Sri Lanka

Photo Link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/MKd5m5Gma3oMZZd9A

Made a few quick adjustments here. Added a Google Photos link to all of my prior posts and will add them to the top of all new ones going forwards…it’s the same photos I put on Facebook but apparently half my audience are 50+ year old family friends who don’t have Facebook so this is for all of you. If you just want to look at pictures and skip the posts (tbh I’d do the same if I were in your shoes) there’s also a tab up top with links to all the photo albums (+ Kenya and Russia, as those are legit great photos despite being pre-retirement). I also added a subscribe button in the off chance you want to get emails every time one of these updates get posted.

So I spent just over a week in Sri Lanka – my dad was kind enough to take some vacation days from work (I remember when I had to do that…) to fly over to Asia to meet me for this. We spent a few days in Chennai and I experienced my first Diwali (called Deepavali in Tamil Nadu) in India. There were no state-sanctioned fireworks, and instead people were just lighting off their own personal supply throughout the night. This was actually way cooler than any organized fireworks show I had ever seen, as you saw random huge fireworks getting lit off in every direction with no rhyme or reason. I had a rooftop dinner that night with my dad, uncle, aunt, and cousin in some swanky hotel restaurant which had a great view of the fireworks.

So for Sri Lanka…honestly my first takeaway is, that the single best time to visit a country is after a terrorist attack or similar event (Sri Lanka had some bombings this past easter). All the paranoid tourists will stay away so the tour sites are empty, the country will actually be safer due to increased security, and everything will be cheaper. This was the first of a few ways in which Sri Lanka reminded me of my trip to Egypt…no tourists and relatively cheap drivers and guides.

Because my dad was with me, I classed it up from my usual hostel accommodations and we stayed in these bougie converted colonial mansions and villas. I did score the moral victory of getting him to become a fellow street food fan.

Kandy

Kandy was a nice little colonial town in the center of the country. The first day there, we did an all day trip to Dambulla and Sigiriya. Dambulla was a really cool set of Buddhist cave temples. They were in shockingly good condition, and it was cool to see a different type of Buddhist architecture to what I had seen in Nepal earlier and what I’ve seen in Cambodia and Thailand in the past. Weirdly enough, some of the wall paintings in the caves reminded me of the tomb paintings in Luxor, in Egypt. After Dambulla was Sigiriya, which was sort of Weathertop-esque in that it was a giant rock platform with an abandoned settlement up top. Sigiriya was one of the cooler things I saw on this trip, and the Nepal trip made this 200m climb seem like child’s play for me.

We also had some toddy on the drive to Dambulla and Sigiriya. Toddy is the drink of choice for (predominantly poor) rural people in much of South and Southeast Asia. It can vary in strength but the one we had was more like wine, and it’s typically extracted from something like a palm tree. The stereotypes of this drink are apparently quite bad (poor uneducated people drinking it, etc.) which only made it more appealing to me to be honest. Our driver knew a guy and was able to arrange for us to sample some, and honestly seemed quite amused that two tourists wanted to drink this. It was surprisingly sweet and pretty decent overall, to be honest.

Kandy itself was decent enough, but we spent a day there and that was honestly more than enough. It had nice colonial architecture with all white buildings and a picturesque lake in the center. Definitely worth a half day to a day if you use it as a base to go to Dambulla and Sigiriya.

Nuwara Eliya

The drive to Nuwara Eliya was absolutely gorgeous, as we saw a handful of waterfalls and lakes along cliffside roads. To be honest, it wasn’t quite as eye-popping as Nepal (but I don’t think I will ever go to a country as naturally beautiful as Nepal was), but it was still pretty nice. Sri Lanka is just such an incredibly green country.

Nuwara Eliya itself is a pretty eh town. It has a bunch of buildings lifted straight out of England, but the town itself can be skipped. However, we stayed in this really cool lodge about 20km outside (1 hour drive with the road conditions) called the Scottish Planter Glendevon Bungalow. This was a converted Scottish tea estate house that felt like a museum. It was also smack dab in the middle of a tea estate, so we were able to spend hours walking/hiking around the local estates, which was really cool. If you come here, skip Nuwara Eliya (maybe head to Ella, which I’ve heard is cool), but stay in this lodge.

Galle

Galle was definitely the highlight of the trip. We spent a day and a half there which is probably all the time you need though. It’s a quaint little fort town with stunning colonial architecture (I’m a sucker for those pristine white painted buildings surrounded by tropical flora) along the beach. It’s probably similar to a lot of the walled towns/cities in the Caribbean. This was also where the lack of tourists was the most jarring, as we had the streets to ourselves and saw the same tourists over and over again throughout the day as we walked around (the whole city is less than 4 square km so it’s quite small).

Colombo

Colombo was overall pretty eh. There was some really cool colonial architecture north of Galle road (by the Dutch Hospital area), and some of the Buddhist temples were pretty cool to check out, but overall it’s not worth more than half a day after you fly in or before you fly out. For my final Egypt shoutout, Colombo actually reminded me a lot of Cairo, in that you had all these grand exteriors of colonial British buildings that were all crumbling and repurposed on the inside.

Sri Lanka was overall a really nice trip, but definitely on the slower side. I did really enjoy it, and it was nice to do a trip with my dad, but my biggest takeaway is that I’m not so sure if I can do extended trips in slower places where the “experience” is what you go for (i.e. beach trips, mountain trips like the Himalayan states in India). For me, the chief appeals of travelling are doing activities (whether it’s safaris, trekking, diving, horseback riding, etc.), sightseeing (like Dambulla/Sigiriya, rural temples, churches, etc.), and just walking around a picturesque city seeing various different sites and eating the local foods (which Galle offered the most in Sri Lanka). It’s actually made me reconsider going to Kerala right away in December as I think I’d need a break from a slower paced trip before I go on another one.

Next up is Rajasthan, which to be honest, is probably towards the top of my list of places to see in the world (the others are not as easy to get to sadly…Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan are all up there, along with more accessible ones like Jordan, Chernobyl, Uzbekistan, and a Gorilla trek in Africa). It’s probably the #1 thing I want to see in Asia in my first year actually (either that or the horseback trek in Mongolia), so I hope it lives up to my lofty expectations. Overall, the trip has been fantastic so far. Besides Varanasi, nothing has really been a negative experience, Delhi and Agra were all-time memorable standouts in my imaginary vacation destination pantheon, and everything else from East China to Nepal to Sri Lanka have been solidly enjoyable places to visit.