Matara is a busy, booming and sprawling commercial town that owes almost nothing to tourism – which makes it a fascinating window on modern Sri Lankan life. Matara’s main attractions are its ramparts, a well-preserved Dutch fort and, most of all, its street life.
Nuwara Eliya is often referred to by the Sri Lankan tourist industry as ‘Little England’. While most British visitors struggle to recognise modern England in Nuwara Eliya, the toy-town ambience does have a rose-tinted English country village feel to it, though it comes with a disorienting surrealist edge. Three-wheelers whiz past red telephone boxes.
Traditional masks in Ambalangoda – The traditional masks are very much a part of Sri Lanka’s culture and folklore. Kolam masks are used for dramatic purposes to enact traditional folktales and history; Thovil masks are used for exorcism rituals especially to eradicate disease. Each mask has a specific purpose. Mask crafting is an intricate skill […]
Colombo is a throwback. It has smartened up considerably since the end of the conflict, but there is still only a limited sense of the dash for development that characterizes most capital cities in south-east Asia and the result is a compact city retaining an atmosphere all of its own.It is now a mixture of […]
Perched underneath the shadow of the Hakgala or Jaw Tooth rock, at an elevation of 1,670m, the beautifully landscaped Hakgala Botanical Gardens spread over nearly 3 sq kms. With magnificent views of the surrounding hills and the jungles of the Hakgala Nature Reserve, the gardens are filled with roses and orchids, eucalyptus, pine and camphor, […]
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