Sri Lanka is small enough to cross in a day and deep enough to spend a lifetime in. The famous places are famous for good reason — but they're not the whole island.

This guide grew out of years of weekend drives: chasing a waterfall someone mentioned at a tea stall, climbing a ridge because the bus stopped near its foot, swimming in a granite pool a farmer pointed us toward, finding a forgotten Dutch fort or an empty beach down a side road. None of it was planned, and almost none of it was written down anywhere we could find later.

So we started keeping notes. Which province a place sits in. The town you turn off at. How high the climb is, whether the falls run in the dry season, which beach has the surf and which has the calm. Over time the notebook became a map, and the map became this — an index you can search by where you already are and what you feel like doing.

It is independent and unsponsored. Nothing here is ranked by who paid; it's ranked by whether we'd send a friend. When a place is fragile, we say so, and we ask you to tread lightly: carry your rubbish out, ask before you cross private estate land, dress respectfully at temples, and leave the pools cleaner than you found them.