General: Sri Lanka

“I can see we’ve come at the right time of year,” my wife said, for once letting her enthusiasm run ahead of her horticultural expertise. She was gazing out at the flame-trees and bougainvillea as we were driven away from Colombo Airport. Having left a bare-branched February behind in England, perhaps she could be forgiven for being momentarily dazzled by the tropical luxuriance.

“April is a little bit more the right time for blossom,” ...
...“I see you drive on the left, like we do,” I observed, changing the subject.

“Yes, but here it is a little bit more optional.”

Within the first few minutes, four recurrent themes of our visit were thus already established: the beauty of Sri Lanka’s flora and fauna; the easy-going amiability of its people; the hair-raising character of travelling by road around the island; and the delightfully Sri Lankan concept of “a ... more

“I can see we’ve come at the right time of year,” my wife said, for once letting her enthusiasm run ahead of her horticultural expertise. She was gazing out at the flame-trees and bougainvillea as we were driven away from Colombo Airport. Having left a bare-branched February behind in England, perhaps she could be forgiven for being momentarily dazzled by the tropical luxuriance.

“April is a little bit more the right time for blossom,” our driver corrected her diplomatically, “or May.”

“I see you drive on the left, like we do,” I observed, changing the subject.

“Yes, but here it is a little bit more optional.”

Within the first few minutes, four recurrent themes of our visit were thus already established: the beauty of Sri Lanka’s flora and fauna; the easy-going amiability of its people; the hair-raising character of travelling by road around the island; and the delightfully Sri Lankan concept of “a little bit.”

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As a holiday destination, Sri Lanka is very hard to fault. If you want to lie on palmy beaches in tropical sunshine, it has plenty of them. If you want to watch elephants and crocodiles in the wild, it is easy to arrange safaris into the extensive nature reserves. If you want to visit temples and see the relics of ancient civilisations – and of more recent ones - all are present in abundance. If you want to walk among green, temperate mountains, they can be reached. If you want luxury hotels, they’re there, but so are backpacker hostels where you can stay for a pittance in western currency.

Moreover, you can enjoy all these things across most of the island in peace and security, despite recent ethnic troubles that have verged on civil war in the north and north-east, especially as the two-year-old truce seems to be holding. Tourists were in any case never terrorist targets, and the only visible signs of unrest are the military roadblocks, through which foreigners are generally waved with a smile. Crime, though not unknown, is relatively light. There are some beggars and touts who will pester you, but not very aggressively. Most Sri Lankans seem genuinely friendly and welcoming, and though you may be viewed in some parts as a mildly amusing curiosity likely to have more money than sense, you will seldom if ever feel threatened.

So what can one say against this paragon of destinations, this demi-paradise? Obviously not much, or I wouldn’t be awarding it five points out of five. A few minor niggles, perhaps, which will emerge as this review unfolds. But my main criticism is one that is perhaps more a criticism of me than of Sri Lanka – that it’s a little bit unchallenging, even a little bit bland. Somehow, for all its beauty and charm, I found it made strangely little impact on me, and I’m even not sure I would go back. But probably that’s my fault, not Sri Lanka’s.

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“Serendipity,” my dictionary tells me, is the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident, derived from the word Serendib, one of Sri Lanka’s former names. We did indeed make many happy discoveries, but I cannot pretend that they were unexpected, nor by accident.

We had undertaken some research before departing, and instead of trusting to luck and our own instincts to find our way around as we usually do, we had hired a driver who also acted as guide. We did so rather reluctantly, but we found that (i) to hire a car with driver is no more expensive than hiring a car to drive oneself, and (ii) all the advice is against trying to drive oneself, given the bumpy narrow roads, the infrequency of road-signs, and above all the habits of local road-users.

From what we saw, this was good advice, and I think we were lucky in our guide, Jaya, who was both capable and knowledgeable. Nevertheless, his presence insulated us from the more adventurous aspects of exposure to a new country – exploring, communicating with and asking directions from locals, changing plans on the spur of the moment, coping with the unexpected. Maybe it was this, rather than the intrinsic nature of Sri Lanka, that made it all seem somewhat bland.

