A perahera is a Buddhist festival and parade with drummers, traditional dancers and costumed elephants. Sri Lanka was known as Serendib by early Arab traders, finding the Perahera was our serendipity moment of the trip. A few days earlier, on our way into Colombo from our big tour, I was using my GPS app to help Anu, the driver to get through the Colombo traffic. Just as he exclaimed that he didn't know where he was, Shyana said this was the Buddhist Temple she...

Located on the south coast Galle was one of the first areas populated by Europeans. Galle has a large natural harbour and access to the fertile lands of the south. Portuguese first use Galle and Sri Lanka as an important stop on the spice routes back in 1600's. The Dutch took over later and built fortifications on a promontory large enough to contain a small town. The town was well laid out and apparently included a drainage system flushed by the tide twice a da...

A beautiful hotel, if only you can figure out how to get in......We stayed at the Centara Ceysands Hotel on the north end of Bentota Beach, which is a spit of sand between the Indian Ocean and the Bentota River. Using GPS and Google maps we thought we'd done well to find the little lane between two other hotels that headed toward the hotel. The lane returned to a sandy road on the edge of the beach, there was no choice so we kept going, it seemed a bit bumpy for ...

Driving down from Nuwara Eliya to Bentota on the coast, we visited a tea factory to see the process at work and stopped at some roadside overlooks to see the spectacular views. As we got to the lower elevations the rivers transform from the waterfalls of hill country to be broader, and slower, but still wild enough for white water rafting, check photo page for the unusual truck used to bring the raft back uphill. After a few hours of the twists, turns, scenic vie...

Hill Country in Sri Lanka gets pretty high pretty quickly, getting up to 6,000 feet for the town of Nuwara Eliya and eight thousand for the highest peak Pidurutalagala. Hill Country is much cooler than the plains and Colombo. Some enterprising Brits, mainly Scotts, introduced European farming and tea cultivation and cut a road up the steep hillsides to the small plateau of Nuwara Eliya. After a week in Sri Lanka arriving in Nuwara Eliya is a shock to the senses,...