There is a particular freedom in arriving at a Sri Lankan bus station alone with a bag that fits in the overhead rack and no one else's preferences to consult. You can take the slow train instead of the express. You can stay an extra day in a town that everyone else...
There is a version of Sri Lanka that most people visit. Colombo to Kandy to Nuwara Eliya to Ella to Yala to Galle, with Sigiriya inserted in the middle and the Nine Arches Bridge photographed from the same viewpoint that everyone photographs it from. This is not a bad...
There is a particular kind of quiet you find at the edge of things. Where the road runs out, and the land dissolves into water. Where the sky feels wider than it ought to. Kalpitiya a long, slender peninsula curling into the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka's...
Forty thousand years ago, a people we now call the Balangoda Man lived in the caves and rock shelters of the Sri Lankan highlands, hunting the forest animals and gathering the river plants of a landscape that was already ancient when they arrived. Their descendants,...
The northern boundary of Wilpattu National Park sits in a part of Sri Lanka that most travel itineraries skip entirely, a stretch of dry zone forest and abandoned paddy land that absorbed some of the worst years of the civil conflict and is only now, gradually and...
King Parakramabahu the Great, who reunified Sri Lanka in the 12th century and built the Parakrama Samudra at Polonnaruwa, was born in Dedigama. That fact appears in the history books and then largely disappears from the tourist itinerary, because Dedigama is not...
Hikkaduwa and Unawatuna have built their reputations on accessible coral and shallow, snorkel-friendly water, and both deserve the visitors they attract. But a short distance further along the southern coast, near the busy commercial town of Matara, sits a natural...
There are places in Sri Lanka that exist entirely outside the tourist itinerary. Not because they are difficult to reach or lacking in beauty, but because they operate on a frequency that most short-stay visitors never quite tune into. Kataragama is one of those...
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