Yala National Park

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.

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.

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 […]

With herds of elephants, wild buffalo, sambar deer and leopards, Uda Walawe National Park is the Sri Lankan national park that best rivals the savannah reserves of Africa. In fact, for elephant-watching, Uda Walawe often surpasses many of the most famous East African national parks. The park, which centres on the 308.2-sq-km Uda Walawe Reservoir, […]