The Magical Isle with Everything

By Richard Hartung

Want to go to the beach on your vacation? Hike in the mountains? Get up close with wildlife? Visit temples? And experience thousands of years of history? Sri Lanka has all that and more.

Even though I have visited Colombo frequently for business, I hadn’t experienced the breadth and depth of the wonders of Sri Lanka until we took our children there for a week in their early teens. We set up a full itinerary to see as much as we could in the time we had, and – while everyone has different preferences – our trip shows the variety of places you can enjoy in a short time.

We started before we left by hiring a driver/guide who drove the four of us around for the entire week, getting us to where we wanted to go and providing excellent explanations. It’s easy to find such a driver online or through friends.

Our driver picked us up at the airport in Colombo and took us to our hotel, where we stayed just one night. The range of hotels is vast, from budget hotels to a Shangri-La in the center of town. My favorite is the Galle Face Hotel, which opened in 1864 and has a rich history as one of the iconic hotels in capital cities across South and Southeast Asia. Although standards fell several decades ago, it has been restored and is charming.

We left the following day for Galle, a UNESCO world heritage port city on the beach in southwest Sri Lanka, arriving at midday. We spent much of the afternoon touring old Dutch colonial buildings and churches and making stops in several shops. We enjoyed the history and our time at a hotel along the beach. If you want to spend more time at beaches, there are plenty of resorts up and down the coast.

After a day alongside the ocean, we headed inland to Yala National Park for a safari to see elephants, buffalo, deer, leopards, and other wildlife in this fantastic nature reserve. We spent hours traveling through the park in a jeep, spotting multitudes of wildlife, before heading to our hotel towards the end of the day. Rough and crowded roads meant longer traveling times between destinations here and elsewhere than we expected just by looking at the distances.

The following day, we headed toward Nuwara Eliya, a hill station from British colonial times that celebrates its colonial style and has the Grand Hotel that dates back to the 1800s. While the weather at elevations as high as 7,000 feet in the hills can be chilly, our room in a tea plantation factory converted into a hotel was quite cozy and had beautiful views over the countryside. Rather than heading off along one of the many hiking trails in the region, we opted for leisurely tours of a tea plantation and the botanic gardens.

Our next stop was Kandy, a UNESCO heritage site. We enjoyed our walk through the gardens around Kandy Lake, the explanations of spices in a visit to a spice garden, and visits to some of the many temples in the city. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic is especially important because it is believed that whoever holds the relic holds the country’s governance. The former royal palace dates from Kandy’s time as the last capital of the Sinhalese kings.

Carrying on with our focus on history, we headed on to Sigiriya, a gigantic rock with near-vertical sides that soar upwards and a narrow walkway that ends at the ruins of ancient buildings on the flat-topped summit. Sigiriya Tourism says the surrounding territories of Sigiriya were inhibited for several thousand years, with the plateau of the rock serving as a monastery starting in the third century BC and being turned into a royal residence in the fifth century for King Kasyapa.

We also visited Polonnaruwa, another UNESCO world heritage site built in the 11th and 12th centuries AD as the second capital city of Sri Lanka, after Anuradhapura. Areas of interest included the ruins of the Royal Palace and statues of Buddha.

After circling through many sites, we returned to Colombo and arrived in time for lunch. While we all enjoyed the delicious Sri Lankan cuisine along the way, our children afternoon of shopping in outlet stores and ODEL, an upscale retail and lifestyle brand.

We headed home the next day, fully satisfied at having seen such an excellent combination of history, wildlife, temples, beaches, and high- were delighted to find that McDonalds is thriving in Sri Lanka. And since garment factories are such a big part of the Sri Lankan economy, our daughter, in particular, thoroughly enjoyed an altitude tea plantations within just a week. And the souvenirs, spices, tea, and clothes we brought back were reminders long afterward of a thoroughly enjoyable holiday.