This leg of the trip is four nights in Sri Lanka. Although we have hotel rooms in the Hilton for four nights, to do this leg we must get out of Colombo and into the countryside. Sri Lanka is about the size of Britain and is longer than it is wide. There are several choices in each direction. We are traveling with the Camels from Dubai. It took more than a half day to come up with a workable plan. Silly-sounding, but it is hard to plan. First, it took about one hour to get a guidebook in English. Then, we had to figure how to fit the destinations together when they are in different directions and several of them may be reached only by train in one direction. We headed off to the train station to get the schedules. Ha. India redux. There is no published or posted timetable that we could find that pulled all the schedules together - even for a single destination. The Intercity ticket office (which we liked a lot because it is air conditioned) sells tickets for trains from Colombo to Anuradhapura.
However, there is at least one more train a day that is accessible via ticket purchased from a different office in the same station. And, there is much, shall we say, flexibility, about the arrival time. The man selling us tickets didn't provide a specific target arrival time. For the destination of our first leg, he said four or four and a half hours. And, we read later in the guidebook that train delays are expressed in terms of "quarter day late", "half day late", etc.
We have a hard stop that we must report back to the Colombo Hilton by 4PM on Friday. We cannot be on the road between 10PM and 5AM. So, to link the destinations together into a plan, we have a fuzzy idea of where we can spend the first night. It's kind of like the old cowboy movies where the posse leader aims to try to make it to a certain destination by nightfall.