The Mount Lavinia Hotel, Colombo

Built in the early years of the C19th as the British governor's residence, extensively rebuilt in the 1820s and used in the Second World War as a British military hospital, the Mount Lavinia is a stunning colonial building wrapped around a beautiful small beach. It's all teak and brass, white walls and colonnades. It is without a doubt one of the most impressive colonial buildings you'll come across in Sri Lanka - a country with a rich stockpile of amazing colonial buildings (the Galle Fort Hotel is one such - and an excellent hotel to boot).

It's also thoroughly neglected.

The evening we arrived, the hotel reception and bar areas were liberally provided with a collection of buckets, from coloured plastic pails through to white plastic tubs, and soggy towels. The bar area was shut because of the water. There had been rain that day, we were told.

Bring a bucket for monsieur! 

And I'll chuck in a free signed copy of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller 

to the first commenter who identifies the film that quote comes from.

Sri Lanka gets a lot of rain in general - and Colombo's wettest average month is October when the city gets something in the range of 300ml of rainfall. London in the same month could expect perhaps 70ml. So rain is hardly a surprise, is it? And if you're going to dot your five star 'breathtaking colonial experience' reception with buckets, couldn't they at least be brass or branded? Paint tubs are hardly de-rigeur.

Our room was old and dowdy, the ancient green patterned carpet was stained. The sheets were also stained, something I regard with mild horror in hotels, no matter how washed those sheets have been. There were no bathrobes or slippers, although there were tea and coffee facilities and a minibar. The vintage AC worked. The bathroom was old but clean and functional. The balcony, overlooking the palm-lined beach and giving a view across to the main hotel restaurant and terrace areas, was a place of sublime and magical beauty. The stormy evening added to the sheer gloriousness of it all.

Although shuttered by the rain, the bar off reception was open for business. The seating in the bar area is strange, more suited to being a waiting area for reception than a bar. It certainly lacked any romanticism or link to the hotel's much-touted colonial heritage. Large blue sofas around chunky coffee tables are more suited to large groups than romantically inclined couples and the service was slow.

The bar area, as many of the hotel's other surfaces, was dotted with palm shoots in terracotta trays. These, we were informed in a leaflet, were part of an earth day project to 'give back to the community we gain so much from'. The hotel buys the seeds, plants them until they sprout then gives them back to the community the seeds come from so they can plant them along the river banks. Quite mystifying, really, sort of greenwash without a point.

Escaping the drip of water into plastic buckets and the frigid AC in the lobby bar, we went upstairs to eat, only to find the only choice in town was the Indian theme night at the hotel's gorgeously Victorian Governor's Restaurant. We stayed at the Mount Lavinia because of the food - the executive chef here, Chef (Dr) Publis Silva, has published a number of popular Sri Lankan cookbooks. So we were looking forward to a lively menu of Sri Lankan specialties rushing out of a bustling, world-class kitchen. This, we fast found out, was not going to happen.

Meeting cookbook author and Mount Lavinia's executive chef, 

the engagingly eccentric and 78 year-old Chef (Dr) Publis Silva. 

That's a story for another day but it was a strange, 

strange encounter in which he promptly sold me a cookbook.

The Mount Lavinia really only has Governor's Restaurant - although its website talks about seafood cove (open air dining on the beach) and the terrace (open air dining at the poolside), there is really only one restaurant as such. Especially when it rains, which it does quite a bit in Colombo - as we have already discussed. Governor's has an open air area and closed, air-conditioned area. There is an á la carte menu, which is a pretty standard walk through coffee shop fare the world around. And there is a buffet - offering, on the night we were there, the delights of India. There was also a smaller area of Sri Lankan food on offer.

We'd been looking forward to fine Sri Lankan food flung together by the best in the business. What we got was a fight for a table (reception had told us not to bother booking, we could just rock up. Rocking up, we were told all tables were reserved. A short, taut conversation later we had a miraculous table appear) in the restaurant's enclosed area.

And what an area. It's a Victorian tea-room, white pillars reaching up to the far ceiling, panelled teak windows all around. It reminded me of the achingly beautiful Cinnamon Room at Galle's Lighthouse Hotel and, for all I know, this room could have inspired architect Geoffrey Bawa to build that very lovely (and hopelessly bad) restaurant.

