Driving north from Colombo the forest soon takes over. Glossy, colour-saturated plants press up against pretty clay-tiled bungalows and century-old yellow flame trees form a canopy over the main road. There is hardly any traffic heading for the north-east coast even though it offers some of the most spectacular beaches on the island.

I have long wanted to visit the east coast after hearing Sri Lankan friends wistfully recall childhood holidays on empty beaches of soft white sand (the south coast has coarse yellow sand and a rougher sea). Trincomalee, described by Admiral Nelson as the finest harbour in the world, is also back on the tourist map. Sadly – like Mandalay and Timbuktu – the romance of “Trinco” is all in the name. It is a nervy, rundown place that needs a big cash injection to give it a future. The harbour appears largely abandoned but massive Fort Frederick, built by the Dutch 350 years ago, is still very much in use. Visitors are allowed to drive through it to visit the site of an ancient Hindu temple from where there’s a grandstand view along the coast.

A half-hour’s drive north is the Nilaveli Beach Resort, its 44 rooms bravely rebuilt following its destruction in the 2005 tsunami. Then, a 4.5m-high wall of water crashed through the rooms, killing four honeymoon couples. It is now a tourist-class hotel again with friendly staff, and the only comfortable place for visitors to stay on the north-east coast. There are a few Germans, a Russian family, and two Sri Lankan couples from Colombo. We decide that the beach does live up to its hype – just. Slender coconut palms arc over a long strand of powder-soft cream sand. Offshore lies Pigeon Island where big groupers and parrot fish nibble on the coral, which is starting to recover its colour.

One of the boatmen touting for business on the beach takes me up the creek to a large welcoming Muslim fishing village. A man hails me from his dugout. “Micky” apologises for his English. He hasn’t spoken it in a long time, he says. A long time ago, he used to be a dive instructor at a hotel that has long since vanished. Micky is returning from his land across the river where he has been able to plant a rich crop for the coming harvest season. His face beams with pleasure. “I think all my Christmas’s are coming soon”, he says. The boatman says he’s a smart man; “he knows a lot of things that most people never think about”.

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Passikudah and Kalkudah, south of Trincomalee, are once again thriving resorts after suffering hugely during the country’s civil war. Sri Lanka went through a horrible civil conflict from around 1980 until it finally ended in 2009. Life is certainly back in the region and tourism has certainly settled in. Arugam Bay seems to be where everybody is headed, where the surfing is supposed to be amazing. There is a lot of rooms for rent advertised in almost every village along the coast and even a few miles inland. Kalkudah beach is a bit run down and has dozens of families who live on the beach in makeshift fishing camps, which makes the place slightly unattractive to tourists. If the beach was cleaned up and zoned into areas for fishing and tourism, Kalkudah could be another Goa.

Sri Lanka’s Cultural Triangle located in the middle of the island is a very interesting place to visit. Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka’s ancient capital is especially interesting and is a must see of every travellers list. White-robed Buddhist pilgrims from all over the country visit its 2,000-year-old temples to light candles and place offerings of pink water lilies at the massive bell-shaped brick shrines. Known as dagobas, the shrines rise as high as 100m above the forest canopy.

At the sacred bo tree, grown from a branch of the fig tree under which Buddha obtained enlightenment, there is a queue of pilgrims clutching gifts for the guardian monks. “It usually means their wishes have come true,” says Ranji. “They have come back to make an offering of thanks as they promised.”

Anuradhapura was a famous city in the ancient world, trading precious stones, muslin, ivory and rice as far away as Greece, Rome and China. It was the capital of Sri Lanka for 1,300 years before the kings moved south and the jungle reclaimed it. A model of town planning, there were hospitals, bathing tanks for people and elephants, and tiled pavilions for visiting monks, pilgrims and foreigners.

In the north of the old city, beneath a canopy of glossy margosa trees, there are moonstone steps and staircases to monastery compounds intricately carved with elephants, horses and, most curiously, lines of tubby dwarfs dancing or acting as load bearers. The stone refectory troughs used to serve curry and rice are still in position. Some are as long as a bus; there must have been a lot of monks.

Driving south, elephants graze beside lakes dug out and dammed by the ancient kings and still in use today. A web of water channels nurtures the country’s rice bowl. At its heart lies Jetwing’s Vil Uyana, an eco-retreat built on stilts above the rice paddy. My suite is a two-storey villa and oh so chic: all cool polished concrete and warm teak with woven grasses for texture. Kingfishers sit on the bulrushes that screen the private plunge pool. The Pacific Rim-influenced food is wonderful.

Three of Sri Lanka’s greatest cultural sights – the rock fortress of Sigiriya, the medieval capital of Polonnaruwa, and the exquisite painted caves temples of Dambulla – can all be visited from Vil Uyana.

