Category: Sri Lanka
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Colombo: Waking Up to a Fresh Start
THERE ARE TWO COLOMBOS. There’s one city that clings to its heritage past, a reminder of what it and its residents have gone through. There’s the other for the future, a signal to starting fresh almost a decade after emerging from a lengthy civil war that gripped an entire country. Returning to Colombo via train after…
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Galle: Fort Charm
GOING FROM THE HILLS to the southern coast reveals a different side of Sri Lanka. The twisting roads overlooking vast tea plantations are replaced by a highway with views of the ocean, its strong waves crashing to the shore. Palm trees line the beaches alternately filled with sleepy villages and hotels. One minute you’re looking at…
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Ella: Elevated Pleasures
WE START THE FOLLOWING DAY with our guesthouse, the Freedom Guesthouse Inn, serving us some toast, fresh fruits and tea at the terrace outside our second-floor room. The server (whose name I fail to get) is a cheery fellow and very eager to please his guests. But he seems to be a one-staff-member-team, having had led us…
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The Train Ride through the Hill Country
THE TRAIN RIDE from Kandy to Ella is so popular it seems as if you’re riding with the rest of the world – in a manner of speaking. The train is packed both with locals and tourists, and there’s no room to sit even on the floor. It seems daunting to imagine, but as we…
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Sigiriya: Around the Lion Rock
HAVING DECIDED TO SKIP a day tour of Kandy in favor of a day trip to Sigiriya, we ride a bus to Dambulla, a town in Sri Lanka’s Central Province. The province is located in a region known as the Cultural Triangle, where the heart of the Sinhalese culture lies. It was here that the early Sinhalese…
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Kandy: Our First Taste of Sri Lanka
WE’RE IN KANDY, sitting in a trishaw as the driver fearlessly snakes through the traffic in the city downtown. The scenario is so familiar for someone like me who grew up in a Southeast Asian capital city, but the driver’s audacious zigzags between buses and cars are a different level of crazy. The trishaw takes…
The Tourist Gaze 