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“Plenty of sunshine coming my way….”

Our first two days in Sri Lanka we weren’t going anywhere, just recovering from the flight at the Ranweli Holiday Village at Waikkal, a few miles upcoast from the capital. This is a pleasant enough place, slightly large for our taste, slightly formulaic, with ecological pretensions. Still, ideal for acclimatising, the heat moderated by a cool wind from the sea.

The palm-fringed beach looks as if it has been directly reprinted from a poster, but currents and undertow make sea-bathing dangerous. Much of the west coast – where most of the seaside resort development has taken place – shares this problem, and we encountered it again when we returned to the coast at Galle later in the holiday. We were told that the best bathing is to be had on the east coast around Trincomalee, in the region from which Tamil Tiger trouble has deterred tourists. Braver souls than we might head over there.

Located just 6º-8º north of the equator, surrounded by the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka tends to be hot and humid throughout the year, especially in April and May before the main monsoon arrives to clear the air. This heat is tolerable – indeed, many people would find it enjoyable – on the coast with its sea-breezes, though we took a boat upriver from Ranweli to go bird-watching, and barely a mile or so back from the shore we were soon sweating uncomfortably. In the low-lying areas inland (known as the “Dry Zone”) any westerner will find the climate sweltering, with temperatures characteristically well into the 30s Celsius and sticky with it.

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Nevertheless, it was inland that we were heading, first stop the “Cultural Triangle”. This area of northern central Sri Lanka is delineated by three former capitals – Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandy – and contains five of Sri Lanka’s seven World Heritage Sites. We tackled them in descending order of antiquity, and ascending order of pronouncability:

• Anuradhapura, the capital from the third century BC to the tenth century AD and still a sacred place for Buddhists, who comprise the majority religious group on the island. Here can be seen the Bo tree, allegedly grown from a sapling of the tree under which Buddha achieved enlightenment, with its surrounding temples and dagobas – a dagoba being an enormous bell-shaped structure built from solid bricks. The Ruvanvelisaya Dagoba is vast – perhaps fifty metres in diameter at its base and thirty metres high, whitewashed for the May full moon each year, and guarded by a curtain wall of plaster-cast elephants. Down the road is Ratnaprasada temple, built on and around an outcrop of rock in a delightfully higgledy-piggledy jumble, studded with statues and relics.

• Polonnaruwa. When Anuradhapura was overrun by the Cholas (Tamil marauders from India) in 993AD the capital was moved south-west to Polonnaruwa. Here around a lovely lake (in this case, as so often in Sri Lanka, lake means ancient reservoir, usually now overgrown with water lilies and teeming with wildfowl) are grouped more monuments: the remains of a vast royal palace covering hectares; an intricate complex of temples that once housed the tooth relic (supposedly Buddha’s own); a fifteen-metre-long reclining Buddha statue delicately carved out of a single slab of hillside rock; and another gigantic Dagoba, which we were told would have been the third highest man-made structure in the world at the time of its construction, and the highest religious one. “How do they know that?” I wondered, but failed to ask.

• Between Polonnaruwa and Kandy are two further unmissable monuments. The first is the Lion Rock at Sigiriya, a ruined palace perched on a solid pillar of rock that juts up out of a flat landscape. It looks unscaleable, but the main danger is from unofficial “helpers” plying for tips from tourists clambering up the rickety iron stairway pinned to the rock. Visitors with vertigo should stay away; those without will be rewarded by sweeping views across the jungly plain to the hill country beyond. The second consists of the cave temples at Dambulla, burrowed out of living rock and crammed with Buddha statues and brightly painted frescos.

• Kandy is also built round a picturesque lake, and is ringed by hills – for here we are on the way up to the hill country. The main sight here is the Temple of the Tooth, to which the tooth relic was eventually brought from Polonnaruwa, an elaborate and impressive piece of architecture. The other highlight from our own viewpoint was where we stayed, Helga’s Folly, a hotel so unusual that I will, Ciao permitting, devote a whole op to it in due course.