The buffet was, well, lazy. There were two dishes of each salad on the salad buffet, one in front and the one behind a repeat in case the front dish ran out. Nothing stood out, it was the usual melange of seafood in dressing, green salad, beef in vinaigrette and the like. The hot Indian food (not really matched up with Indian starters to any great extent we could see) was a standard rolling out of Northern staples - chicken makhani, dal makhani and the like.

The Sri Lankan food suffered from being piled up in large containers, slowly steaming away for hours and becoming tough and dull in the process, rather than being cooked in small batches and frequently refreshed. A black pepper mutton was spicy, hot and tough, the beef was also tough. The fish curry was tasty, but the fish flaky and dry. A lotus root and yam curry was overcooked by the time we reached it. The hoppers were cooked live and were stunning, light and crispy with a soft heart - and served with a rich onion sambal that wasn't as hot as most you'll find on offer with hoppers. These were the best we've ever had but, tellingly, they were the only things on the whole buffet that were freshly made.

The desserts were awful. Tiramisu is made from mascarpone cheese and egg yolks, 'lady finger' sponge dipped in coffee or, better, liqueur- not Polyfilla-like imitation cream and chocolate sponge. Many of the other desserts defy description. The 'creme brulee' was floury, tasteless and the sugar topping was soggy.

The service was pretty much as bad as you'd get. With absolutely no food knowledge on offer, the waiters were disorganised and appeared to be randomly assigned. Getting any request met was down to spending minutes on end waving your hands and crying out at them as they ran past avoiding eye contact with any of the tables. The whole wearying thing cost twice as much as dinners in other hotels we'd stayed at during our trip.

We left the Mount Lavinia totally perplexed at how you could make so little from so much. it's lazy, there's no other way to put it. There is every reason to invest in this hotel, to re-evaluate the limited facilities and shabby furnishings and come up with something truly outstanding that delights and inspires - a hotel that lives up to the standards and expectations of that rich colonial history. It's a beautiful building, but the colonial heritage schtick doesn't go deeper than the structural level. Everything else is just bleh. As it is right now we wouldn't go back if you paid us. We just thought it was all such a terrible shame.

The Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel, Nuwara Eliya

Scotland? Nope, Sri Lanka. Exotic tropical flowers rub shoulders with fuschia 

and pink roses in the rich gardens of Nuwara Eliya's Warwick Gardens Hotel.

Jetwing, often for some reason called Jetwings, is a major Sri Lankan conglomerate with interests in the travel and tourism industry and ownership of a large number of hotels across the country. The company's hulking luxury buses ply the tourist routes, the Eddie Stobart of Sri Lankan tourism. I had past experience of one of those hotels, Galle's achingly beautiful Lighthouse Hotel, a building designed by much-celebrated Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa.

Bawa's extraordinary architectural vision places the Lighthouse Hotel in every coffee table book of 'funkiest hotels in the world' and it's always to be found in collections of 'lovely hotels' - the camera loves its clean lines mixed with visionary statuary and yet the truth is, when you get up close to it, the hotel is at best unkempt and at worst shabby. It is also home to the mind-numbingly beautiful Cinnamon Room - the restaurant at which, readers will by now be weary of being reminded, I had The Worst Meal Of My Life.

We had also endured a week of public school-like misery at the hands of a 'boutique small hotel' in Sri Lanka, the dubious, woeful and rat-piss spattered charms of Galle's Sun House Hotel.

So booking the Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel - a boutique small hotel - as our overnight stay in the lush, cool highlands of Nuwara Eliya was something of a leap of faith. Or lunacy. You tell me.

On paper it looked stunning - C19th planter's house restored check, different out of the way experience check, uniquely stylish way to spend a Nuwara Eliya night check. But still there was a niggle. What if it were, you know, just not very good after all that? What if the TripAdvisor reviews were all so starry-eyed at the splendour of the place they missed the things that make somewhere truly special, not just decoratively exceptional?

We approached the hotel from the Ambewela Dairy Farm side, a dumb move that we only had ourselves to blame for. We're hooning around in a charcoal Lexus minibus and the increasingly precipitous road through the mountains starts to become no laughing matter as the daylight begins to fade. There are yawning chasms inches away to our right as we negotiate the narrowing single track mountain road which becomes barely road and mostly track. Still it wends up through the misty hills and we've stopped talking. Everyone's nervous as Duminda skillfully wrestles with the wheel and guides us past those awful drops and crumbling margins.

The silence bears down on us, the engine becomes something to focus on as its note rises and falls.

