Taxi in Kalutara, private transfers at a fixed price

We collect at the door of the beach hotels in Kalutara North, Katukurunda, Waskaduwa and Wadduwa: they open straight off the Galle Road and a car can turn in. Behind Kalutara South the lanes tighten fast, and on the Calido sand spit north of the river mouth — the Kalu Ganga on one side, the sea on the other — a car has barely room to turn, so give us the property name rather than a house number. At the temple the vehicle waits in the yard on the south bank; there is nowhere at all to stop on the bridge approach, and the traffic police move cars on. Shoes come off before you enter the chaitya and shoulders stay covered. There is no ticket office here — it is a working shrine, and what you leave goes in the till.

From Bandaranaike airport the sensible line is the E03 Colombo–Katunayake expressway, then the E02 outer circular round the east of the capital, then the E01 southern expressway down to the Dodangoda interchange, signposted for Kalutara and Matugama and about a dozen kilometres inland from the coast. That is a little over a hundred kilometres and roughly an hour and a half, and it keeps you out of Colombo entirely. The old A2, the Galle Road, is shorter at some seventy-five kilometres, but it threads Moratuwa, Panadura and Wadduwa as one unbroken ribbon of shops, buses and level crossings, and two to two and a half hours is normal on a weekday afternoon. Kalutara North and Kalutara South each have a station on the coastal line. In town the bridge is the bottleneck, and everything crossing the river queues for it.

Swim between November and April. From May to September the south-west monsoon puts a hard shore break on the sand and the Kalu Ganga runs high and brown; this is the most flood-prone river basin in the country, and a wet May or June can put water over low ground upstream. Never swim at the river mouth: the outflow pulls, and the wide, safe beach is north of it. Mangosteen is the district crop and a mid-year fruit, roughly May to August, sold from stalls along the road; the cane baskets and mats hung outside the workshops on the Galle Road are woven here rather than trucked in. On poya full-moon days pilgrims fill the Bodhi, the bridge slows to walking pace and no alcohol is sold; Vesak, in May, is the busiest of them.

The Gangatilaka Vihara is the reason to stop: a modern white chaitya built hollow, widely described as the only stupa you can walk into, with a second smaller stupa at its centre and painted panels of the Buddha’s life running round the inner wall. Beside it grows the Kalutara Bodhi, held to be one of the thirty-two saplings raised from the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura, on ground that carried a Portuguese and then a Dutch fort — the Dutch took the river mouth in the 1650s and held it for the cinnamon and for the toll on everything coming downstream. About three kilometres inland at Palatota, Richmond Castle is a mudaliyar’s mansion finished around 1910, with a Burma teak staircase and a garden going quietly wild. Further inland again the Thudugala stream fills a bathing pool below a low fall.