Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast 1p4258

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the second episode of a three part podcast dedicated to finding the 7 greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka. 250 years after the creation of the island’s first great wonder – the reservoir of Panda Wewa, the second took root - literally.  Strictly speaking this wonder was not home grown – but rather an import that, in going native, came to symbolise everything about the land, then as now. No building this, nor even a book or garden, but a tree, a single tree – the Sri Maha Bodhi, The Tree Of Enlightenment, an A list celebrity tree to outshine anything anywhere else in the world; not just Sri Lanka’s oldest living tree, but also the oldest recorded tree on earth.   As a tree, it gained its bloodline from the bodhi tree in Bihar under which Lord Buddha sat sometime around 500 BCE prior to attaining his enlightenment, a nirvana of not inconsiderable benefits, including a full understanding the true nature of everything. Its illustrious history aside, the near relatives of bodhi trees are arguably more beautiful, including, as they do, figs, banyans, breadfruits, jacks, mulberries.    But history is rarely written by the beautiful. It is the survivors that get to tell the story and although there is no such thing as an average life span for a tree, the bodhi tree squats confidently at the extreme end of the spectrum, living for anything up to 3,000 years. It can tell stories that would put Scheherazade herself to sleep.   The bodhi still growing in Anuradhapura dates back to 236 BCE. At the time of its arrival, the country was still making tentative if immutable steps as an embryonic nation; and its appearance was to coincide with the reign of the island’s eighth recorded king, Devanampiya Tissa.    It arrived just a few years after Buddhism itself arrived on the island, protolyzed by Mahindra, the son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka. Clearly, the young missionary had painted a compelling picture of his new island abode in his letters home for he was soon ed by his sister, Sanghamitta. She brought with her a golden vase in which grew a sapling of Lord Buddha’s original Bodhi-Tree.    Accompanied by nuns and an entourage of useful craftsmen, Sanghamitta landed in the north of the island and was met by King Devanampiya Tissa himself. With some ceremony, he escorted the party to Anuradhapura along a road said to have been softened with white sand (an enhancement that the present day Road Development Agency might take note of); and the Bodhi sapling was planted in the city’s Mahameghavana Grove.   The world that this tiny tree then looked out upon was already more than a little magnificent. From its plot stretched a new and constantly enlarging city, the creation of Pandukabhaya, a staggering construction by any measure. As the ancient Athenians were putting the finishing touches to the Acropolis and the nascent Roman Republic issuing its first tentative laws, the palaces, and structures commissioned by Sri Lanka’s first great king rose up through the jungle, a tropical Versailles.    Beyond its walls and moats stretched the Rajarata, the land ruled by the king, extending from the northern tip of the island to incorporate most of the island with the likely exception of the impenetrable hill country and the far south – Ruhana.   The small bodhi tree’s very survival depended on all the components of a flourishing nation – a caringly and calibrated civil service, and phenomenally effective water management to feed the growing state. This in turn was enabled by international trade, culture, writing and an evolving new language – Sinhala; by roads, hospitals, horticulture, and an engineering capability that was able to assemble large stone palaces and temples. Surrounded by such professionalism, it is little wonder it flourished, and, in a sense, arrived just as the party began.   Many successive kings enriched the land on which it grew. Magnificent stone and later metallic statues were positioned around it, along with a fine canal and walls to protect it from wild elephants; a protective barrier mirrored as recently as 1969 by a golden fence. Now positioned on a high terrace, surrounded by 4 other terraces, its temple is one of the country’s most sacred sites; and from its vantage point it has borne witness to almost all of recorded island history: two thousand three-hundred-years of it.   The tree itself is managed by priests, ed by a committee, and a s of experts and agencies within the government’s environment ministry. It has given rise to innumerable other direct descendants, thirty two of which are notable trees in their own right.    Three of the most prominent grow in temples in Colombo, Nuwara Eliya and Monaragala. One was planted near Kandy in 1236 by a minister of King Parakramabahu II, and several others by early Kandyan kings around 1635. Another, in 1472 near Colombo, was planted by a somewhat overwrought King of Kotte, Bhuvanaikabahu VI.   