There's a Twenty/20 cricket tournament in Sri Lanka just now, but there are other reasons to visit, as Dunedin man Jim Guest discovered.
"Why Sri Lanka?," people asked.
The answer before travelling was that it seemed a slightly intrepid destination full of rich possibilities, and the answer now is that it is not as intrepid as thought, but exceeded expectations. It is a great destination for a break from the southern winter, but with a developing country edge to it.
An island nation snuggling up to the east coast of India, it holds 21 million predominantly Sinhalese people on 66,000 square kilometres. It has extensive beaches and warm ocean culture, lush jungle, but also cool and misty high country known for tea growing.
Our first three nights were at Colombo, arriving late at night and using a prearranged transfer to the Galle Face Hotel on the coast. This hotel claims to be one of the oldest in the world, and is a restored colonial-era building. Its historic atmosphere provided a great start to the trip.
On the first day in Colombo, we pushed ourselves to walk around the city in humid heat in the high 30s but gave in to using a three-wheeler tuk tuk once. It was monsoon season, but we would hardly have known. The locals said the weather had been drier than usual, and we barely saw rain. However, the humidity was high - the kind of conditions where a cool beer sweats puddles of condensation as if mimicking the person contemplating it.
There are many interesting attractions in Colombo, among them the Dutch Museum, the bazaar, the "Old Dutch Hospital", and a walk around the many old colonial-era buildings. The Dutch were the prominent earlier occupiers in Sri Lanka's history, using it as a powerful trading base. They had, however, followed Arabs, who were there during what Europe experienced as "the Dark Ages", and the Portuguese arrivals of the 1500s. The more familiar "pink on the school atlas" Ceylon, as part of the British Empire, came later, during the early 1800s.
The Dutch Period Museum is an old Dutch merchant's mansion, and it contains many interesting items, particularly furniture. The Old Dutch Hospital is a restored structure, and now houses many nice tourist shops and restaurants.
Local prices, even the "foreigner prices", which are considerably higher than "local prices", are quite reasonable by New Zealand standards. A top meal with a couple of glasses of wine is less than $80 and considerably less if you drink beer instead of wine.
Colombo, as with many other places in Sri Lanka, has some very nice hotels, and a wide range of choices for great eating.
The tourist industry seems a little shy in promoting Sri Lankan food, which is sad, so good Italian, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese food can be had.
However, the Sri Lankan food must not be missed. It can be found in safe tourist eateries, which probably is only where it should be eaten. Sri Lanka still has a little way to go with food hygiene standards, although our guide assured us that everything is becoming stricter, and health inspectors no longer take bribes to look the other way. This still did not fill us with confidence.
The level of hustle in Colombo (and elsewhere) was not as bad as we thought might be the case.
But it is there, nevertheless, although somewhat good-hearted. The endless "taxi? I take you around the sights for 500 rupee ..." is OK, but being tailed from the hotel by people trying minutes later to engage you in conversation leading to a commercial transaction is a bit tiresome. Most travellers have heard the line "ah, New Zealand, I have friends in New Zealand ...", but this was the first time I heard "I am from your hotel and I am an authorised guide" (which is nonsense and warned about by the hotels).
After three days in Colombo, it was a six-hour drive up to Nuwara Eliya in the high country. Our driver and guide Ranil was very informative about aspects of Sri Lankan culture and economics, along with a not unanimously appreciated exposition about the faults of women drivers. On sensing some contention, he magnanimously acknowledged that some men actually "drive like women".
At more than 150m up, the weather in the high interior is more like a Dunedin autumn, and there was often mist around the hills. At Nuwara Eliya, we stayed at another restored hotel going back to the early 1800s.
The Grand Hotel was beautifully presented, and a delight to stay in. It has large manicured gardens in the English country garden style.
The hotel was run in a very English manner - even a dress code in the dining room. The food was great, and although it tried to please all tastes, I stuck with the Sri Lankan cuisine and loved it. On the last night there, we observed the strangest mix over dinner, and lingered for a while to absorb it. A Sri Lankan band was playing Santana, a Japanese group was having a real party with members getting up and line dancing (yes, to Santana), and Arab couples with the women in full burkas and face veils looked on and took photographs.
At breakfast the following morning, the same group was added to by eight Buddhist monks. What they were doing in an opulent dining room, I cannot imagine, but they were enjoying themselves. When an Asian woman came in and saw the oldest monk, she immediately and hurriedly removed her shoes, dropped to her knees and bowed very deeply.
A side tour from Nuwara Eliya was a drive to the tea-growing area and a tea factory. Tea plantations are beautiful, and the area covered by tea plants is extraordinary. An enduring memory is standing by the side of the road in the cool morning, tea bushes on both sides, and hearing the gentle snapping of the tips of the bushes at the hands of the traditionally women pickers.
We also went to the second-largest city, Kandy, and the Buddhist Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (being a part of the Buddha's tooth extracted from the ashes of his funeral pyre). There were monkeys all around. A few years ago, there was a suicide bombing at the temple. Sri Lanka's modern history is quite tortured. The country has at last found some peace, but the price for that was a bloody military campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
There are also stunning botanical gardens at Kandy, that in themselves make the trip there worthwhile. Some of the plants were recognisable, partly because of the cooler weather at altitude, and others because we know them as pot plants in New Zealand. But there were also dramatic stands of different species of giant bamboo, medicinal plants, and great orchids. A part of the gardens had the biggest bats I have ever seen, and lots of them.
On the return to Colombo before flying out, we were able to stop in at a turtle sanctuary run as a charity. Giant turtles are under threat, partly because they breed somewhat inefficiently and are vulnerable to natural predators, and partly because of human poachers.
These good people harvest the eggs laid on the beach, hatch them in tanks, and release them to the sea as soon as the turtles are viable.
The coastline we drove along was severely affected by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. We stopped at two memorials but there is little damage to see now. There was quite a lot of tourist activity along the coast, with beaches and good diving, but it was not the place to find top-class hotels, at least until getting close to Colombo.
It was sad to bring the adventure to an end, but if memories had weight, we would have paid a fortune on excess baggage.
If you go
• Jim Guest and his wife travelled in the early part of June, on a "surprisingly easy direct link from Auckland to Colombo on Singapore Airlines", with a brief stop at Changi Airport.
• The capital's most memorable hotel is the grand old Galle Face (gallefacehotel.com).
• Tea plantation options include Warwick Gardens (jetwinghotels.com) and Lavender House (thelavenderhouseceylon.com) as well as Heritance Tea Factory Hotel (aitkenspencehotels.com) and Ceylon Tea Trails (teatrails.com).
Expect to pay about Rs12,000 ($NZ111) for half-day trips to plantation lodgings.
• More: Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (srilanka.travel) - Jim Guest/AAP
