I Spent A Week In Sri Lanka And Immediately Started Planning My Return

From sunrise climbs and wild elephants to house-made curry, lush hotels and an entirely unreasonable amount of coconut treacle, Sri Lanka turned out to be the kind of place where one trip can feel like several completely different holidays at once. I’m already working out how quickly I can get back there.

I was hosted by Jetstar and Intrepid, flying direct from Melbourne to Colombo before heading inland for a whirlwind introduction to the country. Somewhere between climbing Sigiriya before breakfast, eating curry in someone’s home and watching elephants wander across the road, I realised pretty quickly that Sri Lanka wasn’t going to fit neatly into one kind of holiday.

I expected lush landscapes, temples, epic food and wildlife. What I didn’t expect was how quickly Sri Lanka would draw me in: the warmth of the people, roadside king coconut stops and scenery that just kept getting. 

Image credit: Rebecca Keating | Supplied

A few experiences are the ones I keep coming back to.

Sigiriya was one of them.

At 4.30am, our group was considerably more energetic than expected, while perhaps also quietly questioning its collective fitness levels. We were heading for Lion Rock, the enormous rock fortress rising almost 200 metres above the plains.

Image credit: Rebecca Keating | Supplied

The climb is steep in parts and I definitely made use of a few strategically timed “admiring the view” stops, but going early makes all the difference. The air is cooler, the crowds are lighter and the landscape slowly wakes up around you. 

At the top, lakes, hills and dense green forest stretch out in every direction, with monkeys swinging through the trees below. The crowds were considerably thicker by the time we headed down, so if you’re going, take the early alarm. It hurts considerably less once you see the view.

The 4.30am start was also made easier by the fact that breakfast in Sri Lanka very quickly became one of my favourite parts of the day.

Before the trip, my knowledge of Sri Lankan food was fairly limited. I knew there would be curry and I was slightly worried everything might blow my head off with spice. I’d never eaten a hopper and had no idea coconut treacle was a thing.

That changed quickly.

Hoppers are thin, bowl-shaped pancakes with crisp edges, and our group almost immediately started stuffing them with dhal and potato curry. Apparently, this wasn’t quite the intended approach. We decided we were starting a trend anyway and, by the end of the trip, most of the table was doing it.

Then I discovered soft coconut milk hoppers smothered in coconut treacle, which may have been even better.

Meals would arrive with dish after dish: eggplant curry, pumpkin curry, beans, carrots, potatoes, dhal, coconut sambol, rice and papadums, each tasting completely different from the next. You’d build a plate, eat it, discover another combination and somehow start all over again.

Image credit: Rebecca Keating | Supplied

“I couldn’t possibly be hungry” became one of the least reliable things I said all week; by about day two, wearing anything remotely fitted to dinner had started to feel like a poor decision.

Of everything I ate, though, the meal I’d go back to tomorrow was one I couldn’t simply book.

We arrived at a family home and sat outside on plastic chairs around a long table on the veranda. Clay pots of food began filling the table while the women of the family cooked nearby, with dhal bubbling over an outdoor stove and coconut sambol being ground together with an enormous roller-style mortar and pestle.

There was okra, beetroot, beans, sweet pumpkin curry, chicken, dhal, rice and papadums, and the sambol went onto virtually everything on my plate.

Image credit: Rebecca Keating | Supplied

The food was incredible, but what made the lunch stay with me was knowing there was no restaurant reservation I could make to recreate it. We were simply being welcomed into somebody’s home.

That’s also where travelling with Intrepid really clicked for me. The big-ticket sights are already on most travellers’ radars; it’s experiences like this, built through local relationships, that are much harder to replicate independently.

Our guide, Dodan, summed up that warmth pretty perfectly. He described just about everything as “beautiful”—a meal, a view, a temple, someone he was introducing us to. It never felt rehearsed; he genuinely seemed delighted by his country and even more delighted to show it to us. By the end of the week, I understood the repetition.

And Then There Were The Elephants

I knew we were going to see elephants at Minneriya National Park. I still wasn’t prepared for what it feels like when an entire herd comes into view with babies amongst them. They were just…relaxed.

The females grazed together, babies stayed close to their mums and huge males wandered on their own. They tossed sand over their backs to cool down and every so often an elephant would stroll across the track in front of the safari vehicles, bringing everyone else to a stop.

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There was no performance to it. They were simply going about their afternoon while we stood in an open jeep trying to take it all in.

At different points there were elephants on both sides of us, and they kept appearing even after we left the park: one crossing the road ahead of us, others among the trees beside the road.

Between that and the monkeys—which seemed to materialise everywhere—Sri Lanka started feeling like a wildlife holiday even when we weren’t technically doing anything wildlife-related.

Image credit: Rebecca Keating | Supplied

Dambulla Cave Temple was another unexpected highlight. The walk up winds through thick greenery with monkeys all around before you reach the caves, where paintings cover the walls and ceilings, Buddha statues fill the chambers and intricate details appear everywhere you look.

What stayed with me most was how peaceful it felt. Everyone moves through barefoot, many dressed in white, and the heat and noise outside suddenly seem a long way away.

The smaller local stops stuck with me too—quite literally in the case of the pottery I somehow decided needed to come home to Perth.

At a village workshop, we watched a local woman shape rustic terracotta pieces on a manually spun wheel. I bought two traditional food-storage pots to use as vases, which would have been a completely sensible place to stop. Instead, I also bought an enormous clay vessel traditionally used to store water.

Getting it home involved a tote bag, a blanket gifted from the plane, a random cardboard box and an aggressive amount of tape. Against all odds, it survived and now sits in the middle of my dining table.

At the Impact Centre by ZeroPlastic, which connects visitors with local makers while promoting alternatives to plastic, we sanded discarded coconut shells into bowls before browsing wooden utensils, baskets and homewares. I left with cooking spoons and another vase, while seriously considering how much more of my kitchen I could replace before my luggage became a genuine problem.

Just as importantly, I got a glimpse of how good Sri Lanka could be when you stopped moving.

At Jetwing Lake, my enormous room looked out over greenery and water, with a huge bed, a bath and a sprawling pool just beyond. After climbing Sigiriya, I went back to my room with a coffee and my book, only to spend most of the time looking up at the view instead of reading.

Image credit: Jetwing Hotels | Supplied

That was enough to get me thinking about the Sri Lankan trip I’d do next: beaches, long breakfasts, pool time, a spa treatment or two, another safari, hopefully a leopard, definitely more elephants and absolutely no reduction in the amount of curry involved.

I went thinking I’d get a taste of the country and came home wanting more of almost everything. Next time, I’m just leaving a lot more room in my suitcase.

The writer travelled to Sri Lanka as a guest of Jetstar and Intrepid Travel.