Taxi in Mihintale, private transfers at a fixed price

The car park sits at the foot of the main stairway, beside the hospital ruins and near the archaeological museum, and that is where your driver waits: in the shade, with no time limit. In Anuradhapura we collect from the hotels of the new town, from the properties strung along Nuwara Wewa and Tissa Wewa, and from the guesthouses on the Mihintale road; being outside your door at half past five for a first-light climb is routine here. Tell us on WhatsApp once you have booked if someone will not attempt 1,840 steps. A road loops round the hill to an upper car park that removes a good part of the ascent when it is open to vehicles, and the museum, the hospital ruins, Indikatu Seya and Kaludiya Pokuna on the far side of the hill are all reached without a single step of the main stairway.

From Anuradhapura it is about twenty minutes on the A12, the road that carries on east to Trincomalee, so Mihintale slots into a transfer day instead of costing you one. From Colombo airport allow four and a half hours for roughly 220 kilometres: north on the A3 past Negombo and Chilaw to Puttalam, then inland on the A12 through Anuradhapura, a route that never enters Colombo, which is the best thing about heading north from the airport. Sigiriya and Dambulla sit an hour and a half to two hours east, the coast at Trincomalee about two hours further on the same A12, and the Wilpattu turn-off at Thimbiriwewa is passed on the way in. There is no expressway on this axis and no railway station at Mihintale; the nearest is Anuradhapura, on the northern line. On the hill itself, everything is done on foot.

Climb before eight in the morning or after four in the afternoon. Shoes and hats come off before the Ambasthala terrace, and granite that has taken the sun since dawn is painful underfoot by midday: the complaint heard most often here, and a pair of socks in your bag is the local answer. Shoulders and knees stay covered on the upper terraces. This is the dry zone: March to May is fiercely hot, and the country is greenest after the rains that run from the second inter-monsoon into the north-east monsoon, roughly October to January. Poson Poya, the June full moon, marks Mahinda’s arrival and makes Mihintale the centre of the island for two days: hundreds of thousands of white-clad pilgrims, an all-night climb, dansal handing out free food along the verges. Carry water, because shade is scarce above the first flights, and watch your bag on the terraces: the resident monkeys go through anything left on the stone. Entry is paid at the counter on site, separately from the transfer.

The stairway climbs in four flights: the lower ones broad and shallow under frangipani trees, the upper ones steep and narrow. Kantaka Cetiya, off to the right early on, is the one visitors skip and should not: its four carved vahalkadas, set against a base roughly 130 metres round, are among the finest early stonework in the country. Higher up, the middle terrace gathers the monks’ refectory with its huge stone rice trough, the relic house, and the two slab inscriptions of King Mahinda IV, which set out in tenth-century Sinhalese how the monastery was to be run, down to the staff of its hospital. Just below, Sinha Pokuna takes its water through the mouth of a lion carved two metres high in the rock. Ambasthala Dagoba marks where Mahinda and the king are said to have met, and above it Aradhana Gala, the rock of invitation, is a bare granite dome climbed along an iron railing, short but exposed. Mahaseya, the largest stupa here at some forty metres across, holds the view over the plain and its tanks; at the base, the ninth-century hospital attributed to King Sena II still has its medicinal trough, hollowed to the shape of a body from a single block of stone.