Four in Trincomalee, planted in 1753, mark the moment Buddhism began to recover from the onslaught of colonization. Two even have British associations. The future King Edward VII planted a bo tree in 1875 in Peradeniya Gardens during a state visit more associated with big game hunting and dancing girls; whilst in 1803 a British officer, Davy hid in one to (briefly) escape a massacre in Kandy.    The saddest though is one planted around 522 CE by a poet loving king, soon to kill himself in grief for the murder of his friend, Kalidasa, a writer with a finer sense of poetry than he had for women.   And although the Sri Maha Bodhi is in many respects a tamed and urban tree, it is also, by virtue of being a plant, an iconic symbol of the island’s remarkable biodiversity. Its very existence infers the exceptional quantity of Sri Lanka’s endemic species; its wide array of climatic zones; and ecosystems that include vast forests that still cover almost a third of the entire land.   Almost 100 years later a start was made on ancient Sri Lanka’s third great wonder – one that was to comprise Asia’s equivalent of the three great pyramids of Giza – the three great stupas of Anduraupura: the Ruwanweliseya; the Abhayagiri; and the Jetavanaramaya.   Stupas are a structure exclusive to Buddhist countries. The shape is made for perfect skylines. Bells, bubbles, pots, lotuses – even heaps of paddy: Sri Lanka’s many thousands of stupas were built in a range of related shapes, and in such numbers that it is unlikely that a five-minute car journey anywhere in the country will fail to take you past one.    They are still being constructed to this day – in Kandy, Kalutara and Kotmale, to name just three.   Whatever their shape or age, they are outstanding architectural creations, mesmerizingly graceful as they rise over their visiting pilgrims, providing them with a place to meditate and a home for the relics and religious objects they venerate. And its three most important ones are found in the island’s heartland - Anuradhapura.    The oldest of the tree is the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 to 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu, with a height today of 103 meters. The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle which started “on the f...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the third and final episode of a three part podcast dedicated to finding the 7 greatest wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka.   Reservoir, tree, stupas.  All came before this, ancient Sri Lanka’s fourth great wonder  - a palace built to escape death and suffering. Bulit by the self-same great king, Dutugamunu, who commissioned the Ruwanweliseya, the oldest of Aurnadupura’s three great stupas, the Brazen Palace, or Lowamahapaya, was built between 161 BC to 137 BC.  Its name “brazen” comes from the brass or copper roof tiles that covered it.   For centuries this was the island’s most magnificent building. The king had his architects draw up no-limit plans for an opulent palace monastery, two hundred feet long, ri nine stories and a further two hundred feet, each story punctured by a hundred windows. Observers spoke of the entire edifice containing a thousand rooms – an obvious exaggeration, but one that was not really required. For the building was, by any standards anywhere in the ancient world, a masterpiece.    Inside the vast structure golden pillars held up the roof of a special throne hall, its centerpiece an ivory throne centred between the titanic images of a golden sun; and a moon and stars picked out in silver and pearls. The gilded roof glinted so fiercely in the sunlight that it could be seen from miles away. No expense was spared in its furnishings either. Even the water basins positioned for the washing of feet and hands at its entrance were said to be of gold.    Each floor of the building was given over for the use of monks in varying stages of sanctification as they travelled the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Naturally, the lowest floor, the Buddhist equivalent of Perfumes & Make Up in a Department Store, was reserved for those who had yet to achieve anything. If not quite the habitat of the hoi polloi, it was not that far off either.    The second floor, however, was allocated for those who had mastered the Tripitaka – three texts in the Buddhist Pali Canon, mostly concerned with doctrinal requirements and monastic rules.   It was only on reaching the third floor of this extraordinary structure that you could encounter monks who had made a real step change, for these ones had attained Sotapatti, the first stage of sanctification – an achievement made possible by having trounced indecision and an obsession with individuality, and rituals.    The fourth floor was populated by monks who had added to this achievement by making serious inroads to eradicate all tendencies towards ill-will. And, more importantly, any thoughts of sensuality.   