One of the surprising things about Sri Lanka is its low population, especially compared to its neighbour India, and the ease of escaping into wilderness. In the centre of the island lies the near-impenetrable Knuckles range where the cloud forest that once covered much of highland Sri Lanka is preserved. It is a treasure house of rare birds and plants and a gene pool for many cultivars.

An old tarred road hardly wider than our car climbs through tea gardens where nut-faced women pick two-leaves-and-a-bud all their lives. The scent of lemon grass fills the air. Here there are only spindly pine and eucalyptus trees.

Crossing over Corbet’s Gap is an Alice moment. We enter a different world. A rocky peak known as the Sphinx reaches for the sky above its own misty cloud forest.

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Waterfalls, lianas and giant ferns tumble down sheer rock. Clinging to the mountainside is Corbet’s Rest, a handful of clean basic bungalows with spring water showers. Chef Lal’s slow-cooked and delicately flavoured curries are worthy of a top restaurant. After the heat of the lowlands, it is deliciously fresh and cool at night.

People come here for the walking. Age-old tracks wind down through jackfruit trees, fishtail palms and giant bamboo to the valley floor 1,000m below and up through orchid-laden myrtles, banyans and myriad other species of tree that only grow here.

Such flamboyant fertility is fed by an extravagance of water that eddies into natural swimming pools. As we wade across a river, tree nymph butterflies with tissue-thin wings float past on a whisper. There are leeches but Nishantha, the lodge’s manager and my guide, sprays our legs and feet with dilute Dettol. “They hate the smell,” he says, and we walk on leech-free in flip-flops like the locals.

Pepper, coffee and rice grow side-by-side in small holdings beside pretty cottages in famously remote Meemure, a place of exile in royal times. The road is impassable to most vehicles and villagers must hike two hours to the nearest bus stop. So it comes as no surprise to bump into a road survey crew. Many of the country’s potholed roads have already been rebuilt as part of the president’s re-election campaign.

Kandy is only 58km from Corbet’s Gap but the journey takes three hours. Most tourists find it a brash, noisy place but I like the city; it is full of culture and historical intrigue. And Kandy House, in a leafy suburb, is probably the best small hotel in Sri Lanka. Built in 1804 for the last chief minister of the Kandyan kingdom, it is a large tiled villa built around a courtyard with deep verandas supported on fat white columns. There are just nine suites.

I am woken at dawn by the soft chanting of monks drifting through the teak shutters from the temple down the way. For breakfast there are perfectly-formed egg hoppers, poached eggs in a paper-thin rice basket and, for dinner, braised emperor fish.

The ebullient Tania Brassey, who lived on the Longleat Estate in England for 23 years, has returned to her native land to take the helm at Kandy House. She wrote the original Insight guide to Sri Lanka and she yearns to reveal its secret places to a new generation of visitors.

Already she has uncovered a tea estate bungalow for lunch owned by a charming but somewhat reclusive Englishman with its own waterfall pool, a walking trail from the hotel through the rice terraces to an 800-year-old cave temple, and found an expert naturalist to lead night safaris into the Knuckles in search of leopards.

It is Tania who insists I visit the British Garrison Cemetery in Kandy and find Mr Carmichael to show me around. The grandson of an English planter, who ran away to India leaving his Sri Lankan wife and children, the cemetery has become Mr Carmichael’s life. His intriguing stories behind the gravestones give a good picture of colonial life 200 years ago.

There is Oteline Rudd who died of sorrow at 37 after her husband lost everything when blight destroyed his coffee plantations, Waterloo veteran James McClasnan who died of fever after walking from Trincomalee to Kandy in the monsoon “just for an adventure” and Andrew McGill whose epitaph says “died of sunstroke aged 35”.

“He was chased by a wild elephant” says Mr Carmichael. “He ran and ran and managed to get away but he had sweated so much he died of dehydration”.

In the next field Kandy’s famous temple elephants are too busy ruminating on hay to take any notice of us. They go on parade at the Temple of the Tooth, the most sacred shrine in the country, which claims to house a tooth taken from Buddha’s funeral pyre. It is a tourist magnet and filled with pilgrims and sightseers all day long.

Much more intriguing is the 650-year-old Lankatilake Vihara temple near the Peradeniya botanical gardens where Buddhism and Hinduism coexist on the same site – as they do in many Sri Lankan temples. Here the shrines are even in the same building. At one end sits a contemplative statue of Buddha surrounded with some very fine murals; at the other end are statues of the Hindu gods Vishnu, Ganesh and Murugan.

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Murugan is a favourite deity of both Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka because he never hesitates to come to the aid of a devotee when called upon. He is also believed to hold power over the chaotic and can be appeased, through sacrifice, to bring order and prosperity.

Sri Lanka is easily the most beautiful island on planet earth – and if you ever feel like treating yourself to a tropical adventure, there is simply no better place to visit. Go Sri Lanka!

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