Sri Lanka: Exploring, Traveling and Takeaways
Sri Lanka
Somewhere over the Arabian Sea and wedged between a layover in Qatar and the descent into Colombo I realized something: Two weeks half a world away.
In a country I'd mostly known through internet searches, photos, and curiosity I carried from hearing my husband talk about his frequent work trips to Sri Lanka. We had started in San Diego, made the hop to LAX, linked up with my husband's parents in the middle east, and then committed to the long flight to Sri Lanka, an island off the coast of India that was entirely its own country. I thought I knew what I was coming for: family memories, adventure, the food and of course ocean swimming.
Our first night was at Pegasus Reef. It let us soften into the time change instead of fighting it. That night at the fishery we ate fresh prawns with vegetables and rice. We walked along the beach while the moon rose and waves kept thudding in. Beyond them the horizon sat behind a curtain of palm trees on one end and city lights on the other. We took the predictable couple photos, hands linked, smiling at the sheer distance we'd covered, on a map, and in life.
Breakfast the next morning was hoppers, string hoppers, roti and sini sambol, and it was the first food of the trip that I had no reference point for.
A hopper comes to the table looking like a small bowl battered, fermented, and poured into a round pan that is swirled up the sides. Tthe edges go thin and crisp and the bottom stays soft and slightly sour. You tear the rim off and use it to pick up the sini sambol, which is onions cooked down long and slow with chili and sugar until they are nearly jam. I ate four.
We swam, worked out, met our guide, Dilshan and climbed the van that would be our second home for this trip. The Road to Kandy was full of rice paddies, sugar cane moving in the wind, villages stitched into hillsides. Street dogs parading in groups, like they owned the streets. And then the signs, warning: leopards crossing. Actual leopards. We stopped for lunch at a roadside stand, spices simmering up our nose. We ate with our hands, exchanged smiles and waved at the wild dogs down the street.
Fox Kandy by Kandy Resorts sat above a deep valley, high enough that the air changed. Cooler, windier, not at all what we'd packed for. There were no mosquitoes thankfully, just centipedes . Dinner was fish, vegetables, and a salad with passion fruit and tamarind vinaigrette.
Committed to a sunrise we sat with my in-laws while watching the valley wake up. We listened to birds we couldn't name and watched little patterns of movement down in the fields. Workers and wild birds.
Breakfast was fruit juice, pancakes, and bananas. Dilshan invited us to his home and by the time we reached the river near his village, his friends were waiting. We watched them slide down a cliff into the water, we chased the eddies for fun. We were welcomed into a family half across the globe from our home. Then dinner: vegetable biryani.
Another sunrise. Another swim. Then we headed into Kandy itself. The Temple of the Tooth, food markets, silk shops, and wild elephants, not as a staged moment, just as part of the day.
Monkeys stole food straight out of trucks on the side of the road with the casual confidence of creatures who knew exactly how things worked around here. The monkeys weren't treated like intruders. The elephants weren't treated like props. Monkeys on the wall of a temple. An elephant standing in the trees off the side of the road, close enough that we slowed down and nobody around us did. Dogs asleep in the middle of a street with traffic going around them. Nothing was fenced off from us and we were not fenced off from any of it.
We ate in Dambulla, drove on to Galewela and up to a villa on a hillside. The house, the garden it sat in, the food that came out of the kitchen, and the man who ran it sat down with us at breakfast and did not get up. Omelets, watermelon juice pressed that morning, mango and pineapple and banana arranged on a plate. He stayed at the table the whole time we ate and he told us about his life, the whole arc of it. When we had finished he walked us through his house and out into his gardens and showed us what he was growing. We had been guests for less than a day.
On the road to Wilpattu we passed rice drying on the shoulder.
It was spread out flat in the sun in long sheets, and people were walking through it slowly, turning it over with their bare feet, and we were past them before I understood what I had been looking at.
Lunch at the camp came in several courses and more of it than we could finish. That afternoon we went out for a half-day drive and came back with peacocks, wild water buffalo, gray langurs, macaques, and a sloth bear. We asked for a vegetable-heavy dinner and got one, and ate it at a long table with the other guests, and then slept under mosquito nets with no air conditioning. I had been braced for that part. It was the best I slept all week, with the whole night going on just outside the canvas.
The full-day safari the next morning delivered what I'd been hoping for: leopards, mugger crocodiles, and so many birds. Our host packed a lunch that could have held its own in a good restaurant.
By the time we drove toward Ella, wild cows in the road per usual.
We stayed at Shining Green View Hotel and visited a tea plantation, where I bought apple tea that I'm still rationing back home. We had an opportunity to cook in someones homes in Ella and made green bean curry, chicken curry, pumpkin curry, onion seeni sambol, coconut roti, and a vegetable salad. Tasting food is one thing. Cooking it with someone who grew up making it was something else.
Then came Dickwella and Smeralda Beach. We had both the hotel and beach to ourselves. By day two it felt less like service and more like being looked after by people who cared for you. We swam, ate more fresh prawns, and went to Smoke and Bitters for a meal that's still in my rotation of unsolicited food descriptions: smoked pumpkin curry, smoked cauliflower, charcoal fish.
More swimming the next morning, a long beach walk, a hermit crab minding its own business, a café stop for a fruit bowl. Seafood again. Sun again. The rhythm I live for.
Galle and the Sky Full of Kites
The next morning we stopped at our local café again for fruit and vegetable plates then drove past a beach after another on the way to Galle. It was Esala Full Moon Poya Day, and we stayed at Fort de 19 Villa inside Galle Fort. From the rooftop balcony, the sky filled up with kites; Long, feathery tails dragged through air that turned orange then purple, the kite colors stitching into the fading sunlight. Down on the streets kids flew them with a proud confidence. We walked through Galle as the evening settled and had ice cream for dinner.
The next day we drove back to Colombo, stopped at a gem factory, and had dinner with my husband's team. Flew home at 2am out toward Qatar, and later LAX. What we continued to talk about later wasn't a resort or a booking. It was the way Sri Lanka refused to separate its people and the rest of the living beings on the island; Monkeys riding behind trucks. Elephants crossing the same roads we did. Leaving room for the leopards to roam at night. Rice drying in the sun by the highway. A river the village shared with anyone who was willing to swim in it be it people or crocodiles. Kids, kites, and a full moon on our last night. The stories we’ll remember were not services someone could schedule or upgrade. They were a local showing us his family home with real pride. An afternoon sliding into a river with people who started as strangers and a host telling us his story over a breakfast in his family home.
Aloreign is the creative work of Alondra: an Indigenous American and Mexican photographer, writer, and therapist based in San Diego.
This is my create space for photography, writing, and everything that doesn’t fit nearly into one category. I’d love to connect.