On the fifth floor lived the Anagamin monks – those who were now seeking to overcome pride, restlessness, ignorance, fine things, and immaterial cravings in order to become an arhat. And above them all, in the upper stories of this temple of gold, lived the Arahats themselves. This lofty station, the goal of all practicing Buddhists, was reserved for those who have finally achieved Nirvana. Not for them the irksome and interminable cycle of rebirth.   Despite the building burning down, it was faithfully rebuilt in all its brilliance by King Saddha Tissa, Dutugemunu’s brother. Further repairs were carried out a hundred and twenty years later and a pavilion decorated with gemstones was added. But by the time of King Siri Naga I, sometime after 195 CE, the repairs carried out on this and other buildings in Anuradhapura were noticeably more modest in their goals.    Buildings such as this one, were made good, but reduced in size and scope, the easier for maintaining perhaps – or maybe because there was just insufficient money to keep them as they had been first envisioned. It was, in its own grey and mildly dispiriting way, a metaphor for its time.   Today you need a rich imagination and a keen sense of history to imagine how the Brazen Palace would have looked – even in Siri Naga I’s time. Destroyed eight hundred years later in the tenth century by Tamil invaders, it is today reduced to one thousand six hundred granite columns set in forty rows – all that survives of its once colossal walls.    As Shelley might have said had he added Sri Lanka to his well-documented French, Swiss, German, Dutch, and Irish holidays: “nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” stretch yet more ruins, scrub, and jungle.   Sri Lanka’s fifth great wonder is a mystery. Perishable, yet still found in almost every island household at some point in any week, its origins may be obscure, but historians appear to agree on one thing: it is uniquely Sri Lanka, originating here at some very distant point in the remote past before being adopted in many other parts of South Asia, and even further afield.     Uniquely, it is also a wonder that can be constructed by almost anyone who knows how to boil rice. The recipe is simple. Once boiled, you add coconut milk to the rice for 5 more minutes of cooking until no liquid is left. Then slice it into shapes – diamonds are a favourite - and leave it to cool and dry a little more.    Kiribath, the name of the dish, is the ultimate comfort food. And yet like Dior’s little black dress, is immensely versatile too. It can be served with anything: poached eggs, Fois gras, curry, marmalade - but by far the best consumable accessory is Seeni Sambol, a sweet, tangy, caramelized onion flavoured with all the spices for which the island is so famous - tamarind, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, curry and pandan leaves, chilli and turmeric.    Most, if not all the food made on ther island, can be found elsewhere: in India of course, but also the Maldives, Malaysia, the Arab world, Portugal, Holland, and Britain. These shared dishes have, over the centuries, evolved to become distinctly Sri Lankan but only kiribath seems to have started its world journey from this island.    It is also the only food item to have inspired a stupa – the Kiribath Vehera in Anuradhapura, a small, barely standing and much overlooked stupa of almost unimaginable antiquity that once was said to house the sacred tooth relic itself, whose own origins, like the dish itself are equally opaque.    Yet kiribath’s very existence signifies several fundamental things about Sri Lanka that reach far further than mere corporeal cravings.    Like so many other Asian countries, rice is the country’s staple food, more so even than bread in the west. Sri Lanka devours over 2.4 million metric tons of it annually.    A semi aquatic plant, rice needs water to grow – around 2,500 litres of it for every kilo of harvested rice. Had ancient Sri Lanka rested on the calibre of those distant aquatic laurels that gave rise to Panda Wewa in the 4th century BCE, the country would have evolved little further than a few modest kingships. To grow the vast amounts of rice that were needed then, as now, huge advances in water technology were needed.    And these are best epitomised by bisokotuwas – cutting edge sluices, their design and position modified and perfected by the kingdom’s hydrogeological engineers, the Quantum Computing scientists of their day.    Their revol...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Tiny mammals are the subject of this podcast – the search for Sri Lanka’s smallest and most overlooked mammals.   But first a health warning – for fans of Hi, Hallo or Hola, this is not a story of Sri Lanka’s mammalian celebrities, its kings and queens, or its most photographed princelings.    Rather, it is a tour of the island’s plebs: its most ordinary of mammals, the ones lost in the scramble to see elephants and monkeys, deer, leopards, wild boar, buffalo, even bears.  These telegenic superstars were once enriched by yet more glamorous species, but of these little remains but memories etched on fossilized rocks. The island’s lions became extinct 38,000 years ago, if not more. Its tigers, hippos, and rhinos vanished ever further back.  