Colombo Fort Station - Beware "The Tourist Information Office"

We determined that we would travel by train in Sri Lanka.  Having experienced the joys of near-suicidal driving in places like Pakistan, India and China, we weren't keen on the idea of long-distance buses or cars, so we opted for the train.

We were bound for Sigiriya, in the North Central Province.  We tried to plan our rail journey  before we arrived.  This was hard for two reasons.

First, there is no official map of the Sri Lankan railway network, so it's hard to work out which train you need to catch.  There is a helpful official timetable on line - but it does rely on you knowing where you want to go.  

We couldn't find a map of any description that actually showed all the stations - so it took a bit of figuring out how to get to Sigiriya. 

There seems to be an expectation that tourists won't travel by train (when we emailed the hotel asking which station to get off at, we were told we needed to talk to a sister company for excursions). 

Persistence prevailed, and we learned that we needed to get off at Habarana, on the Batticaloa line.

The next issue was booking tickets.  While you can book railway tickets up to 46 days ahead, you have to do that at a railway station. 

You can't do it from abroad (except from some tourist train that go to kandy). We were arriving on a Friday, and leaving for Sigiriya on Saturday, so we had to go to Colombo Fort railway station on Friday afternoon to book our tickets.

We caught the bus to Colombo Fort Station.   It was a bustling and busy place.  

At the front of the station is "Tourist Railway Information Office". We went in and explained to the helpful man that we wanted two tickets for tomorrow to Habarana.

He told us that there were no trains to Habarana the following day. He then told us that it wouldn't be possible to catch any other trains to the north because they were full.  "Everyone wants to travel by train for the end of Ramadan," we were told.

As it turned out, this was either a bare-faced lie, or the man knew so little about what he was talking about that he should not have been working in a tourist information office. 

He did offer us an alternative - he could arrange a first class ticket to Kandy for us tomorrow, and then arrange a driver to take us to Sigiriya for four days.  This would cost us the princely sum of USD 316, not far short of our total budget for two weeks (we had prepaid accommodation), so we graciously declined his offer.

Instead, we went in search of a ticket counter where we could buy a ticket to Habarana.  The station has separate ticket counters in separate places for separate lines. 

They are not well-signposted.  We kept being told we were in the wrong place and that we needed to keep moving down the station.

We eventually found the ticket counter for Habarana (if you are ever in search of it, its ticket counter 16 - start on the left hand side of the station as you look at it).  

We had to queue for a bit (and guard our place in the queue carefully, because Sri Lankans don't like to queue very much), but we eventually secured our tickets to Habarana. 

There was no first class service on the day in question - s we settled for second class tickets at LKR 640 (USD 4.80) - substantially less than the USD 316 we had been quoted for travel via Kandy with a driver.