The Amazing Sri Lanka

How this writer was charmed by the Pearl Island

I am not very good at picking favorites at anything — especially related to travel. However, if I had to pick a favorite country in Asia, it would be Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is not a very large country at sixty-five thousand square kilometers, but it packs a punch in activities. It has an ancient culture that can trace its origin to over one hundred twenty thousand years when transplants from the Northern Indian subcontinent arrived becoming today’s Sinhalese. Later the Tamils arrived from Southern India making up the two main ethnicities on the island.

The country has miles of beautiful beaches and coral reefs wrapping around the entire island, whale-watching excursions, wild animal safaris, tea hilltop stations, and Ceylon sapphires. It also has some of the most charming people I have ever met!

This was all the more reason that I was stunned, in early 2022, to learn it had gone into an economic crisis. In the span of a few months, the country’s inflation had skyrocketed by 50%, it had stopped paying its foreign debt, and it had run out of petrol. This led to power shortages and a breakdown in infrastructure. The citizens protested and the President fled the country.¹

Can this amazing country ever catch a break? It had just pulled itself out of an over thirty-year civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamil Tigers. The first Sri Lankan I had ever met was a young college student in the mid-1990s who taught me some mountain biking skills. Soon after, he went home to fulfill his military obligation with the civil war still raging and we forever lost touch.

After the civil war was concluded and an armistice agreement signed in 2009², it made progress in expanding tourism and quickly developed a reputation for safe high-end travel when I visited in 2013. Then COVID hit the island hard resulting in an economic crisis and here we are.

Let’s go back to 2013 and how I ended up in Sri Lanka in the first place. I needed to spend a few days in Bangalore, India to host a Client through our Indian operations, and then a week after I needed to be in San Francisco for another Client meeting. It didn’t make sense to fly back to New York City for the weekend to just fly back to San Francisco so I started looking for a nice location for a 3-day weekend.

From Bangalore, it was a quick 1 hour and 30-minute flight to Sri Lanka. Before I arrived, my San Francisco Client pushed our all-day meeting by a week, and since we were going into an American holiday week, I decided to amend my trip and stay for 10 days instead.

It was well worth the extension. During those ten days, I focused my time in four locations — Sigiriya, the Northeast Coast, Kandy, and the Tea Hilltop Stations. Before I arrived in Colombo, I booked a car through my resort hotel that drove me to Dambulla, a group of ancient caves with Buddhist temples. It has the largest lying Buddha in the world. Afterwards, I settled into my resort hotel near Sigiriya. I was in Sri Lanka in the summer which is low season and rainy season in the West and South of the island. This is why I kept my itinerary to the Central and East Coasts.

Sigiriya is the heart of Sri Lankan history and culture. Over two thousand years ago they developed a sophisticated culture in Anuradhapura Kingdom that went on a building and art spree that can be seen in the ruins of their ancient capital, Anuradhapura in the center of the country.³ The people were originally Hindu and then adopted Buddhism as well. The Sinhalese tend to be Buddhist while the minority Tamils are Hindu.

The next day I spent at Sigiriya hiking up the mountain and visiting the palace ruins at the top. The vistas and views from the top were incredible. My last day in the area was spent in the morning visiting Pollanaruwa, an ancient capital of the Sinhalese, and the afternoon on an elephant safari in Minneriya National Park. Sri Lanka has the largest population of wild elephants in the world and can be visited at many of Sri Lanka’s National Parks. The country even has wild leopards, but we didn’t find any that day.

The next day the resort hotel arranged a diver to take me up to Uppaveli beach in the Northeast of Sri Lanka where I stayed for three nights to relax and scuba dive. In Uppaveli, I relaxed on the beach watching the fishermen cast their large nets during the day and then dined on the beach every night. My favorite meal was whole crab curry that had to be eaten with your hands to truly enjoy!

The scuba diving was also a treat. The waters were full of fish and the corals were numerous in multi-colors. The dive masters who took me out diving were a social bunch. One of them even took me out the next day on his motorcycle to experience a Sri Lankan outdoor communal bath experience.

My final destination was a direct flight from Uppaveli to Kandy in the Hill Country and then an organized drive to a tea plantation resort up in a tea hilltop station. While Colombo may be the capital, Kandy is the cultural center of Sri Lanka. I spent a day enjoying the city, shopping for sapphires, and taking in a dance show in the evening. The next day I took a local hike amongst the tea stopping on occasion to watch the tea pickers at work. On my final day in the Hill Country, I took a tour of a tea factory.

I had to finally say my farewells to Sri Lanka and head back to San Francisco for that rescheduled Client orals but will never forget the amazing experience I had on the Pearl Island of the Indian Ocean.

As of my writing, Sri Lanka’s economy contracted by 7.8% in 2022 and another 7.9% in the first half of 2023, however not all is lost. The World Bank forecasts economic growth of 1.7% in 2024. After depreciating by 81% in 2022 against the US dollar, the local currency bounced back 11% in 2023.⁴

It looks like Sri Lanka is on the mend and the outlook for the country is on the rise. One thing I am certain of is that no matter the adversity and hardships, the people of Sri Lanka will continue to welcome visitors with graciousness, hospitality, and fabulous smiles.

Hopefully, these better times will bring back globetrotters because Sri Lanka is a country with a lot to offer!

¹Sri Lanka: Why is the country in an economic crisis? — BBC News

² The Sri Lankan Civil War and Its History, Revisited in 2020 (harvard.edu)

³Sri Lanka — Ancient, Colonial, Civil War | Britannica

⁴Sri Lanka Development Update (worldbank.org); World Bank boosts Sri Lanka economic forecasts after inflation progress | Reuters