But what remains is more than sufficient - Asiatic elephants and Trump-like toque macaques; leopards, sloth bear, boars, buffalos and barking, hog, spotted, and sambar deer.    This podcast is dedicated to those mammals that live far below the radar. Some are rhinestone-common, others rarer than Burmese rubies. So comprehensively overlooked, they have become the island’s lost mammals: the Cinderella quadrupeds that bipeds rarely notice.   And endangered though so many of them are, they remain, like all Sri Lanka’s land mammals, a breeding ground for argument.    The disputes start with attempts to settle the actual number of land mammals on the island. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, one hundred and three mammals, endemic or otherwise, are found across Sri Lanka – but that number is a red rag to the tens of thousands of scientists with a ion for post 1700 CE Linnaean taxonomy. Some argue for more, others for less.   A much more relevant question is how many mammals are there likely to be in 2050. For survival is, of course, the critical question. As Darwin meant to say: “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.”     And change is demanding profoundly impossible things of the country’s diminishing mammals.   Over a third of the total on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list face such threats to their existence that they are more than likely to become extinct.    Twenty-one species face so existential a threat that they are judged to be endangered. These include such iconic mammals as the Sri Lankan elephant, leopard and two of its most celebrated monkeys.    Nine others are teetering on the edge of becoming extinct in the wild - including the sloth bear and golden palm civet. Six more, including the otter and the tufted Gray langur, are likely to become so vulnerable as to these nine.    That leaves just over half of Sri Lanka’s land mammals that are judged to be of least concern – including 13 shrews, mice, rats and 30 bats, and leaving what is left to own up to so little data as to be unclassifiable.    “Sometimes,” said Seneca, “even to live is an act of courage,” a sentiment of particular relevance to the philosopher who had been ordered to kill himself by Nero but made such a hash of it that it took several attempts and many hours to accomplish. But suicide is a peculiarly human undertaking. For Sri Lanka’s land mammals, their march to the precipice of oblivion is one prompted not by them but by human actions - poaching, deforestation, urbanization, pollution and climate change.   What you see today, however ordinary, is likely to be obliterated, tomorrow. Which makes their observation now such a privilege and a thrill – be it of a bat or rat, cat or shrew.    Size, contrary to all rumours, really does not matter. Once you engage with any creature every bit as entitled to share your scrap of earth, you move from a human-centric view of life to something more universal; and with this perhaps, the conclusion that neither of you has a greater right to have things just your way. “The world,” noted Eden Philpotts, “is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”   Bats, oddly enough, are the best place for an emergent Sri Lankan zoologist to start their observations, for Sri Lanka is bat country, its incredible range of environments ing 30 of the world’s fourteen hundred bat species.    But of the many bats and bat families that live here, keep your exacting eye focused on the appearance of just one. Should the Sri Lankan woolly bat fly across your binocular lens, you are among the blessed, for it is the country’s only endemic bat.    This tiny creature, barely 50 milometers from head to tail, was first described by tea planter W.W.A. Phillips in 1932. One of Sri Lanka’s most notable early naturalists, Phillips was famous for paying villagers 5 cents for every live snake they brought to his house.  His observations of the tiny woolly bat are as true today as they were back in the 1930s.  They enjoy sleeping in curled up banana fronds.  They have a preference for hills between five hundred to a thousand metres high.  And as the decades have clocked by, fewer and fewer have been sighted.   Endeminicness aside, it is hard to exclude from any Sri Lankan bat list the common flying -fox bat - the megabats of the bat world. With a wingspan of 1.5 metres and a weight of some 1.6 kilos, they effortlessly live up to their name.    Nocturnal, fruit eating and curiously infecund (producing perhaps just one pup per year), they are an unmistakable part of any skyline – especially around city parks where they gather at dusk to hang off trees, discussing the day’s events with aristocratic nonchalance. Although unlikely to turn suddenly into airborne artillery, they are best kept at a distance, harbouring as they do such a wealth of diseases as to make biological warfare warriors jealous.   Even more understated than bats are mice. The island is home to some 7 mouse species - but look out for just 3; and send for champagne and chocolate eclairs from the Boulangerie Utopie in Paris should you ever be so fortunate to see one of them. They are of course tricky things to spot – being so tiny. But harder still, for these particular 3 are (almost) rarer than unicorns.   