The novice monk paced the sand path slowly, concentrating on the human skeleton that hung between him and the rainforest. I squatted, scraped a couple of leeches from my trousers, then reached over and flicked one from Jan’s foot.

“It’s walking meditation, sirs,” our guide, Suresh, whispered, “Skeleton help monk concentrate on his own death.” The monkeys and birds of the jungle’s canopy fell silent. I heard the monk’s brown robe swish as he turned and began his return journey, towards a gravestone.  

“Animals quiet because rain coming very…” Suresh’s explanation was drowned by the incoming downpour, a brief affair, but so violent that it felt like the sky was collapsing. We clambered to the summit of the monastery where another monk sat meditating on a bamboo platform, facing a vast expanse of jungle that steamed in the breaking sunshine. In the far distance a rectangular granite peak rose from a range of hazy green hills. 

“There is Uthuvankanda, the sacred mountain,” Suresh said, “We go there first, before the highlands...”

Three days later, having pulled ourselves up the last near-vertical 100 metres of thick, muddy, leech-ridden jungle, we caught our breath at the revered summit, enjoyed the panorama, and then hiked onwards, down into a real-life Jungle of Eden. Everywhere was food. Papaya, passion fruit, guava, mango, coconut, orange, pepper, cashew, almond, lime, banana, pineapple and jackfruit, to name but a few, all hung from trees or bushes growing beside the track. Suresh pointed out multicoloured birds, frogs, water lizards and rat snakes, which he was particularly fond of (“No worry sirs, them rat snakes, very friendly snake sirs, yes”) and on one occasion a huge hornets’ nest, which he was mortally scared of (“Shh, no noise, seven hornets stings same as cobra bite, we die!”).

We traded the jungle for village life and fell into step behind an elephant. I’ve seen elephant plenty of times before, but never so close that I could study their skin moving like a pair of baggy old grey trousers whilst they moved. As he walked, driven on by his mahout (owner), men rushed from houses to touch his swaying underbelly.

“For luck,” Suresh explained. “Come sirs, we follow him.”

The elephant turned off into a mud lane and ambled down to a river, where 40 or 50 of its friends were already splashing around, watched over by their mahouts. A group of youngsters lumbered across the river and began to make off into the jungle, forcing their mahouts to yell for five minutes and, when that failed, chase them back with the aid of long sharp sticks.

“Elephant has big ears, sirs,” laughed Suresh, “but he doesn’t listen very much.” The sight of the animals interacting, trumpeting and spraying red mud over themselves and their babies, gave me a real funny feeling deep in my stomach. At least, I think it was the sight of them. Or maybe it was all that curry I’d been eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Two days later I was still dashing to the toilet every hour. And we were due to climb Adam’s Peak, Sri Lanka’s holiest, and at 2,243 metres, its fifth highest, at 6am.

“D’you think you’ll make it?” Jan asked.

 “It’s what we came here for isn’t it?” I replied. “I have to make it!”

What macho nonsense. Weakened by sickness I buckled with stomach and leg cramps at about the 1,700 metre mark. I encouraged Jan and Suresh to go on but with torrential rain falling, as it’d done for the previous ten hours, they were eager for an excuse to quit, and I was it. We sat resting in an open-sided temple for half an hour as barefoot men, their skinny legs bloody with leeches, passed us carrying loads of wood and corrugated iron on their heads. On the opposite slope of the valley Tamil women stood waist deep among emerald green bushes, picking tea. Suresh said they were lucky if they earned £1.50 a day.

“Let’s go have an Arak,” Jan said, realizing, as I did, that if our only problems were a case of the runs and a missed summit then we were flying. “Put our feet up for a bit…”

We walked into Horton’s Plains National park the following dawn. The air was alive with the call of small frogs, their ‘plink plink’ sounding like the high notes of wooden glockenspiels. Sambur Deer pawed beneath bright red rhododendron bushes, feeding nervously on wet grass, whilst behind them silhouetted troupes of purple faced leaf monkeys crashed through the misty jungle canopy. They scattered screeching as we pushed on into their midst, clutching at thick swathes of bamboo, descending first to Bakers Falls and then on through thick red mud to World’s End, a viewpoint separated from Sri Lankas’ second and third highest peaks by an 880-metre near vertical chasm. To our right the land sloped away to reveal dazzling rivers, lakes and tea estates.

“We have a choice,” said Suresh, “We take a five hour steep path to a lodge down there,” he pointed into the chasm, “Or we walk a two day circle to same lodge, through tea plantations and villages.”

We had time to spare, and a wish to see more of local life, so we decided on the latter. That afternoon we reached the bungalow of a tea estate manager, a fervent Anglophile, who had no hesitation in offering us his spare room when we told him the nearby guesthouse was closed. His staff served tea as we relaxed in a wood panelled sitting room decorated with an old world globe, a quarter of which was still painted red, and paintings of Buckingham Palace and Parliament. From the window I could see ladies picking tea above us, working nimbly on steep slopes that the average western hiker would think twice before tackling without ropes. Grasping my camera I scrambled up, asking for pictures.

“Of course,” they smiled, “Why not?”

The route onwards from the bungalow was a well trampled path through pine forest and jungle. Swathes of lemon grass gave up its citrus scent as we brushed forward silently, hoping to catch leopard, monkey or deer by surprise. The day was a national holy day for Buddhists and Hindus alike, and almost everybody had time off to celebrate. In Tamil villages women in their best shiny saris sat chatting outside gaudily decorated temples. Music blared from battered loudspeakers, speeded up and distorted and sounding like ‘Pinky and Perky sing Bollywood.’

A man clad entirely in white sat cross legged in the grounds of a simple temple, meditating under a broad tree. We left him in peace but returned to the spot later, lit dimly by the full moon and dancing fireflies. The temple was empty save for a solitary monk. We stood with our backs to the jungle, where frogs and cicadas hid behind a wall of noise, as he peeled a lotus flower and chanted the Puja in the ancient language of Pali.

“I offer this flower to the Lord Buddha…as it blooms, fades away and dies, so does our life…”

We approached the Bambarakanda Falls which, with a drop of 241 metres, are Sri Lanka’s highest, through glittering green paddy fields - over which golden Orioles and turquoise Kingfishers floated, searching for snakes - and deep jungle. Monkeys lounged in wild mango trees, taking single wasteful bites of the fruits before dropping the remainder on us. Locals grinned widely, their mouths red from chewing beetle nut stimulant, as they showered under waterfalls. And vines and creepers, covered by fallen leaves, waited patiently, strewn across every jungle path, ready to twist the ankles of hikers who were looking up when really they should’ve been looking up, down, and all around.

We’d imagined the falls to be crowded with tourists or at the least served by rows of ramshackle tea and souvenir shops. But as we swam in the pool at their base we were alone, save for a haze of yellow butterflies, dragonflies and swallows swirling about our heads. I floated on my back enjoying the rainbows that formed in the spray. We were coming across new things every day so tranquil times like these were important, to process what we’d seen and clear the head ready for the next new experiences, which we knew would be hitting us full on once again very soon.

“We stay here for few hours, sirs,” said Suresh, “Then we walk down into lowlands. Very big herds of elephant we see tomorrow, and large vegetable market, with snake gourds, you never saw them before, and white temples full of monkey also…”