What can one say about the Cultural Triangle? It’s full of interest, unquestionably, and many of the monuments, set in the midst of tropical foliage with monkeys running wild, are attractively atmospheric. Anyone with expert knowledge of Sri Lankan antiquities and Buddhist statuary could probably spend months or even years there happily. Our knowledge, alas, is cursory and though our interest was aroused it was never really excited. The exhausting heat does not help, especially as one has to show respect by going bare-headed under the blazing sun and barefoot over the scorching gravel or flagstones. After four or five days we felt “templed out”, unable to take in any more or revive our flagging enthusiasm. I feel churlish saying this. I feel I ought to have been enthralled by such a cornucopia of cultural plenty, but I wasn’t. Perhaps we rushed around too quickly.

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From Kandy we took the train up to the hill country, having reserved seats in the observation car. If you are thinking sleek glass-domed luxury, think again. The rolling stock looks as if it dates from the days of the Raj (sorry, “British period”) and probably does, painted colonial brown, with cracks in the jaundiced glass windows. But we do have seats, albeit worn and rickety, and a view – a magnificent view, with tea-clad hillsides and winding valleys below.

In other carriages many passengers are standing, lurching as the train lurches, some of them hanging out of the open doorways to be cooled by the passage of air - I almost wrote “slipstream”, but that would imply a pace that is conspicuously lacking. The train covers the 75km up to Nanu Oya in five hours, averaging a stately 9.4 mph. The many people who use the track as a footpath have ample time to see the train coming and step aside, patiently waiting to rejoin the track when it has passed.

Kandy Station has been an education in itself, stirring half-forgotten memories of British termini circa 1950, with its brown and cream gloss paint, varnished wooden signs and its numerous offices for all the different grades of station-master. Up in the hill country, it is as if the “British period” never ended; Raj nostalgia runs riot.

We stayed in the St Andrews Hotel at Nuwara Eliya, a sort of sub-continental version of a Scottish gentleman’s country club, with tartan upholstery, mahogany-panelled billiard room, and terrace overlooking the golf course.

It is, however, far from being the stuffiest place to stay in Nuwara Eliya. The Hill Club, where we go for tea one day, lives up – or should I say down? – to its reputation. Although they no longer insist that women enter the club by a separate door, it is intimated that the “fairer sex” is still not welcome in the main bar, there being a separate “Ladies’ Bar” down a side corridor. We are accompanied by a couple we have met earlier in our travels and encountered again by chance on our way up there – he is German, she Belgian – who can scarcely believe their eyes. We have to pay for temporary membership, although it is hardly expensive at 60 rupees (35p) a head, 240 rupees for the four of us. I produce a 500 rupee note and the man on reception promises to bring me the change in the lounge, but in the event I have to chase it up when we depart. The tea is slow to arrive and unappetising on arrival, unlike the food at the St Andrews, which is excellent.

Nuwara Eliya is the hill-station to which the British rulers of Sri Lanka used to decamp en masse to escape the Hot Weather every year. Despite throwbacks like the Hill Club, it retains a curious period charm – with some characterful colonial-style architecture, tea plantations still using 19th century machinery and a golf club and race-course right in the town. All contribute to the lingering scent of a bygone age.

On our balcony at the St Andrews, musing on how much more British it is than the British, I toy with penning a spoof of Rupert Brookes’ “Grantchester.” Surprisingly, it can be made to scan, since the two words Nuwara Eliya are compressed into three syllables (pronounced Nur-ail-yah) in local speech. Yet in the end I am only really happy with the closing line:

“And is there curry still for tea?”

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“My oh my, what a wonderful day….”

One really worthwhile outing you can do from Nuwara Eliya, if you can stand the spine-jarring hour’s drive each way to reach it, is to walk in the Horton Plains National Park. Our guide, who is unfortunately “a little bit ill” that day, doesn’t stand it very well, so we go round alone, possibly missing some of the things he could have pointed out, but enjoying the sense of adventure.

At over 2000 metres above sea level, the park is definitely in a temperate zone, and the scenery resembles nothing so much as the Scottish highlands, with sambhur replacing the deer, jungle fowl (the national bird – the male plumed in bright orange, red and blue) replacing the grouse, and thankfully nothing replacing the midges.

