After years of fantasizing about Sri Lanka, there was a lot riding on our visit. In fact, given our past experiences with heightened expectations, my repeated mantra on the flight over was “Don’t expect too much. Sri Lanka probably won’t be that great.” I was certain my hopes and dreams for the country would prove […]
If I’m being perfectly candid, we have seen and done some pretty adventurous things during our journey around the world. We’ve trekked in the mountains of Nepal, and over-landed on scooters through the back-country of Laos. We took a tiny boat along some of the wildest and most beautiful coastline in the Philippines, and went scuba diving in some of the world’s best waters. We’ve met real Geisha in Gion, and tried the foul-smelling “king of fruit”, durian, not once but THREE times! We’ve done some epic things, many of them things we never expected that we would ever do.
There are few places I have rolled into with a heart as full of as much dread as I did the western coastal resort city of Negombo. Throughout our three weeks exploring Sri Lanka, we had been won over by every place we had visited (in most cases quite easily), but I knew things would […]
A terrible pun, I know, but one that was too good to resist. Obviously. Our penultimate stop in Sri Lanka was the former capital, the city of Kandy. One of the final holdouts against colonialists and conquerors, Kandy was the last stronghold of the Sinhalese empire when it finally fell to the British in 1815. […]
It’s no secret that I consider our decision to start 20YH one of the best choices we made before leaving on our Big Trip. The site hasn’t always been easy to maintain and has lent itself to frustration and become a source of stress on more than one occasion, but on the whole, it’s been […]
I’m not entirely sure why we decided to go to Arugam Bay in the first place. Sri Lanka’s east coast is not nearly as well traveled as its west, but Arugam Bay is the exception: known for its phenomenal breakers, it is a world-class surf destination and attracts surfers from all over the globe. However, […]
We knew the rains would come for us, it was only a matter of time. Though there are plenty of perks to traveling in shoulder season, the weather (which is notoriously fickle in Sri Lanka at any time of year) is generally not one of them. With each passing day as we puttered along the […]
Like every traveler to Tissamaharma (a name that trips up the tongue rather than rolls off of it, resulting in it being more frequently referred to by its diminutive, Tissa), we trundled into town to see about some cats. Positioned such as it is, Tissa acts as the staging post and gateway to Yala National […]
In case we have not been clear in our previous posts, Sri Lanka has some really beautiful beaches. By which I mean, literally every beach we visited in Sri Lanka was the most beautiful beach we had ever seen in our lives in the entire world. Weeks later when we were in Paris and had […]
Sri Lanka has heart. I think if you asked me what I liked most about our time there, it would be that: this earnestness, this particular openness that I can only describe as heart. Very few countries seemed to open themselves up quite so willingly as Sri Lanka did for us. Everywhere we went people […]
There’s an old saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. That may be all well and good, but I say that fair is fair and this credo should be extended to all world travelers regardless of gender… especially when they’re traveling in Sri Lanka! Sri Lanka is a country whose […]
As a travel blogger, the hardest part about visiting beautiful and fascinating countries is almost never the travel part. (I say almost, because sometimes you have days like this one…). No, the difficulty always comes in writing about these places. The more beautiful they are, the harder it seems to be to do justice to […]
In the past few years, something of an obsession has developed amongst travelers (both short-term annual vacationers and less conventional long-term ones) in “living like locals” when abroad. It starts before we even embark on our journey, with carefully pruned packing lists so that we aren’t outed on sight alone as the foreigners that we […]
I can only assume that when Anderson penned those words of wisdom, he hadn’t been traveling around the world for 20+ months. One of the realities of being a long-term traveler means you rarely travel the fastest or easiest way to your destination, because fast & easy usually don’t come cheap. When every dollar saved […]