Sri lanka forum

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How to enjoy the real life in Sri Lanka !?

First of all, I recommend you not to select a 5 stars hotel in some kind of closed area like in Bendota. If you travel a lot, you must know that all 5 stars hotel offers a High Aulity service, but you will not see a real life of the country. Of course you can order a standard excursion and take a look at standard things. Why standard ? Simple ! Just imagine, each day, hundreds of tourist visit the same place(s). As a result all locals already knows that, and trying to do their best to show something interesting to the tourist.

If you eant to enjoy the REAL life of the country, it's better to stay in different places, and to stay in guest houses. You can even imagine how beatifull and real they looks like. Of course if you select a guest house for 6$ per night, you will get only bed. But you can take a guest house for 30$ and get a really nice place to stay. With not so many peoples around you, and a raw life.

I can recommend you to take a look at Lanka Houses website. This guys personnaly visiting each place, make photos and videos and publish them. You can select a place thets suite for you better and make an online reservation.


It's a real phot of me, taken 2 days ago in Tangalle, in one of beatiful gesthouses that I found in Guet House area of lanka houses website. Just for 25 Euro per day, you can rent a natural bangalore on the beach. And enhoy the beatifull beach and RAW ocean.

In Sri Lanka: The Basics for Americans

As I travel through Sri Lanka, covering the nation as it seeks reconciliation among its diverse population after decades of conflict, I am receiving e-mails from my friends at home asking me to review the basics for them. Here we go:

Sri Lanka is an island nation off the southern tip of India in South Asia. It was populated mostly by Buddhists called Sinhalese until Europeans took over. Before then, the island had three kingdoms, namely Kandy in the central hills, Kotte on the Western coast, and Jaffna in the north.

Europe never seemed to like non-white kingdoms. The Portuguese attacked first, then the Dutch. They built an incredible fort -- a walled city -- in the southern city of Galle. The British then took control through the British East India Company in about 1800.

The Galle Fort is an incredible colonial vestige.

The British grew tea plantations when they controlled the island, and they brought more people over from the south of India to work the plantations. These people were Hindu, from the Indian province of Tamil Nadu. They are known as Tamils. There were also Tamils already well established on the island.

Historically, Moslems traveled extensively throughout Africa and Asia -- all the way down to Indonesia. There are many Moslems in Sri Lanka today.

Sri Lanka declared independence from the British in 1948, becoming the Commonwealth of Ceylon.

Located off the southern tip of India.

Once known as Ceylon and now called the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, the country has a population of about 20 million -- about the same number as New York State. It covers territory the size of 'Almost Heaven,' West Virginia.

Interestingly, Arabs called Sri Lanka "Serendib," from which comes the word "serendipity" -- the lucky tendency to find an interesting or valuable thing by chance.

Sri Lanka is derived from the Sanskrit word "lanka," meaning "island." Not just any island, but the island described in the ancient Indian epics Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which are the basis for Indonesia's shadow puppets.

Ethnically, today Sinhalese make up 74% of the population, with Tamils comprising 19%, and Moors (Arabs) about 7%. Theologically, Buddhists comprise 70%, Hindus 15%, Christians 8%, and Moslems 7%.

Sri Lanka's primary industry has been tourism, although a decades-long conflict in the north, the Tsunami, and now a global recession have crippled the tourist industry. Most of the tourists have been British and German.

After the destructive Tsunami in Galle, Southern Province.

It is not all tourism. Tea, rubber, and textiles have played a major role in Sri Lanka's economic development. The country has a per capita gross domestic product of about $2,000 per year.

Sri Lanka is hot. Very hot. The average yearly temperature ranges from 82 to 88 degrees, although in the central highlands the average temperature is 61. The tallest mountain is taller than Mount Washington in New Hampshire, at over 8,000 feet.

The central highlands near the city of Kandy.

The island does not have our seasons, but rather the monsoon, which brings rains. Sri Lanka is humid. In the capital, Colombo, humidity is above 70% all year round, rising to almost 90% during the monsoon season in June.

My favorite hotel in Sri Lanka is the Galle Face in Colombo.

The city of Colombo was established as the administrative center of the British colony, and the British established modern schools, colleges, roads and churches that brought European education and culture.