All three are endemic - Mayor’s spiny mouse; the exceptional Sri Lankan spiny mouse; and the almost equally rare Ceylon highland long-tailed tree mouse.    The Ceylon highland long-tailed tree mouse was discovered in 1929 by the Dutch tea planter Adriaan Constant Tutein-Nolthenius.  Little more than 21 centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is found in Sri Lanka’s hill country where it lives in trees, venturing out only by night, a timid and reticent nightclubber, never likely to dance shirtless.    The Sri Lankan spiny mouse barely reaches 18 centimetres from nose to tail. Its reddish grey back and sides morph into white underparts, with huge gorgeous smooth scooped-out ears that stand like parasols above large dark eyes. It is a mouse to fall in love with.    Mayor’s spiny mouse inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum and comes in two variants, one which inhabits the hill country and one of whic...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Part Two of a two part Podcast dedicated to Sri Lanka’s most wicked monarchs.   After the excesses of Prince Vijaya and Queen Annua, it is time to encounter our third candidate king and winner of an abiding place in the island’s of wicked monarchs.     So little is actually known about Yassalalaka Tissa, King of Anuradhapura that he almost fails to make the cut. And yet three key qualifications mark him, two of which are so beautifully distinctive as to ensure his remembrance for as long as anyone ever bothers to the island’s ancient kings.   His path to power was so traditionally iniquitous that has become an almost essential distinction for any candidate for this guide: he murdered his predecessor. Simply by virtue of his ascension, Yassalalaka Tissa makes the grade, though the ancient sources helpfully validate this by calling him “a vicious ruler.”     But by virtue of his placement in the line of the founding Vijayan kings, his inclusion here offers an irresistible and matchless neatness to the . For he was to be the last true Viyayan ruler. His own murder, in 60 CE, just 8 years after seizing the throne, brought to an end the royal dynasty that, more than any other, set up the country to be what is was.    And what an ending it was, its preposterous characteristics being the third main reason to include in this guide.   Yassalalaka Tissa own reign suffered from the fact that his dynasty had never really recovered from the effects of having overcome the island’s third invasion by Tamil warlords between 103 to 89 BCE. This was to so weaken the kingdom as to fatally undermine its confidence and capability.   It all started with yet another grubby and bloody power struggle that saw one brother kill another to grab the throne before ing it on – briefly – to yet another bother, Khallata Naga, who was himself to be despatched by a fourth, Valagamba, in 103 BCE. It was a damned succession.    Barely had Valagamba digested the celebratory when all the hounds of hell slipped their leads and the kingdom’s preeminent port, Mahatittha (now Mantota, opposite Mannar) fell to invaders.    The third Tamil invasion of Sri Lanka was on. Valagamba fled, lucky to be alive and in a 14-year tableau reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s novel “Five Little Pigs” the once grand Anuradhapura Kingdom was then manhandled to atrophy.    Two of the Dravidians returned to India, leaving one of the remaining five, Pulahatta, to rule from 104-101 BCE. At this point, history struggles to keep up.   Pulahatta was killed by Bahiya, another of the five remaining Dravidians and head of the army, who was in turn murdered in 99 BCE by Panayamara, the third Dravidian who had been unwisely promoted to run the army.    Proving those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it, Panayamara was assassinated in 92 BCE by his general, the fourth Dravidian, Pilayamara.    But by now Valagamba, ever the comeback king, began his return, his guerrilla tactics toppling Pilayamara who had lasted all of seven months on the throne; and then defeating the last of the Pandyan chiefs, Dathika.    Valagamba’s return to power should have seen in a long lasting and confident restart for the dynasty – but too much blood had been split, and regicide had been so normalized as to undermine nearly every succeeding monarch with its malign and cancerous weight.   Two periods over the next 130 years in particular were to be its undoing, the first being the chaos unleased by the ambitions of Queen Annua herself who murdered 7 kings before being murdered in her turn.     Just 5 kings later chaos once again took hold, when a civil war, promoted by one too many serial regicides, caught up with a king called Kanirajanu Tissa who was to be despatched in 33 CE by his successor, Chulabhaya in time honoured fashion.     Dead within 2 years, Chulabhaya’s sister, Sivali took the throne for 4 months before – but by now a proper civil war had struck up, with all its attendant disasters, including leaving they kingdom itself utterly ruleless for periods of time.   