Three hours inPettah.

Colombo is worth visiting. Not as a transit stop between Bandaranaike International Airport and the Galle Road, but as a city with its own irreplaceable character, one that the south coast and the hill country cannot give you. The city has a working port, a Dutch-period fort, centuries of layered trade history, and in Pettah, one of the most alive street grids in South Asia. A morning spent inside it changes the shape of a Sri Lanka journey.

The reason Colombo gets skipped is a scheduling accident rather than a judgement. Flights land late at night and leave late at night, so the city becomes the place you pass through twice while unconscious, and the day that might have been spent in it is spent on the road south instead. The fix is not complicated. One night at the start, or better at the end when you know what you have been looking at all week, converts the airport city into a place with a shape of its own.

Go before nine

The correct time to be in Pettah is before nine. By ten, the lanes between Second Cross Street and Main Street have filled to a point where forward motion becomes a negotiation with the cart traffic. At eight, you can walk the full length of the fabric lane without breaking stride. The light at that hour is sharp and low, it cuts through the arcade awnings and lands on the bolts of cloth in sections. The synthetic roll goods arrive from three wholesalers; the boys who count stock do their counts on the pavement and are done by seven.

Walk it, and dress for walking. The lanes are not built for vehicles and a car will cost you the morning; the sensible arrangement is to be dropped at one edge of the grid and collected at another. Shoes you do not mind, because the ground is wet in places and the pavement is a working surface. Carry little, keep it in front of you, and expect to be moved around by cart traffic that has right of way by custom if not by law. The heat is manageable at eight and is not by eleven, which is the real reason for the early start.

One practical warning about the day you choose. Pettah is a trading quarter and it keeps trading hours: Sundays are quiet to the point of being pointless, and Poya days, the monthly full-moon holidays, close much of it altogether. A Tuesday or a Wednesday shows you the grid at full working pressure, which is the only version worth seeing. If your Colombo night happens to fall on a Poya, spend the morning in Fort instead, where the buildings do not depend on anyone opening a shutter.

A grid organised by trade

Pettah is organised by trade in a way the rest of Colombo is not. The hardware quarter runs three streets east of the fabric lane; the spice wholesale market is another block south; the gold traders cluster near the Main Street intersection. The arrangement is historical, the product of a century and a half of trade association and family occupation. Walk the full grid and you will have passed electrical cable, dried chillies, sewing machine parts, fresh jasmine at the flower stall on the corner, and a man who repairs umbrellas from a chair that has been in the same position since anyone can remember.

Most of what you are walking through is wholesale, which is worth knowing before you try to buy anything. The quantities are trade quantities and the prices assume you are buying at that scale, so the fabric lane is a place to look rather than to shop unless you want a bolt rather than a metre. What does reward buying is the spice end of the grid, where quantities are ordinary and the turnover is fast enough that what you take home is fresh. Agree the price before it is weighed, which is the local convention rather than a defence against anything.

The mosque at the end of Bankshall Street

At the end of Bankshall Street, where the lane narrows before it turns, is the Jami Ul-Alfar Mosque, its red-and-white striped facade the one everybody photographs and almost nobody goes into. The mosque faces a small open square that at eight in the morning is part car park, part fruit stall, and part group of men in a conversation that is not about the mosque. The minaret at the south-west corner is visible from the lane before the building comes into view. That is the correct approach: arrive from the lane, not from the main road.

Whether you can go inside depends on the hour and on who is at the door, and the way to find out is to ask rather than to walk in. Outside prayer times visitors are often welcome; during them they are not, and the courtesy of accepting that without negotiation is the whole of the etiquette. Cover shoulders and knees, remove shoes where shoes are removed, and photograph the building rather than the people at prayer. The facade is the reason most people come and it is genuinely worth the detour, but it is a working mosque before it is a landmark.

Fort, and the walk between them

The Fort district, a short walk west, holds a different kind of history: the Dutch VOC warehouse, the lighthouse above the ramparts, the old administrative buildings now running at a different pace. The two quarters together, Pettah and Fort, constitute the oldest parts of the city and are best treated as a single morning, moving between them on foot before the temperature makes walking uncomfortable. Lunch belongs in the Pettah side streets: rice and curry from a room with no sign, at eleven-thirty, when the pots are still full.

Fort rewards a slower pass than Pettah does. The Old Dutch Hospital, the oldest building in the quarter, now runs as a courtyard of shops and restaurants and makes the obvious place to stop when the walking is done. The administrative streets around it hold colonnades and banking halls from three separate periods of occupation, and the pleasure of the district is architectural rather than commercial: you are reading the city's layers off its facades. It is quieter than Pettah by a wide margin, which is exactly why the two belong in the same morning and in that order.

Why we give it a night

Colombo does not perform for visitors. It is a working city that has interesting things inside it, and three hours of genuine attention to one quarter of it is more useful than a day of the standard itinerary. We include Colombo as a full night in most journeys, not a transit corridor. The guests who give it a morning are, almost without exception, the ones who are glad they did.

The other argument for the night is the food, which is among the best in the country and almost entirely missed by journeys that treat the city as a corridor. Colombo is where the regional kitchens meet: the Jaffna table, the Muslim traders' dishes, the Burgher inheritance, and a fine-dining scene that has grown up in the last decade. A morning in Pettah and a table booked properly for that evening is a better use of a day than most of what the standard itinerary puts in its place.