According to Hindu mythology, a land bridge to the Indian mainland, known as Rama's Bridge, was constructed during the time of Rama. Often referred to as Adam's Bridge, it now amounts to only a chain of limestone shoals remaining above sea level.

Another nature fact: the Yala National Park in the southeast of the island, founded by the British, protects herds of elephant, deer, and monkeys. I have been driven around it in a jeep and it is surprisingly similar to an African safari.

An elephant inside Yala National Park.

There is a dark side to Sri Lankan politics, just as Malaysia and Indonesia had their years of living dangerously. In the late 1950's one of their political leaders used race and religion to divide the people and gain power. He did horrible things, and the people allowed it.

They declared that Sri Lanka was a Sinhalese nation. They mandated Sinhala, the language of Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese community spoken by over 70% of Sri Lanka's population, as the sole official language of Sri Lanka.

This forced large numbers of Tamil civil servants who could not meet this language requirement to resign. Social instability reigned.

Soon, an attempt to make Buddhism the national religion, excluding Hindu and Islam, was also made.

So-called 'affirmative action' in favor of Sinhalese -- in a similar line to Malaysia and Indonesia -- was also instituted. They claimed this would reverse colonial discrimination against Sinhalese in favor of Tamil.

Sri Lankan-Canadian author Shyam Selvadurai.

One of my favorite writers is the award-winning Sri Lankan-Canadian, Shyam Selvadurai. His riveting novel Funny Boy, about coming of age as a gay Asian, is set with the backdrop of anti-Tamil sentiment, where the characters in his family are beaten -- even murdered -- by the politically-blinded Sinhalese crowds.

Trust me, you would have rooted for the Tamils during this dark period. It was truly horrible.

Many Tamils wanted to fight back and began to call for a northern state where they could live in peace, not a strange desire at all considering the bloodshed.

Over time, the Sinhalese politicians quieted and the lynch-mob mentality waned. Sri Lankans began to embrace diversity, and Tamil was accepted as a national language. The Constitution was revised to make Sri Lanka a multi-ethnic and interfaith nation.

The Tamil Tigers have been defeated after 26 years of terror.

The Tamil Tigers were born during this era, resorting to terrorism and refusing to accept that they were no longer being targeted as outsiders. The leadership refused to join the national mainstream as it moderated, and pushed their people to demand separation.

Although the Sri Lankan nation had moved forward and embraced diversity, the Tamil hard-liners rejected peace, perhaps because they desired power. Turf. They pushed for control until they were finally defeated, only a few weeks ago.

As repressive as Sri Lanka was in the 1950's, the nation led the world a decade later. In 1960 the people of Sri Lanka elected the first-ever female head of government in the world. America has yet to match this mark.

Through the Cold War-era, Sri Lanka followed a foreign policy of non-alignment but has remained closer to the United States and Western Europe. Sri Lanka has also received considerable assistance from China.

Even though the military has been busy fighting the Tigers, Sri Lanka has also contributed soldiers to the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti. I have met many a peacekeeper in Port-au-Prince or Gonaives who are from Galle.

My favorite beach in Sri Lanka is located in Unawatuna.

I personally hope to retire to this hot, multi-cultural nation. Having built orphanages here, as well as in Haiti and Indonesia, through Orphans International Worldwide, I have to admit that I like the cities of Jacmel and Manado as well.

But I dream of growing old in Galle, in the Southern Province of the nation of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka May tourist arrivals slump

June 09, 2009 (LBO) - Tourist arrivals in to Sri Lanka slumped 20.6 percent in May 2009 to 24,739 from a year ago as a global travel slowdown and fierce fighting that ended the Tamil Tiger insurgency deterred visitors.

According to figures put out by Sri Lanka's tourism office, arrivals from south Asia, the main source of visitors in May, fell 31 percent to 8,576.

This was mainly because of a sharp downturn in Indian visitors, who come both for tourism as well as business.

Arrivals from India in May 2009 fell 41 percent to 5,697 from the same month last year.

May is usually considered part of the off-season in the island, where arrivals peak during the winter in the northern hemisphere.

But this year, Sri Lanka also suffered from bad publicity generated by fierce fighting between government forces and Tamil Tigers, whose remnants and top leadership were wiped out in the final phase of a military campaign in mid-May.

