Most travellers who visit Sinharaja approach it from the north, through Kudawa, and leave the same way. The southern boundary of the rainforest, accessible through Deniyaya and the Rakwana hills, receives a fraction of that traffic and offers a completely different...
Ayurveda has become one of the words most casually attached to Sri Lankan tourism, printed on resort spa menus alongside hot stone massage and aromatherapy facials as though it were simply another treatment on the list. It is not. Ayurveda is a complete medical...
Budget travel writing about Sri Lanka rarely tells you what things actually cost or what choices are genuinely worth making. This post does. What follows is specific, honest, practical information that makes a budget Sri Lanka journey work well rather than merely...
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...
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