Sivali bobs up and down in the months succeeding her ascension vying for control of the state in what looks like a three cornered struggle between herself, her nephew Ilanaga and the Lambakarnas. For by now the Vijayan dynasty not only had itself to contend with – it also had the much put upon and exasperated nobility, especially the Lambakarna family.   Little about this period of Sri Lankan history is certain, except that from around 35 CE an uncensored civil war preoccupied the entire country, leaving it without any plausible governance.    For a time Ilanaga seemed to be ahead of the pack. But he then seems to have scored a perfect own-goal when he demoted the entire Lambakarna clan. This abrupt change in their caste, in a country held increasingly rigid by ideas of caste, galvanised them into full scale rebellion.    The king – if king he really was – fell and fled into the hill country, returning 3 years later at the head of a borrowed Chola army to take back his throne in 38 CE. Ilanaga’s reign lasted another 7 years, before his son Chandra Mukha Siva succeeded in 44 CE – only to be murdered by his brother, and our third candidate in this guide, Yassalalaka Thissa in 52 CE.    The stage was now set for one of the most eccentric periods of island governance. With the ascension of the regicidal Yassalalaka Thissa, the last chorus of the Vijayan throne sounded, in Frank Sinatra style: “and now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.”   With a story too bathetic to be encumbered by any inconvenient disbelief, The Mahavamsa recounts the bizarre end of this once great dynasty in 60 CE.   “Now a son of Datta the gate-watchman, named Subha, who was himself a gate-watchman, bore a close likeness to the king. And this palace-guard Subha did the king Yasalalaka, in jest, bedeck with the royal ornaments and place upon the throne and binding the guard's turban about his own head, and taking himself his place, staff in band, at the gate, he made merry over the ministers as they paid homage to Subha sitting on the throne. Thus, was he wont to do, from time to time.   Now one day the guard cried out to the king, who was laughing: `Why does this guard laugh in my presence?' And Subha the guard ordered to slay the king, and he himself reigned here six years under the name Subha Raja.”   Despatched by his own lookalike, Yassalalaka Thissa, the last Vijayan king died, one hopes, seeing the unexpectedly funny side of assassination. King Subha’s own reign lasted 6 years when, whetted by a 3 year rule back in 35 CE, the Lambakarna clan took royal matters back into their own hand and put the ex-palace guard to death.   Some 200 years after all this dayglow-mad tale, we encounter our 4th candidate; villainous for sure but oddly sweet too – though not so sweet as to rule himself out from his rightful place in this guide.    By the time Jettha Tissa I ca...

Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press. _________________________________________________________________________________________ This episode is dedicated to the sprawling plantation gardens that disappear off into the jungle around Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.    This longer of two walks, which we call THE ESTATE WALK, starts at THE PODI PATH just outside the front porch that leads into the hotel.    A traditional kitchen constructed of mud and bamboo once stood on this path, managed by Podemenike whose life roughly and remarkably followed that of independent Sri Lanka. Around 1950 she began work on the estate as a lady’s maid. It was just a few years after independence – and she stayed on to help protect the estate once the family fled after the 1987 JVP Uprising.    This violent Marxist-Leninist insurrection almost toppled the then government of President Premadasa. For over two years a state of near anarchy dominated life, with militant riots, mass executions, and assassinations affecting most areas of the island. Pro and anti-government militias added to the battle, the causalities of which, Human Rights Watch eventually estimated at 35,000 – a figure no sides yet agree on.   It wasn’t the first such uprising.    In 1971 a similar insurrection occurred, this time against the Bandaranaike government, though its fatalities were considered to be less. But the 1987 rebellion was the first truly island wide event that deeply affected the estate, causing it to be abandoned by all except Podemenike and two elderly croppers, understandably fond of arrack. It was a terrible time for the country and although Podemenike’s kitchen has long since gone, as you walk down this little path, you may, at least in your imagination, still catch the smell of real village cooking - warm spices and buttery rice.   THE PODI PATH cuts through a pepper plantation, arriving soon at a flight of steps on the left just before THE SPICE KITCHEN. Herein lies the entrance to THE KITCHEN GARDEN, with two special trees coming into touch on the right. The first of these is a Cannonball Tree or Sal Tree.   