How to scale a mountain without leaving home

In January a friend visited me at my home in Colombo, and I promised him that we would climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (twice, actually), and there would always be another chance to do it, right?

Things changed. When lockdown came to Sri Lanka, I found I was already bored and irritable in the first week. Then I saw a cheery Facebook post about some chap called David Sharp who used his time in isolation to calculate how many stairs he would have to climb in his home to ‘top’ the various mountains of the British Isles. Virtual mountaineering, if you will. Well, I thought, why don’t I do the same with Adam’s Peak?

At 2,243m, Adam’s Peak — or Sri Pada (‘sacred footprint’) in Sinhala — is not the highest mountain in Sri Lanka (it’s fifth), but it is certainly the most famous. It’s visible on clear days from the western sea routes; mentioned in the Mahavamsa and in the writings of Fa-Hsien, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta; and sacred to Buddhists, Hindus and even some Christians and Muslims. Under normal circumstances, peak (as it were) pilgrimage season would be about now.

The standard route to the top takes two or three hours (including a lot of uneven stone and concrete steps, plus handrails), and then an hour or so to come back down, if your legs still work. Folk mostly set off in the small hours so as to be at the top when sunrise casts the mountain’s conical shadow across the plain. It’s not the Matterhorn, obviously; but it’s not comfy either. And it isn’t part of anybody’s fitness schedule — except perhaps a few monks.