Sri Lanka: The Island Where Temple, Mosque and Church Are Minutes Apart

The teardrop-shaped island in the Indian Ocean - Sri Lanka - is one of those places where, in the same city, you can pass a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple, a mosque and a church within minutes. That religious diversity, without tension and without walls between people, is the first thing to surprise anyone arriving expecting "the exotic."

The entry point is Colombo, the capital, where colonial architecture mixes with modern structures like the Lotus Tower, the tallest tower in South Asia. From there the road leads to Kandy, the spiritual capital, where the Sri Dalada Maligawa temple guards a sacred relic - a tooth of the Buddha, so important through history that its keeper was recognised as the legitimate ruler of the island.

The heart of the journey is the so-called Cultural Triangle, with five of its eight sites under UNESCO protection. There is Sigiriya, the Lion Rock - 1,231 steps climbing a granite face where Prince Kashyapa built an unreachable palace after killing his father. The archaeological cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa hold temples millennia old and giant statues of the Buddha.

And perhaps the most beautiful part is no single monument, but the road between them. The train from Kandy to Ella winds through nineteenth-century landscapes, where Tamil women in colourful saris pick tea by hand on the Ceylon plantations. The nine-arch bridge, over a hundred years old, built only of stone and brick, the locals call the "Bridge in the Sky." There are places you look at, and there are places you feel - Sri Lanka is one of the latter.