Aruni had us at Sigiriya at five-fifteen in the morning, before the bus tours, and the lion rock was empty for ninety minutes. The same day, we had a private lunch at a paddy-field restaurant her father used to take her to. The trip felt personal in the way none of our other Asia trips have.

We took the blue train from Kandy to Ella in second class, on Aruni's specific recommendation against the air-conditioned observation car. The right call. Children played at every station, the door was open the whole way, and the engineer waved us to the front cab for the Nine Arches Bridge. Cannot be booked online; cannot be replicated.

On the second drive in Yala, our guide spotted a leopard on a tree branch from three kilometres away. He had been a tracker since he was eleven. Aruni had quietly mentioned to us at dinner that the guide had been with our camp for nineteen years and that we should ask him about the 2004 tsunami. We did. We didn't talk for a long time afterwards.