The Knuckles Mountain Range squeezes every one of Sri Lanka's climate zones into a single massif. At its feet the jungle is hot lowland forest; on the tops, montane cloud forest gets cold enough for ground frost to whiten the grass on January mornings. British surveyors named it Knuckles for the run of peaks that, seen from the Kandy side, look like the knuckles of a clenched fist. The Sinhala name, Dumbara Kanduvetiya, means the mist-laden mountains. The highest summit, Gombaniya, reaches 1,906 metres, and although the range covers barely 0.03 percent of the island, more than a third of Sri Lanka's endemic trees, shrubs and herbs grow within it. It shelters creatures that live nowhere else on Earth.
Mornings begin under mist that pools in the valleys and burns off toward midday, uncovering terraced paddy, waterfalls and purple-green ridges. Trails climb through dripping, moss-hung forest — loud with birdsong and home to purple-faced langurs — to open crests that break suddenly above the clouds. At the cliff called Mini World's End the ground simply stops, and a hazy plain drops away hundreds of metres beneath your boots. The weather turns without warning, the streams run cold, and leeches come with the wet, while villages folded into the hills still smell of cardamom and tea. Though it lies close to Kandy, the Knuckles stays quiet; the forest is now protected, so you enter through the conservation area, usually with a guide, on a handful of marked trails.