The fighting generated news reports of civilian casualties and also led to calls from Western powers like the UK, a traditional source of visitors to the island, for probes into allegations of human rights abuses.

Arrivals from Western Europe in May 2009 fell 15.3 percent to 8,010 with visitors from the United Kingdom, the main source from the region, down eight percent to 4,558 and those from Germany down 28 percent to 1,216.

Arrivals from China, which the government sees as a big, new tourist generating market, fell 33 percent to 592.

The slump in arrivals meant low occupancy levels for listed hotels, and therefore reduced earnings.

But the tourism industry has said the end of the war augurs well for the future as peace is likely to entice visitors back to the island and revive the economy.

The tourism office figures showed that in May 2009, arrivals into Sri Lanka increased only from a few countries such as Pakistan, where the number of visitors went up 26 percent to 599.

Cumulative arrivals in the five months to May were down almost 20 percent to 157,495 visitors

Unawatuna Beach

Probably one of the beateful and famous places in Sri Lanka is Unawatuna beach ! It's located on the South part of Sri Lanka, based in UNICEF protected coral bay. It's about 4 hours driving from Colombo. The beach is full of guesthouses, most of them situated right on the sane, it menas, when early in the morning, you open the doot of your room, the first step you make is a step to the beach. During the night you breath and listen for the ocean. You can also enjoy your daily meal in the small restorans near each guesthouse. You will be sitting on the beach, and warm ocean will sing you a song of dreams.

If you really have time, we recommend you to visit Unawatuna and try to stay at least 3 days here!

Why to visit Sri Lanka ?

It's difficult to answer to this question in one sentence. There are many reasons to do that.  You can see the ancient world with the buildings before our century. It's hard to beleive, but there is a lot of buildings in Sri Lanka wich was build about 200 or 300 years before our century and they a still in quite good conditions.

Or you can watch to lot's of famous Buddha statues all around the Sri Lanka. You will lot's of them there. All sizes from smallest to 40 meters, made of stone and gold, wood and bones. 

You can ride a beautiful elephants in Sigiriya. Elephants was a domestic animals in Sri Lanka, but right now the Sri Lankian law forbid to have an elephant as a domestic animals.  It means that all elephants that local peoples have in their houses is the last domestic elephants on Sri Lanka. 10 or maybe 20 years, and all of them will die. After it only wild elephants will stay alive in wild nature. No more private rides, no more funny jokes. It's you chance to make a ride and to catch it on video Maybe your children will not have so nice ride, Cause no more elephants stay alive.

And of course you must visit the real Jungle Beach of Unawatuna. It's a really wild place ! The only way to get to the beach is a boat. You need to arrange a private trip to beach and back.  It will cost you about 50$-80$ but it worst it. When I've been there in March I saw nobody there, only our company of friends a Lankian guy who take as there. 

Sri Lanka is a Paradise for you!

Do you ever imagine about the place where you can enjoy your life as you are in Paradise ?

No, I’m not talking about the high class 5+++ star’s hotels, long yachts and other glamour life things. I want you to know about the place on earth where you can feel yourself like on heaven, without spending billions of dollars and pounds.

The name of this place is not a secret – Sri Lanka. Believe me it’s true.

May be your first sight on this country will not impress you. Maybe yes or maybe not. Who knows. I recommend you to take a tour throw all the country, better to buy a real interesting tour with private guide for not more that 10 people. Make your own plan and visit this places without rush. Stay as long as you desire, talk to the people make photos and videos. When you on Sri Lanka you must forget about all this continental life. Peoples who lived in Sri Lanka are absolutely happy cause they didn’t try to buy all new collections from D&G and Gucci. They don’t mind the model of you car because they didn’t need it. They have everything to enjoy their life’s in this nice and charming place. The sun, the ocean, the palms. It’s hard to believe but 250$ per month is enough to have you own room with fan, and have quite good meal 3 times a day. Plenty of fresh fruits for your health. Fresh fish and seafood. Weird vegetables with no English names. Everything like on another planet and not so far away from continent.

I just start this blog, cause I want to share my experience on living in Sri Lanka with you. And probably you will find my advices and notes useful for your own new life experience.

Sincerely yours, Barada.