Five days built around one night. Five and a half thousand steps in the dark, a summit shrine at first light, and the shadow of the mountain thrown across the cloud.
Prices are not published yet — every journey is quoted for your dates and group size.
At the top of Śrī Pāda — Samanaḷa Kanda, Adam's Peak — there is a hollow in the rock about a metre and a half long. Buddhists hold it to be the footprint the Buddha left on his third visit to the island. Hindus attribute it to Śiva, Muslims and some Christians to Adam, and Portuguese-era sources to St Thomas. It has been climbed by all of them, together, for at least a thousand years, and Ibn Battuta wrote about doing it in 1344.
The pilgrimage season runs from Unduvap Poya, the December full moon, to Vesak Poya in May. In season the stairway is lit through the night and lined with tea stalls and resting places, and on a Poya weekend tens of thousands of people are on it. Out of season the shrine is closed, the lights are off, and it becomes a serious unsupported mountain walk in leech country. We only run this journey in season.
Climbing in the crowd rather than avoiding it is the whole point. You will be overtaken by families carrying sleeping children and by people in their seventies who have done it forty times. First-time climbers are traditionally called kodu kārayā and are looked after by everyone.
Met at the airport and taken to Kelaniya Rāja Mahā Vihāra, one of the sixteen sacred places and the site of the Buddha's third visit, for the Solias Mendis murals and the evening pūjā. Then east and up, to Kitulgala or Ginigathhena for the night.
Divāguhāwa — the Batatotalena cave near Kuruwita, the fifth of the sixteen, where the Buddha is held to have spent a day in meditation on the journey to the peak. It is a working village temple in a cave mouth, with almost no visitors, and it is the right way to approach the mountain: from below, in its own tradition.
Afternoon at a tea estate on the Ratnapura side, then on to Nallathanniya (Dalhousie) at the foot of the climb. You will see the summit lights come on at dusk.
A deliberately empty day at 1,200 metres so that you are not climbing on the back of a long flight. A short walk to the Seetha Gangula, the cold river where pilgrims wash before starting, and up the first two hundred steps to see what they are like. Early dinner at six, in bed by eight.
Tea, and away at two in the morning. The path runs about seven kilometres and a thousand metres of ascent, almost all of it on steps, and the last kilometre is steep enough that there are handrails on both sides. You stop at the tea stalls, you ring the Gaṅgulātenna bell, and you keep going. Most people take three to five hours.
At the summit: the Śrī Pāda shrine over the footprint, the flag pole, and the bell that pilgrims ring once for each time they have completed the ascent. Sunrise from the ridge, and — if the air is clear — the ira sevaya, the perfect triangular shadow the peak casts onto the cloud to the west. Down through the morning, which is harder on the knees than the way up, and then you sleep.
Down out of the hills to Kandy for the evening Thevāva pūjā at the Sri Dalada Māligāwa, where drummers announce the opening of the inner shrine holding the tooth relic — a fitting place to end, and a very different kind of devotion from the mountain. Then the airport. For later flights we add a night in Kandy instead.
Not included: international flights, the ETA visa, travel insurance (required, and it must cover the ascent), lunches and dinners other than those stated, personal expenses, and the porters some pilgrims hire.
Notation lifts to the photograph. Every image here is a real, freely-licensed photograph of the actual site.
The season and the Poya calendar decide everything here. Tell us when you can travel and we will tell you which nights are climbable and which will be shoulder-to-shoulder.
