Wilpattu is Sri Lanka's largest national park and one of its finest wildlife destinations, its network of natural lakes called villus supporting one of the highest leopard densities in Asia. Most visitors approach it from the eastern entrance near Nochchiyagama,...
Negombo has a reputation problem. It is the town most Sri Lanka visitors sleep in on the night before their flight home, the place where the beach hotels cluster around the airport approach road and the restaurants serve pizza alongside fish curry and the whole...
The road between Habarana and Trincomalee passes through one of the most active elephant migration corridors in Asia. This is not a managed wildlife experience. There are no gates, no entrance fees, no jeep convoys assembling at dawn. The elephants that move through...
Everyone who wants to see elephants in Sri Lanka goes to Yala. And Yala delivers, reliably and dramatically, which is precisely why the southern entrance to the park on a busy weekend in December looks less like a wildlife sanctuary and more like a traffic jam with...
There is a category of place that travel writing rarely knows what to do with. Not ancient enough to be historical, not wild enough to be a wilderness, not picturesque enough to be scenic in the conventional sense. The dry zone frontier settlements of Sri Lanka's...
In 2012, a team of Sri Lankan and American underwater archaeologists discovered a merchant vessel on the seabed off the southern coast near Godawaya. The ship had been carrying a cargo of glass ingots, semi-precious stones, and iron destined for the Roman trading...
The Kelani River begins in the central highlands above Hatton and descends through the wet zone interior in a series of wide curves before reaching the sea just north of Colombo. For most of its length it passes through a landscape that the average Colombo resident...
There are places in Sri Lanka where the weight of history is not in the monuments but in the geography itself. Mantai is one of them. Stand at the northern tip of the island, where the land flattens into a narrow shelf above the shallow waters of the Palk Strait, and...
The Kandyan kingdom gets the attention. Its temples, its dance traditions, its hill country setting, its carefully preserved royal history — all of it is well documented and well visited. But the kingdom that preceded it in the North Western Province, the Wayamba...
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