Set out early, with a packed breakfast in hand, for a Jeep Safari in Yala National Park. The first light hours are the ones that matter here: the open vehicle moves slowly along sand tracks and tank margins while your tracker reads the ground for the night's news. Yala is renowned above all for its leopard population, one of the densest concentrations of the animal anywhere in the world, and the park's dry-zone scrub, rock outcrops and waterholes make it a landscape built for patient watching rather than guaranteed sightings. Elephant, buffalo, spotted deer, crocodile and a long roll of birdlife share the same ground, and the morning's rhythm is one of stopping, listening and waiting.
Later you leave the park for the coast, a drive of approximately two hours thirty minutes to reach the historic UNESCO-listed Galle Fort. Here a guided walk takes you through the colonial streets within the ramparts: a fortified town first raised by the Portuguese and rebuilt in stone by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, still lived in today, its grid of lanes lined with merchants' houses, verandas, churches and the old lighthouse looking out over the Indian Ocean.
From Galle a further drive of approximately one hour thirty minutes brings you north along the coast to Bentota, where the pace changes entirely.
Accommodation: Cinnamon Bey or equivalent
