means a collection at the door of your hotel in Nuwara Eliya at about five in the morning, four o’clock from Ella, half past four from Haputale. At that hour the town is shut and the gates of the older properties around the lake and the golf course are chained, so give us the name of the hotel or guesthouse rather than a street and the driver will be at the gate with the heater already running. The car then crosses Ambewela, clears the ticket office and carries on to the car park at Farr Inn, the old hunting lodge that now serves as the park information centre and marks the start and finish of the loop. It stays there for the three to four hours you are walking. Park entry is paid at the counter by the gate, separately from the transfer, and the vehicle pays its own way in alongside its passengers.

The road up from Nuwara Eliya climbs through the dairy pastures of Ambewela and past Pattipola, at 1,891 metres the highest railway station on the island: thirty-two kilometres that take a good hour, longer at dawn, because the final stretch is single track, patched, unlit and shared with sambar deer that do not move for headlights. From Colombo airport it is a little over two hundred kilometres and close to seven hours of driving, so the plateau is never a first-day destination. The second approach comes up from the south, roughly eleven kilometres of switchbacks above Ohiya station on the Colombo–Badulla main line, which is how walkers arriving by train reach the park. Inside it nothing runs: no bus, no tuk-tuk, no taxi rank at the barrier. The only vehicles beyond the ticket office are the ones that brought visitors up, and yours has to be one of them.

Leave Nuwara Eliya at five so you are at the gate as it opens at six. The escarpment faces south, cloud lifts off the lowlands as soon as the ground warms, and by half past nine World’s End is usually a wall of white: the people who arrive at ten queue to photograph fog. January to March gives the clearest mornings; from June to September the south-west monsoon sits on the plateau, the wind at the edge is hard to stand up in, and leeches reappear in the forest sections. First light is around five degrees and can touch freezing, with frost in the grass on some January and February mornings, and it is mild by ten, so dress in layers you can shed. The path is close to flat by Sri Lankan standards, but it is uneven, boggy in places and stepped at the falls, so shoes matter more than fitness. Single-use plastic is banned, bags are checked at the entrance, and nothing at all is sold along the trail: carry your own water and take every wrapper back out.

Most walkers take the loop in the order that beats the cloud: Mini World’s End first, a drop of some two hundred and seventy metres, then the main escarpment about forty minutes further on, then Baker’s Falls on the way back, a twenty-metre curtain on the Belihul Oya reached down a short flight of wet steps off the path. From the main viewpoint the ground falls away to the southern lowlands, and on the clearest mornings the sea beyond Hambantota shows as a pale line. The plateau between the viewpoints is the real surprise: stunted cloud forest bearded with lichen, whole stands of it dead on their feet from the die-back that botanists have been recording here for decades, opening onto tussock grassland where sambar deer graze in the open near the visitor centre. Kirigalpotta at 2,395 metres and Thotupola Kanda at 2,357 metres, the island’s second and third highest summits, rise from the same plateau on their own far quieter trails. Birdwatchers come for endemics that live almost nowhere else: the Sri Lanka whistling thrush at first light, the bush warbler in the scrub, purple-faced langurs — the bear monkeys — in the mist.