This is a mighty and magnificent wonder, with pink white architectural flowers like half open lids that give off one of the most perfumed and refined scents you are ever lightly to encounter on this good earth. It grows to over one hundred feet and the flowers eventually turn into seeds the size of cannonballs that hang off the main stems of the tree like a wayward artillery store.   The tree comes from South America and is the source of adamantly held confusions. Buddhists believe that Lord Buddha was born in a garden of sal trees in Lumbini in distant Nepal.    But the Cannonball or Sal tree growing in Sri Lanka only arrived in South Asia in the 1880s. The first one to have a detailed record is that in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, planted in on the 14th of April 1901 by Geroge V and his alarming wife, Queen Mary.    Given the extreme botanical spectacle that this tree is, it is no surprise that it has come to be conflated with the sal Lord Buddha would have known – shorea robusta, a smaller tree with little flowers and no fragrance. I hesitate to boast and brag, but the inventible conclusion from comparing our Cannonball Tree with King George’s is that our, being much larger, must predate 1901.    Beside it is what looks like Breadfruit tree. Or possibly a jacktree? Actually, it is both – a rare hybridising that occurred entirely naturally between these related species.    The relationship coach, Laura Doyle, famed, at least in California for her trademarked “Six Intimacy Skills,” remarked that “Only God is perfect. For the rest of us, there are apologies.”     And so it is for our Kitchen Garden. Invaded nightly by hungry porcupines; several times by a small herd of 20 wild boar, and often at the mercy of deer, squirrels, and monkeys, it is a wonder it ever produces any herbs or vegetables.    Even so, we limp on, brave as Obi-Wan Kenobi, planting organic wonders that will flourish all the better once we finally get around to fencing in the entire acre. The happier plants grow in a large greenhouse, mostly soft vegetables, and herbs. The area is surrounded by shade nurseries, home to hundreds of hand reared trees, destined for timber plantations or our rare trees arboretum.   Returning back to the steps up which you first came to enter the kitchen garden you then , on your left THE SPICE KITCHEN.    This modest building was made in the traditional way as a Pandemic project in 2021 by our whole team, using bamboo, mud, and leftovers. It is the place for staff teas and lunches, and a creche. Part of the building is used to process latex, the raw white juice extracted from the estate rubber trees that is then half dried and rolled on machinery made in Wolverhampton in the 1940s.    At the building’s end is another flight of steps, this one leading up into THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN. The path through the spice garden is circular, eventually returning you back to this point.    And now you are in the Estate’s private spice garden, planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger and named for two sassy polyamorous Methodist family cousins who lived, ménage à trois, with a German POW on their remote Cornish farm for 50 years. Their three graves, side by side, overlook the sea near Morwenstow.    The only graves here however are those of the three estate elephants, their limitless night songs still heard in the hearts of those best able to in the occasional elephant Séance.   The vanilla vines we grow in THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN are descendants of the 19th century plants the British brought to the island, hoping to eclipse the commercial success the plant enjoyed in Madagascar.    But it was not to be. Fastidious, fussy, and economical, it never amounted to much even through vanilla experts commend the unusual taste that Sri Lankan vanilla has evolved to produce - “a more complex flavour profile with delicate sweetness, subtle floral notes, and hints of cherry and caramel,” or so they say.    Hand pollinated with the sort of brushes favoured by watercolourists of the more exquisite schools, it is nevertheless a bit of a hidden gem – and one that offers plenty of opportunities to practice patience. The cloves, cinnamon and pepper planted alongside it is far more robust and grow on through any amount of animal attack. But the turmeric and ginger tubers have to be husbanded carefully for they offer wild boar treats of almost libidinous pleasure and excess.   Getting back to the main path from its entrance point, THE PODI PATH then leads through a large plantation of pepper vines, growing gleefully up glericidia poles. Gliricidia is the perfect plant for this, being fast growing and erect - and pumping the ground around it with lots of nitrogen. It is also much used as a living fence.   The path moves on through jackfruit and clove trees and past THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD. Marked by Ceylon Oak or Koan Tree, the estate’s 3 elephants lie beneath it. The last elephant died in 1977, a few years after standing very firmly on her mahout. The plant itself is sis even longer living – and thi...

