“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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“Plenty of sunshine coming my way….”

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.

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• 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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

Pictures of General: Sri Lanka

Coast at Galle

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

“Wonderful feeling….”

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.

© torr 2004