This means it is even better for walking than the highlands, and the panorama from the precipice edge known as World’s End across to Adam’s Peak – one of the islands highest mountains – and over hills and valleys to the coast is justly famous. You have to be there early in the morning, though, before the coachloads arrive and before the mist floats up the densely wooded hillside (it is not known as “cloud forest” for nothing) to obscure the view.

While up there you can take a detour to the see the attractive Baker’s Falls, but you cannot stray far from the beaten track. Signs are there to warn that: “Walking and riding off path is extremely prohibited.”

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The next day, Jaya declares himself to be “a little bit well” again, and from the hill country we are driven down through the equally scenic Ella Gap to the southern Dry Zone.

It is time to turn our attention to Sri Lanka’s wild life. We have already seen plenty without really trying: monkeys galore, water buffalo, jackals, monitor lizards, mongeese, even a wild elephant grazing beside the lake below the Lion Rock at Sigiriya. That was a rare and lucky sighting. Wild elephants are few in Sri Lanka nowadays outside the national parks. Even the tame ones are on the wane, their working roles increasingly supplanted by machinery, and at Pinnawala we visited the rather sad and tawdry “Elephant Orphanage” that gives a home to injured or abandoned ones, who now earn their living by providing a spectacle for tourists.

The elephants at Ude Walawe National Park earn their living by fending for themselves, and they are magnificent to behold, roaming the scrubland, browsing the tall grass, lumbering down to the lakeside for a wallow. Here we also see wild boar, deer and jackals, and numerous species of bird, of which more below.

The next two nights we spend at Yala Safari Lodge, wedged between the sea and Yala National Park, one of Sri Lanka’s largest. Safaris at dawn and dusk – the best times for animal-spotting – add a tusker (a rarity among Sri Lankan elephants) marsh crocodiles, sloth bears and a rusty cat to our tally, but alas no leopards, although some are present in the Park. I never expected to be much excited by bucketing down dirt-tracks in a jeep casting around for spoor and listening for the calls of wildlife, but it’s rapidly addictive.

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“Nothing but bluebirds….”

I’ve never been much interested in ornithology either, but Sri Lanka is famous for its birdlife and we decided to take an interest. I’d glad we did. We were lucky in that Jaya was expert in the subject and extraordinarily keen-eyed. Often the car would suddenly screech to a halt, back off a few yards onto the roadside and he would say: “Crested Serpent Eagle” or “Indian Roller” or “Brahminy Kite.” After a minute or so peering in the direction of his pointing finger we would at last discern the relevant specimen.

My wife bought a book of Sri Lankan birds and took to ticking them off systematically. We had 113 species by the end of the holiday, but accumulating the score was a minor element of the fascination. I won’t attempt to describe them or this op will go on forever, but perhaps just rolling off a few of their names will convey what a colourful pursuit this was, for example: Painted Stork, Orange-billed Babbler, Rose-ringed Parakeet, Purple Heron, Pied Kingfisher, Yellow Bittern, White-bellied Sea Eagle, Emerald Dove, Red-rumped Swallow, Blue-tailed Bee-eater, Crimson-fronted Barbet, Scarlet Minivet....need I go on?

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How Jaya managed to spot birds and drive simultaneously is still beyond me. I couldn’t have managed either, let alone both.

The traffic is as colourful as the wildlife. Luridly varnished wooden-panelled trucks with ‘Fully Insured’ ominously written across their backs, little “tuk-tuk” three-wheeler taxis, ox-carts, tractors, coaches and bicycles all press for position on the narrow uneven roads. If you want to overtake you pull out and sound your horn, this being fair warning that if whatever is coming the other way doesn’t back down or swerve off the road onto the verge, you will carve up the vehicle you are overtaking and force it onto the verge on your side.

There is no aggression or road-rage in this approach. It is simply the accepted local style. The more I saw of it, though, the more certain I became that I could never emulate it and the happier I was that we had opted to hire a driver.

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Even down in the Dry Zone the vegetation is not what we would think of as dry – paddy fields are hemmed around by palms, spice gardens and cashew plantations. Apart from the nature reserves, there are patches of jungle, though these are as often scrubby as they are dense. Flowering trees and shrubs, such as frangipani and camellias, are commonplace.

