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...
Sri Lanka's digital nomad visa, which now extends to spouses and dependants and which the government has forecast will substantially increase long-stay arrivals, has changed the conversation around the island from holiday destination to genuine work base. What has not...
There is a part of Sri Lanka that the coastal traveller never sees and the highland trekker tends to bypass. It sits in the south-western interior, between the beaches and the tea country, neither one thing nor the other. It is wet, dense, loud with birdsong, and...
Our Newsletter