Taxi in Matale, private transfers at a fixed price

We collect door to door in Matale town, in Aluvihare village, and from the estate bungalows east towards Rattota and Elkaduwa on the Knuckles side. Aluvihare has its own car park at the foot of the rock, straight off the A9, and your driver waits there for as long as you take — on a Kandy to Dambulla transfer the stop costs the schedule about an hour. In the town centre there is nowhere to wait on the A9 through the bazaar, so we set down at your door and park elsewhere. Leaving Kandy soon after six puts you at the rock around seven, well ahead of the coaches, which reach Aluvihare mid-morning.

The A9 is the island’s north–south spine, starting in Kandy and running through Matale and Dambulla and on to Jaffna, and it is the only sensible way in or out. Kandy is twenty-five kilometres and about fifty minutes, the crawl through Katugastota and over the Mahaweli bridge costing more than the map suggests. Dambulla is another forty-five kilometres, an hour further north. Colombo airport is roughly 140 kilometres and close to four hours: no expressway reaches Kandy or Matale, so most of the run is two-lane road, whether your driver takes the A1 through Kegalle or the quieter way round by Kurunegala. A branch railway has climbed up from Kandy since 1880, but it needs well over an hour for the same distance and manages only a few trains a day. The real bottleneck is Matale itself, where the A9 threads straight through the bazaar.

The spice gardens strung along the A9 north of town deserve a straight answer. Entry and the guided walk cost nothing, the guide knows his plants, and the botany is real: cinnamon bark peeled in front of you, a nutmeg split open to show the red mace around it, cardamom, pepper vines, a cocoa pod. It lasts about forty minutes and ends, without exception, in a shop where oils and balms cost several times what the Matale market charges. Take the walk, skip the free massage if you do not want the sales pitch attached to it, and buy your pepper and cardamom — the district’s real crops, unlike the cinnamon, which grows better on the south-west coast — at the market. At Aluvihare shoes and hats come off and shoulders stay covered, and entry is paid at the counter, separately from the transfer. With a full day and a driver, the road east through Rattota climbs to the Riverston gap and the open grassland of Pitawala Pathana, on the edge of the Knuckles range and inside the Central Highlands World Heritage site: some thirty-five kilometres of hairpins from Matale, an hour and a half each way, and worth starting early before the afternoon cloud swallows the view.

Aluvihare, three kilometres north of town, is a set of shrine caves wedged under leaning boulders, and it is where the Pali Canon was first written down in the first century BC: the teachings had been carried in memory for more than four centuries, and monks inscribed them on palm leaves here during the reign of Valagamba. The library that resulted did not survive — British troops burnt the manuscripts in 1848, during the Matale rebellion led by Gongalegoda Banda — and monks still cut ola leaves in a workshop you are welcome to watch. One cave is given over to the punishments of hell in unsparing detail, and steps cut up the rock behind the shrines lead to a small dagoba with the valley spread out below. In town, the Muthumariamman temple raises a gopuram crowded with painted figures above the bazaar, the temple of the Tamil families who work the surrounding estates. Twenty-five kilometres north on the A9, Nalanda Gedige is a small eighth-to-tenth-century stone shrine, Buddhist in dedication but South Indian in form, taken apart and rebuilt above the waterline when the Bowatenna reservoir was filled.