Sri Lanka - pleasing to the senses

The afternoons in Kandy are hot at this time of year, hot and languid, the weight of the air lightened by the song of birds and thickened by the deep base of a far-off music that fills the troughs. The mornings start fresh enough, a cool breeze bringing the mist from amongst the trees in the forest behind us, to be warmed by the streaking sunlight and so to evaporate gently as a long slow breakfast is taken by the open terrace doors. The mist is not gone for long.  As the heat of the day builds, so great clouds are formed above the forested mountains, to briefly close-in as the sun disappears and so to return the waters in brief torrential downpours, beating on our tin roof and quenching the now parched ground. The cycle of these days defines our movements.

We quickly learn to enjoy Kandy and its people, its faded colonialism and its industrious present, its faultless manners and its ready smile. As we have done previously, we decide to forego the tourism burdened historic sites that pepper this country and instead stay in one living place and become familiar with a people that are pleased to be familiar. We get to know many of its tiny facets; its many tiny birds, its many tiny shops with their many tiny notions, the tiny grommets that might one day become jewellery, its small tailors in long cool corridors, the small vanilla farmers in the hills that coexist to improve their prospects. 

A tiny bat invades our rooms leaving tiny poop, a band of small monkeys encircle our tree top house and employ their tiny hands to steal our small bunch of tiny bananas.  Tiny striped children of the next-door school shriek cheerily on the playing field across the road. We squeeze into tiny tuk-tuks for short journeys when our legs get tired of the city’s hot broken pavements.

We meet up with our friend DRJ, who shows us the anything but tiny dam he helped to build 40 years before, a dam that continues the ancient Sri Lankan art of water management and supports the year-round irrigation of the arable plains to the north. We learn of the role of intelligent elephants in the construction, and we wonder whether, while Iran is under siege and the petrol is rationed, their role will return.  One passes our balcony, ambling to and from the forest. 

The elephant is big, the hearts are big, the generosity is big. The food is big, the landscape is big, the lake is big. The screech of the red- backed woodpecker is loud, the monkeys play loudly on our tin roof, the bus drivers blast their sharp loud horns for pleasure as much as progress.

Such is the mix in this place, of quiet forests and urgent streets, of grand timbered dining halls and plastic-coated snack bars, of religions melded by a common belief in graciousness, of people of peacefulness and activity, of well educated, polite ambitious youth happily getting along.

We wonder at and study the irregular plan and purpose of the royal bath house; developed slowly over the centuries, not rigorous in form, not trapped by convention, but softly elegant and rather pleasing to the senses. Our Sri Lanka in metaphor.

Two weeks drift happily by and yet pass too soon before it’s back to the humid heat of the west coast above Colombo. We spend a last two days in a Bawa hotel that channels the few breezes, on any anywhere tropical beach with a tranquil body-warm sea, dipping like sheep to cool, laying like lizards to dry, waiting for the inevitable sunset to reflect radiant on tanned white skin, seeing few but the hotel occupants and the batik sales folk that prowl the ill-defined beach boundary, an experience that prepares us well for the journey home but from which little more is learned of the wonders of Sri Lanka. 

March 2026