It's not Adam's, it's mine: From Trivandrum in India we made the very easy 1 hour flight to Sri Lanka, the beautiful tear drop Island and our new home for the next 12 days. I think it is fair to say that we all fell in love with the country immediately and this love affair grew all the more intense over the following days. From Colombo to Kandy we travelled by train through the breath-taking mountainous tea plantation countryside, and from the striking lakeside city of Kandy, home of the Temple of the Tooth Relic we journeyed north to the elephant orphanage in Pinnawala where all the feeding, slobbering and general Kodak moments were enjoyed by all.

Aside: Having now been travelling for nearly a month we decided, as I'm sure many do, that a massive reassessment and cleanse of our travelling essentials was required (the point ought to be made outright that whilst we are technically travellers we are, first and foremost, women and had therefore started to accumulate new clothes, jewels, shoes and even head wear at an alarming rate in only 4 weeks). The backpacks which were already groaning at Heathrow were now screaming in Sri Lanka; their wheels were buckling, their zips were stretching and what was once a streamline, attractive and racy piece of kit had quite quickly turned into its older, lumpy and unsightly looking sister no-one wants on their arm. The spring clean began, and after the tossing out of many not-so-white white tops, any shoe that wasn't a flip-flop, jeans, jumpers and even a few bras, we all had one thing left on the 'maybe' pile to chuck… the walking boots. Every good travel book, website, seasoned expert and parent will tell you to pack them, so there we were with 3x pairs of heavy duty walking boots taking up valuable space and presenting a nightmare to pack. The challenge was set: if they hadn't been used in the next 24 hours they got the boot (pun intended)…

Adam's peak is a 7,500ft tall mountain in the centre of Sri Lanka which is famous in Buddhist tradition for the Sri Pada "sacred footprint" of the Buddha at the summit or, depending on who you speak to, the footprint Adam left on his first entrance into the world. Whoever's footprint it is, it was left at the top of one pretty big mountain! We had been told by those who had climbed the beast already that we should get going at dark to get to the top for sunrise. So at 1:30am in the morning 3 English explorers set forth in their newer than new boots to conqueror Adam's peak. It might be worth mentioning at this point that even though we were enjoying daily temperatures of around 30 degrees, Debs had managed to find herself a nasty little cold from somewhere and could be found, 10 minutes before our expedition, popping a concerning concoction of beechams flu plus, ibuprofen and malaria tablets. That said, she was raring to go and the first hour of the climb passed with relative ease - I think at one point I even uttered the faithful words, 'I don't know what all the fuss is about…'!! 20 minutes later and the gentle incline we had been enjoying changed dramatically; the steps which had been 6 inches high and 2 feet deep quickly switched to be 2 feet high and 6 inches deep. With Debs' cold now really coming into its own, leaving a trail of snot up the sacred mountain, and the burn in our legs beginning to takes its toll, we slowed the pace and an eerie silence fell upon us as we concentrated on the climb. And 2 hours later we were still going, the pace was now embarrassingly slow, the burn in our thighs was so intense it made you feel physically sick, and the change in body temperature every time you stopped for a second was so extreme you were either fighting to rip your clothes off or getting inappropriately close to the person in front of you for warmth. If this wasn't bad enough, every 5 minutesanother barefooted 80-year-old Sri Lankan woman would stride past us taking the steps 3 at a time - we were embarrassed but inspired to continue! After 3.5 hours in total we made it to the top of Adam's peak; we were shattered, aching, delirious and frozen to the bone but ecstatic to have made it. As we cuddled together and watched the sunrise over the mountains whilst the monks chanted in harmony behind us, we took comfort in the fact that we came, we saw, and yes we may ache for a week, but we had conquered Adam and his peak.