step one: Galle

AT MIDDAY, GALLE FORT succumbs to the heat and falls into a light doze. Schoolchildren, their uniforms still unfathomably white after a morning’s tramp round the town’s walls, sit in the shade of jacaranda trees and suck on bright ice lollies. Older boys give up on the cricket games that are played on every flat scrap of land and flop down into the dust to rest. Even the auto rickshaws fall silent for a while as drivers nap in their cabs, feet up on the handlebars. Only tourists stick it out, ambling along the cobbled streets and into craft shops, their only concession to the fug a beer or lime juice taken on a colonnaded café porch. 

They are the latest in a long line of visitors to arrive on these shores. Galle’s history is best documented from the 16th century onwards, with the arrival of the Portuguese, but Persians, Romans and Chinese swept through long before then. The Dutch takeover in the 18th century created the town that still exists today, building the thick walls that encircle its grid of lanes, and elegant villas, warehouses and offices for the many Europeans who came to trade spices and gems. The ensign for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) remains etched above the main gate, a reminder of a time when the company ruled much of the Indian Ocean. 

By the time the British claimed Galle in the 19th century, the port town, restricted by its small harbour, was starting to lose its appeal for voyagers between the Far East and Europe. But life continued here, if a little more quietly, as it does today. This is no architectural theme park, even as old warehouses are turned into hotels and the wards of the Dutch hospital turned into bars and boutiques. Accountants and lawyers scurry about the jumble of small offices around the courthouse, ayurvedic practitioners open wooden window shutters to share advice with patients on the streets, and locals call into hole-in-the-wall shops for gas canisters and sweets. 

The riches that brought merchants across the seas still retain their allure. At Mansion Arts and Crafts, amethyst and sapphire are fashioned into necklaces, engagement rings and bracelets. Abul Kalam As’ad is the workshop’s main gem cutter, and uses a technique (the Ceylon cut) that wouldn’t seem odd to an 18thcentury Dutchman. Jagged moonstones are polished into smooth, milky pebbles at his wheel, their purples and blues magicked out. His colleague, Chanadna Jaysan, sits out the back and eases the stones into a silver chain, resolutely undistracted by co-workers noisily sharing fish curry from a tin plate beside him. In three days, the work is done, on sale for a little under £20. 

Near the lighthouse, whose beam sweeps across the town’s red-tiled roofs each night, Nishadi Kalhari and fiancée Ashkar are bringing the spice trade back to Galle. In a courtyard entered through doors carved with elephants, they grow mint, chilli and basil, and dry curry leaves in the sun. At their shop, Chilli Dragon, Nishadi pulls out pots of cloves and cinnamon, explaining the medicinal properties of each, and suggesting marinades for myriad dishes. ‘People call this the spice island, because we have so many good spices,’ she says, pouring red curry powder into a coconut shell. ‘And we know what to do with them. Scientists only now say that lemongrass is good for burning fat, but my grandmother knew that long ago.’ 

If ever there was a doubt that Galle knows what to do with its spices, a trip to the Green Market will put paid to it. Vendors sit beside piles of limes, avocado, beans and okra, and advise which spice goes best with them. Spice trader Shandhu emerges from his stall with a bag of garam masala, encouraging a passerby to use it in a fish curry. He bats away the offer of money with a smile: ‘For you, this is a gift. When you cook, you remember Sri Lanka.’

step two: the south coast

THE BRIGHTLY COLOURED steel buses rumble past Galle’s fish market, out along the A2 towards the coastal town of Tangalle. For the 50 miles in between, the bright blue of the Indian Ocean is rarely out of sight. Sharing the road are rickshaws selling bread, announcing their arrival with a tinny tune played on a loudspeaker, ice-cream van style; small groups of women, parasols raised against the sun; wetsuited surfers staring out to sea; and the odd plodding cow or baffled monitor lizard. In wide coves – white-sand beaches edged with palms bent over by the wind – shacks with banana-leaf roofs sell roti, pineapple juice and coconut milk, and sunbathers take lazy strolls by the water’s edge, flip-flops in hand, their footprints soon swallowed by the surf. 

Beyond them are small forests of sticks, rising a few metres out of the surf: tools of the trade for stilt fishermen. Perched out in the shallows, these men were a familiar presence along the south coast until recent years. Changes in fishing practices and local ecosystems, particularly after the 2004 tsunami, mean that many now clamber up their poles to pose for tourists’ photos in exchange for a few thousand rupees, rather than hope to earn a living from their catch.

 But there are exceptions. Thirty-year-old Jagath Kumara lives by Koggala Beach with his wife, two children and mother. Each morning before dawn, and again at sunset, he crosses the road and wades into the water, canvas sack slung over his shoulder. Hoisting himself up on to his stilt, he casts his line into the waves, and there he stays until the bag contains enough fish to sell, and enough leftover to feed his family. At his roadside stall, water dripping off him, he explains: ‘My father and grandfather were fishermen, and my pole is in the same place they had theirs. Afterwards, my son will have it.’ It’s a hard life, and during the day he drives a rickshaw to earn extra money, but the sea always calls him back. ‘At sunrise, when I am alone with the ocean, it is so calm and beautiful.’

