Self-Driving in Sri Lanka: What You Need to Know Before You Start the Engine

Self-driving in Sri Lanka gives you a freedom that no other form of transport can match. The ability to stop at a tea stall on a hairpin bend in the hill country, to pull off the road when something beautiful happens in the landscape, to detour down a dirt track to a temple that appears on no map: this is the dividend of having your own vehicle. It comes with a cost.

Sri Lanka drives on the left, which is familiar for visitors from the UK and Australia and a full-body recalibration exercise for everyone else. The road surfaces vary enormously: the expressways are smooth and fast, the A-roads are mostly fine, the B-roads become progressively more challenging, and anything beyond that is genuinely agricultural. The hill country roads are narrow, winding, and frequently shared with buses that have strong opinions about their right of way.

Hire a driver for the hill country sections if you are not confident. The roads between Kandy and Ella in particular require a specific kind of attention that is exhausting if you are not accustomed to it. A local driver who has been doing this road for years will get you there faster, more safely, and with considerably less elevated cortisol.

For the coastal roads and flatter sections of the country, self-driving is genuinely excellent. The Southern Expressway from Colombo to Galle takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. The A2 coastal road, slower and infinitely more interesting, runs along the southwest coast through every town and village between here and Galle with the ocean appearing between the palm trees every few minutes. Take the expressway one way and the coast road the other. This is the correct approach.