Finally we come across a sign. It's a right turn off the track. We take it and meet an even narrower track. There's no tarmac, this is compressed mud and pothole. We bounce and judder down into a valley only to see another track leading upwards, two concrete runners have been laid down, but they're smashed and cracked. White-painted rocks mark the route of the narrow, precipitous track upwards. The Lexus strains as Duminda tries to slow for the potholes and yet maintain enough momentum to take us up the rain-slicked incline. The edge seems very near indeed and then we hit a tight hairpin. It's too much, we have to reverse and re-take it. Bouncing and creeping, we negotiate the iniquitous track and finally draw up outside the old plantation house that is the Warwick Gardens.

It's glorious.

As far as I understood the story told me by the house's factotum as we stood on the lawn looking out over the mountains the next morning (there is a guest-facing staff of three, said factotum, a housekeeper and a chef), a Scottish planter by the unlikely name of Lemon (we tried looking up Lennon, but both come up blank) built his home from home here up in the temperate hills of Nuwara Eliya in the 1880s. He thrived here, with a massive plantation estate of some 10,000 acres.

The family stayed until 1940, selling up to a Sri Lankan chap by the name of Fernandes and he ran the estate until the nationalisations of 1971-2. This was a black period in Sri Lankan history, when the government took to its own any and all plantations over 50 acres, particularly focusing on foreign-owned estates but, it seems, even Sri Lankans weren't safe. His proud mountain kingdom reduced to 50 acres, Fernandes had a heart attack and died of grief.

Thirty years later, the house - a ruined shell in the hills - was discovered by Jetwing chairman, Hiran Cooray and he, his wife and architect Channa Daswatte took to restoring the house to its original glory. Every bit of woodwork is new, the furnishings, fixtures and fittings all selected tastefully to recreate the glory of that 'Grand highlands house in a foreign land' the original owner had set out to create in the middle of his lush plantation.

The result is a very special small hotel indeed.

The living room gives into the formal dining room. Can't stand eating with other guests? 

Find a hotel for the socially inadequate, then...

Two dining rooms (the formal dining room with a ten-seat table and the pantry with a smaller table) and a drawing room and study form the 'front of house' downstairs (there's also a pantry and kitchen).

Informal dining in the Pantry...

There's a ceiling-high tapestry on the dogleg of the stairs and then a landing leading to the other rooms. Behind the tapestry is a secret staircase to the glorious 'White Room' - originally called the Netherleigh Room. This is where we stayed - a minimalistically stylish room with an equally stylish bathroom attached to it, complete with walk-in shower and claw-footed bath. If you ever go to this hotel, book this room. Just do it. The views out over the stepped country-house lawn and peaks beyond alone are worth it.

Dinner consists of no menu. What sort of thing do you like? Sri Lankan? European? Chicken? Fish? What floats your boat? We plumped for Sri Lankan and settled down for drinks in the living room. Our host pours a serious G&T.

A long while later we wandered over to the dining table and enjoyed a meal of rare finesse, a chicken curry, vegetable curry, breadfruit curry, dal and string hoppers together with a spiced coconut sambal were subtle, spicy and served piping hot. A dessert of set yoghurt and a traditional Sri Lankan set pudding followed by coffee (from the estate's own plantation) and a battering, flashing thunderstorm whipped up almost to order, with rainwater cascading off the house. There's magic in the air.

The post-storm night is noisy. All sorts of things bump, croak witter and caw through the dark hours. And it's majestic. The morning sunlight floods the white room as we pull open the heavy curtains.

Walking in the Warwick Gardens' gardens is a morning delight...

Breakfast ("What would you like for breakfast?") was an omelette for Sarah and, for my part, bacon, sausages and eggs. With toast, home made preserves (including jam from the strawberries grown on some of the 30 acres of land remaining to the house) and more of that excellent coffee. Then a walk around the grounds, fresh from the night's rain, the channeled streams muddy with the night's run-off.

The staff are knowledgeable, charming and couldn't do more to help. The water in the bathroom is hit and miss - really not consistent with the rest of the experience on offer. There's nothing quite like standing, freezing and covered in suds waiting for the other room to turn off the tap to make you count quite how much you're paying for your boutique small hotel experience room. That's my only complaint - apart from the mad track to the house.

But, by golly, this is a special place made more special by its staff. I have no hesitation recommending it heartily to anyone who wants to do something outstanding and memorable at least once in their lives. I'd rank it alongside Ballymaloe, The Clarence and Auchterarder House as one of my favourite hotel experiences ever.