Further along the coast in the village of Mirissa, dawn is a somewhat less calm time of day. In the harbour, tourists clamber on to sightseeing boats just as fishing vessels return from a night’s work. They bounce across the waves for an hour or two, all eyes fixed on the horizon for pods of weaving dolphins and – the ultimate prize – the fin of a blue whale flipping into the sky, and a dark body arching above the water and back into the depths.

By lunchtime, all the boats are back in dock, and their passengers in the cafés lining the shore, recounting the morning’s adventures, or heading along the coast in search of a quiet beach At nightfall, all will find themselves sitting on a patch of sand facing south, waiting for the daily spectacle of an Indian Ocean sunset, and wondering which restaurant will barbecue them that lobster.

step three: Yala National Park

DAWN COMES FAST IN Sri Lanka. Within minutes, night is gone, the stars faded. Only the moon remains, a faint slither clinging on in a pink sky. At the lake near the Kataragama entrance to Yala National Park, the water lilies start to open to the sun, and a peacock performs his first courtship dance of the day, rattling the blue eyes on the raised fan of his feathers at an unseen female. A parakeet sticks its head out of a hole in a dead tree to see what all the fuss is about as the morning safari jeeps bump past and into the park.

Ramani Jayewardene has been visiting Yala since she was a child, born to a Swiss mother keen to explore her new home, and a Sri Lankan father who enjoyed seeing his country through her eyes. She has been experiencing Yala in a professional capacity for two years, working with Kulu Safaris. ‘It is not possible to get tired of the park,’ she says, a field guide to the birds of Sri Lanka open on her lap. ‘It is different every time I come, but it is always beautiful.’

A wildlife sanctuary since 1900, Yala was created as a hunting ground by British tea planters, who came down from their hill plantations to bag trophy kills of elephants and leopards. More than 2,000 years before that, it was home to a thriving kingdom, whose people abandoned the site, it is thought, when malaria struck. The remains of the stupas and irrigation tanks they built still dot the landscape, the latter now used by the park’s animals as watering holes.

The elephants and leopards had the last laugh over the hunters. Indeed, Yala is now home to the highest density of leopards in the world, and they are the main reason people come. Dawn and dusk, jeeps buzz along the tracks that crisscross the land, responding to reports that a cat has been seen in a tamarind tree or playing with her cubs on the rocks. The chances of a spot lessen after sunrise, the animals retreating to the shade of the bushes. The barking alarm call of a spotted deer or paw prints on the road are often the only signs of the park’s star attraction after 9am. Ramani lays down her binoculars having admired the bright flit of a bee-eater bird. ‘The leopard is elusive,’ she says, ‘but that’s nature. You have to take what it gives you.’ 

And it gives plenty. Elephants emerge from the trees, their backs coated with mud to protect against the sun. A scruffy-haired, snorting sloth bear shuffles into a clearing on his way to destroy a termite mound weakened by recent rain. Red-coated mongoose trot through the grass, keeping a wide berth of the open-jawed crocodiles that gather on the banks of the lakes, steering clear themselves of the herds of hulking water buffalo that stand in the water, only their horns and eyes peeking above the surface. Macaque monkeys, entirely unafraid of humans, appear any time a jeep stops, eager to steal some lunch.

With patience, and luck, most visitors to Yala will eventually see their leopard. Many return to their camps and lodges having seen nine in one day; few return time and time again and see nothing. There are varying intensities to an encounter, too. Some are teasing: a long tail flicking above a distant boulder, or the sudden blur of a young cub racing across the road. Others remain lodged in the memory long after the experience – perhaps training a pair of binoculars through the undergrowth and finding the yellow eyes of a leopard staring right back as he slowly licks his paws, or inching behind a large male cat as he strolls along the tyre tracks.

For Ramani, it’s important to teach her guests that there is no checklist to be ticked off when entering Yala, that a leopard-sighting is not, as for those 19th-century hunters, some trophy to be won. ‘Every time I come into the park I find new joy. It might be a small thing – the dew on the grass lit by the morning sun, or the crunch of a monitor lizard eating a grasshopper, ’ she says as the jeep leaves the park under a darkening sky. ‘It’s important to find joy in everything and not just focus on seeing a leopard. If you are only after one thing, you might be disappointed.

step four: the hill country

PARAKKRAMA KIRIDENA slurps a mouthful of brown tea from a china spoon, sucks it several times against his teeth, and swallows. ‘We have to put the manners to one side when tasting,’ he says, laughing as he puts the lids back on the many small bowls of liquid in front of him. ‘It’s a kind of art, tasting tea. There is no literature on it, you just have to feel it.’