We visited two botanical gardens in Sri Lanka – the internationally celebrated Peradeniya at Kandy, and a charming hill country gardens at Hakgala. My wife, who loves plants, was raving about the rare varieties to be found there, but to me the everyday flora found around the island was exotic and spectacular enough.

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Sri Lankan towns tend to be untidy, rather hectic places – open shop-fronts spilling into the street, jostling for space with traffic and pedestrians, although there is little that is pushy or impatient in the jostling.

One exception was the old walled town of Galle, the most important port on the island during the Portuguese and Dutch periods that preceded the British. This is another World Heritage site, but within the old fortifications it is a calm and peaceful place to wander, and even do some shopping. Garments and jewellery are particularly cheap in Sri Lanka, but my wife resisted the temptation to buy sapphires at what we were told – and believed – was a fraction of the European price. She did, however, fall for a limpid moonstone pendant set in silver and hung on a silver neck-chain, with matching earrings, plus further trinkets as gifts for her mother and our sons’ girlfriends, all for a total, post-haggling, of £40. Probably we were robbed, by local standards.

Certainly we paid above the local odds when eating out, since we tended to go in fancier establishments in the hope of avoiding stomach upsets. Here we would find an ample rice and curry lunch with local beer and mineral water, fruit and tea to follow would cost about 1000-1200 rupees for two, around £3 a head.

If you like spicy food, you’ll love eating in Sri Lanka. When I ordered rice and curry in one restaurant the waiter warned me – sotto voce and with a discreet smile – that it was “a little bit hot”, but in the event it proved no hotter than one would expect in any oriental restaurant in England. It is in local parlance always “rice and curry”, not vice versa, to which staple description you add a further specification, as in “rice and curry with vegetables” or “rice and curry with fish”. Whatever the main ingredient, it always comes with side dishes of dhal, chutney and pickles, and crunchy thick poppadoms.

More “international” cuisine is also widely available, especially in hotels, but we seldom sampled it.

Despite being circumspect in what we ate and drank, we did not entirely avoid tummy trouble. Few Europeans do, I understand, and this is one of the drawbacks of Sri Lanka.

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The Sri Lankan people are not only friendly, but also keen to practise their English, of which almost all have at least a smattering. We had come with a Sinhala phrasebook at the ready, but we seldom had to resort to it, which is just as well since it is not an easy language for Europeans to master.

Hotels and restaurants teem with staff, eager to assist you with everything. This is not in my view a benefit. I am more than content to lug my own bag or pull in my own chair, and I don’t need my sheet turned down and petals strewn on the pillow every night. I am uncomfortable with being waited on hand and foot, and embarrassed when service crosses the borderline into servility. On top of which there is the tricky business of deciding when to tip and how much, not to mention making sure one has suitable change to do so in the first place.

Against this, it has to be recognised that the people need the employment and that what seems like small change to a westerner can be a vital element of their income. So I fell in with their way of doing things with as good a grace as I could muster. But to me such things detract significantly from the pleasure of an exotic holiday.

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“Wonderful feeling….”

You will, I suspect, have already guessed that this was not a cheap holiday. Asia specialists Audley Travel (see www.audleytravel.com) fixed us up with a tailor-made itinerary including flights (11 long hours each way on Sri Lankan Airways – not recommended), all transfers, car with driver/guide, 17 nights b&b in good class hotels, and all fees for safaris and entry to historic sites, for about £1700 each. We could have saved a couple of hundred quid off that price by compressing a similar route into two weeks as part of a coach party with Kuoni or another package operator, but we were feeling flush after a good year for my wife’s business.

If you wanted to search for cheap flights on the web and were ready to rough it in hostels and on local transport, you could probably cut our cost in half at least, and as an experience it would be wonderful value.

Even doing it the cushy way, it was wonderful value but, as I have already intimated, doing it the cushy way may have taken the edge off the experience. Sometimes, life can be a little bit too wonderful, or at least a little bit too easy.

© torr 2004
 

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