Coasting Along in Sri Lanka

I’m writing this post beneath a pink mosquito net that is draped carefully over our bed in Tissamaharama (“Tissa”), a town just outside of Yala National Park in southern Sri Lanka. Matt and I are snacking on candy bars, nuts, and drinkable yogurt for dinner, because Tissa doesn’t have many (any?) indoor restaurants and we’re trying to avoid more bug bites. It’s not so bad though; we are content to relax after another adventurous day. It’s actually been an active few days since my last post!

Relying on advice from our Lonely Planet guidebook, we ventured beyond the Colombo city limits on Sunday to Mount Lavinia, the closest town with a clean beach. We took a commuter train, which felt very much like a NYC subway car with long, orange plastic benches lining the sides of each compartment and tip-seeking musicians playing flute, drums, and a keyboard during the 40-minute trip. In Mount Lavinia we paid ~USD $10 each for an all-you-can eat lunch buffet and day-long access to the beach and pool at the fancy and historic Mount Lavinia Hotel, built in 1805. We listened to live jazz music, lounged in the sun, and Matt swam in the ice-cold pool (I was too chicken to jump in). Unbeknownst to us, Sunday, January 20^th was “Poya Day”—a Buddhist holiday celebrating each full moon. On Poya Day, Sri Lankan establishments don’t serve alcohol or meat. Lucky for me, the hotel buffet was entirely vegan as a result!

We closed out our time in Colombo with an evening walk on the Galle Face Green, where locals and tourists were flying kites, picnicking, and waiting for the sunset. We drank coffee (no alcohol allowed on Poya Day!) and watched the sunset from the Galle Face Hotel, another local, old-timey favorite with a checkerboard-tile veranda and a daily bagpipe ceremony as the Sri Lankan flag is lowered at sundown.

Colombo skyline and beach in the background as we relax at the Mount Lavinia Hotel pool.

On the commuter train to Mount Lavinia

We caught a 6:30am train to the city of Galle the next morning, enjoying views of the coastline from our 2^nd-class compartment. A handful of backpackers from Russia, the Netherlands, and the UK were also on the southbound train. One bold, solo woman was lugging both her backpack and giant surfboard to the beaches in southern Sri Lanka.

Matt and I checked into our bare-bones but clean hostel and headed to the town’s main point-of-interest, Galle Fort, which was established in 1588 by the Portuguese and developed over the next couple of centuries by the Dutch and British. A tourism hot-spot and UNESCO Heritage Site, the fort’s streets were lined with countless boutique hotels, cafes, and shops. We completed a three-hour walking tour following a route described in our guidebook, which brought us to churches, bastions, the clocktower, and the lighthouse along the way. After a few hours of walking (25,000 steps that day!), sweating, and baking in the midday sun, we were ready to reset and cool off. We negotiated a Tuk Tuk ride to the popular Unawatuna Beach, which made for an idyllic evening of watching the sunset, eating curry at a table on the sand, tasting our first Lion beer, and walking along the water.

We climbed to the clocktower at Galle Fort.

Selfie on Unawatuna Beach.

Tasting our first Sri Lankan beer during sunset at Unawatuna. 

We hired a private driver for our four-hour drive to Tissa this morning, arriving just in time to grab lunch and walk around the nearby lake before our scheduled safari in Yala National Park. Tissa’s economy seems to rely heavily on safari tourism, its streets filled with open-air jeeps and signs advertising for Yala National Park packages. Another young couple from Argentina was in our jeep, and we had a Sri Lankan driver who was constantly on the phone with his other jeep-driving friends during the safari, gathering intel about where the animals were hanging out in the park. The safari was great! We saw elephants, mongooses (yes – the plural form of mongoose is mongooses), water buffalo, peacocks, colorful birds, a monitor lizard, and more. The terrain was thick with trees and brambly bushes, and the jeeps stayed on bumpy red dirt roads that traversed the park. The selection of species was very different than that of my safari experience two years ago in Kenya, so it was interesting to compare.

Our cute cottage in Tissa, where we are staying for the Yala safari.

Elephant spotting!

As we explore more of Sri Lanka, we have noticed a couple of key constants:

Stray dogs are absolutely everywhere! They’re typically medium-sized, mangy, and they roam the streets either alone or in small packs, walking casually past locals or snoozing in the sun. After hearing about my brother Russell’s brutal dog bite experience in South America, Matt and I are keen to stay far away from the strays. Matt read up the situation, and apparently there has been a lot of political drama in the country about how to manage the enormous stray dog population. Hopefully we continue to steer clear of these pooches.

Construction is pervasive throughout the country. Colombo was a skyline of cranes and half-built skyscrapers, but even the countryside is filled with smaller construction projects—restaurants, apartment buildings, and hotels. Some of the sites look abandoned, as if the project had lost funding mid-build. Despite these instances, the development we’ve noticed since we have been in Sri Lanka makes us think it’s an economy on the cusp of significant growth. We agree that it will be interesting to come back to Sri Lanka in 15 years and see all that has changed.

That’s all for now! Heading to tea country in the hills of central Sri Lanka tomorrow. Thanks again for reading.