Parakkrama should know. He has been in the industry for more 20 years, working his way up from lowly ‘junior creeper’ to the heights of tea superintendent. At the Stafford Estate near Nuwara Eliya, he is in charge of every element of tea-growing, looking after his workers and their families from birth to death. ‘As a planter, you must be a father, a lawyer, a judge, a scientist, an agriculturist, an accountant,’ he says. ‘You are responsible for every incident on the estate and for every inch of the land.’

It is a role that has changed little since the British arrived, originally to plant coffee. Tea was only introduced when the coffee plants were devastated by blight, but it has thrived since. The customs of those times are embedded in the local way of life up in these hills. Afternoon tea is still a tradition, taken in grand old hotels, with a Sri Lankan twist: curried samosas and vegetable rotis served alongside scones and strawberry jam. Nuwara Eliya might have been transplanted straight from England to the tropics, with its racetrack, mock-Tudor houses and swan pedaloes for rent on the boating lake.

Tea factories such as Dambatenne near Haputale, or the Heritance near Nuwara Eliya, look like they’d be more at home in the Britain of the Industrial Revolution than 21st-century Asia. Hulking buildings that squat in the hills, their vast rooms are given over to processes used to roll, dry, ferment and sort tea leaves before they’re packed off to brokers around the world. There is no mistaking the landscapes of Sri Lanka’s highlands for Europe though. On terraces cut into the sharply rising hills, every patch of land is farmed, plots of banana or leek alternating with the pleasing curves of tea plants. Tea-pluckers in bright saris move along the red paths, picking the young leaves and tossing them into the sacks on their backs.

At Stafford, it’s the first of three daily breaks for the pluckers. Parakkrama, stick in hand and white socks pulled almost to his knees to prevent scratches from the bushes, strolls down to the muster station where they gather. He greets each woman as she enters, the cool of the room welcome after a morning in the unrelenting heat. They empty their bags to be weighed, the estate’s field officer records each haul – usually 18kg per day – on their name cards, and the leaves are spread across the stone floor, ready to be taken by truck to nearby factories. Work done, the ladies sit on low benches around the carpet of leaves, and chat over tea and chapatis. Noting that this tradition, too, is little altered over the centuries, Parakkrama remarks: ‘You can’t change it. It’s in our blood now.’

Break over, Stafford’s pluckers, field officer and tea superintendent make their way back to the fields. Parakkrama pauses, takes a lungful of air, and smiles. ‘It’s true, I am now a stress-free man. Look,’ he says, gesturing to the green, rolling hills, the smell of incense drifting in from the estate’s Hindu temple, ‘with this as my office, how could I not be?’

step five: ella to kandy

THE BELL RINGS, AND ELLA’S stationmaster puts on his white hat and marches out on to the platform, ready to greet the 09.23 to Kandy. Around him, people board in a flurry – boxes, backpacks and children passed hurriedly from platform to carriage in the few minutes the train stops before clanking off again into the hills.

For the next six hours, at a pace that never exceeds leisurely, the train lumbers through tea fields and across viaducts, past paddy fields and through villages, and in and out of tunnels carved deep into hills down which waterfalls invariably tumble. It is one of the world’s great rail journeys, and yet was set up with the purpose of simply transporting tea to Colombo, and onwards to the lucrative British market.

Now, the train represents a slow trawl through history, from the days of British rule especially apparent in the tea country, to a time of pre-colonial independence. Kandy, point of disembarkation for many, was the last Sinhalese capital before the Europeans arrived, and the last place in the country to hold out against the British.

It still feels a place apart. In a dusty workshop strewn with wood chips on the outskirts of the city, Nishantha Wood Carving helps to keep alive Sri Lanka’s older customs. Here, among more tourist-oriented carvings, traditional masks are made, worn in folk dances that play each night across town, and hung in homes to ward off evil or welcome good fortune. Dunadasa has been a painter for 50 years. He sits at a carving of a peacock mask, delicately colouring it an electric blue.

‘I learnt this as a boy, just like my father and grandfather before me,’ he says, leaning back to check his work. ‘My son learns it too. This art form belongs to our cultural heritage – it is very important we keep it.’

The city’s religious heritage is in no danger of dying. Across town, the evening’s ceremony at the lakeside Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic is soon to begin. Thrice daily, a golden casket thought to hold the Buddha’s tooth, rescued from his funeral pyre in India, is briefly revealed to the public. Women in white dresses, monks in saffron robes and parents clutching their children’s hands hurry through the temple’s elaborately painted entrance tunnel, past musicians pounding huge drums, and up the stairs to a long hall. The silver doors to the shrine are already open: devotees are rewarded with a glimpse of elephants’ tusks in a sea of gold, before the doors are shut, and the temple locks away its mysteries for another night.