Horton Plains is the one place in Sri Lanka where you can walk to the edge of the central highlands and, on a clear morning, watch the Indian Ocean glint some 80 kilometres to the south. This is World's End, where the grassland plateau — sitting above 2,100 metres — breaks off without warning in a sheer cliff that plunges around 1,200 metres to the tea country far below. Named for a nineteenth-century British governor of Ceylon, the plateau is a cool mosaic of open grassland and gnarled cloud forest, overlooked by Kirigalpotta, at 2,389 metres the island's second-highest peak. It forms part of the Central Highlands of Sri Lanka, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2010, and shelters animals found nowhere else on Earth, including the tiny Horton Plains slender loris, once feared extinct and not photographed here until 2010.
Most walkers set out at dawn, because the weather enforces one rule: reach the edge early. Mornings begin near freezing, with frost on the grass and mist pooling in the hollows, and by mid-morning cloud usually swells up the cliff and swallows the view whole. The circular trail, about nine kilometres long, leads first to Mini World's End and then to the great precipice, where the ground drops away beneath your boots; when the cloud sea rises, it truly feels as though the world ends here. The return leg winds down through forest to Baker's Falls, a curtain of water on the Belihul Oya, while Sambar deer graze the wet grass and purple-faced langurs move through the canopy. To guard the fragile plateau, rangers search every bag at the gate and turn back all plastic, and the loop is walked one way from about six in the morning.