Hidden Trails is the subject of this podcast, which steps off the tourist path to give you a glimpse of the things that really make Sri Lanka tick.    Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visitors to Sri Lanka typically get up to.   And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis; and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice driving its roads or walking its streets.    And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands. As it does most others. For as Bad Bunny, the rapper said, “Simple goes a long way.”  Especially here, far from the busy busy world.    History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this. The fate of this renowned local beauty entwined with the story of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy queen, Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha.    Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first; rescued her, married her, in fact - and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of which was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is no trace.   Yet the world she inhabited is not yet all gone, and this tour will try to pick up what aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will finger inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha, a cave altar that was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today; and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom.  On route too is a handloom workshop; and a wood carver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation.      2 THE KING’S HIDING PLACE   Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE; but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown.   This he did, but little good came of it. Decades of earlier royal misrule had set up the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura for utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana. A devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, opposite Mannar, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi.    The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between 103 BCE and 89 BCE were to either murder one another or fall victim to the guerrilla campaign that now became ex-king Valagamba’s ion and priority.    For 10 years war, regicide, and rebellion cripped the land. The first three Tamil kings murdered one another; and the final two were killed by Valagamba’s successful gruella campaign.   By 89 BCE, he had recaptured the throne/. He was to rule for a further 12 years, but his religious preoccupations, perhaps magnified by his long periods of hiding out in temple caves, set in motion the island’s first Buddhist schism.   Over the following hundreds of years the ancient little temple carried on; its caves gathering statues; its forest getting ever denser; and the walls of the rock within which it hides being chiselled with medieval drains to fend off the monsoon.    Today it remains a place for solitude and prayer; a moment of stillness to carry with you, the lintel about the cave itself inscribed with a pre Singhala script – Brahmi, an alphabet that date back to the 6th BCE in India.     3 TEMPLE, SCHOOL, MUSEUM, PEACE   A temple of a quite different sort is next on the tour.    There is no agreed word to describe a hunger for temples, but any such human condition is most easily put to rest in Sri Lanka, the island that averages a temple or kovil every three mile or so. Ancient, famous, revered, enormous, historic, picking out just one to especially favour is no easy task. But the one I would pick out, for its abiding spirit of serenity; its simple good work; its connectivity with its community and it halcyon calm is Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya.    Found off a tiny back road just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, the temple is around 400 years old, dating back to King Rajasinha II; the collapse of the Portuguese occupation of the island; and the arrival of the Dutch.   Within its grounds lie a lovely elongated mini stupa, over 100 years old; a dormitory for its monks; ponds of koi carp, a range of Buddhist alters; a Museum; public rooms for workshop and eating; a medical facility; and the ancient temple itself.   It is overseen over by Udawela Nanda Thero, whose kind and thoughtful character is almost all the argument you need to believe in the goodness of God. Half a century old, his family have presided over the temple since it earliest beginnings. Someone once said that anyone who loves book...

Thirty miles north of Kandy marks the start of an extraordinary 5 temple circuit tour to places long lost to modern travellers.  The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife – nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. Shew was also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still living aboriginal peoples.  Kuveni, and her husband Vijaya, were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox ion - more akin to Dido and Aneas, with the queen immolating herself. But whilst it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding paterfamilias, it is much harder to find similarly smitten organisations who bear the name “Kuveni.” Coming from a nation fond of boasting the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further and it becomes exactingly clear why Kuveni is the queen the country is too alarmed by to properly acknowledge. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood; and go on challenging them to this day. Her story starts as she sits trapped at in her modest palace, a pawn in her father’s political armoury. She is, naturally, no ordinary princess. Descending from King Ravana, the ten-headed evil demon king who fatally kidnapped the wife of the Supreme Being – her bloodline offers up a clue, if ever one was needed, to a family proclivity for prolific violence, chaos, and injustice. But in Vijaya she spots a way to escape the prison of her family.  Vijay, a shaved head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” was exiled by his father and arrived in Sri Lanka, a man in need of friends. Friends, land, food: in fact, at the time he arrived on Sri Lanka’s shore, he was a man in need of pretty much everything. And in Kuvani he found just about everything.  Overcoming some immediate disagreements in which she almost eats him and imprisons his entire band of feckless followers, she performed a faultless volte-face, gives them food and clothing and, according to the ancient Mahavamsa Chronicle, beaming with broad indulgence, if Chronicles can be said to beam, “assumed the lovely form of a sixteen-year-old maiden.”  Although marriage was what Vijaya and Kuveni agreed on, so too did they execute a plan to annihilate her Yakka tribe. But much good any of this did her. In using Vijaya, she was, in turn, to be even more devastatingly used by him. Soon after inaugurating his new kingdom at Tambapanni, and fathering two children, Vijaya abandoned her, sending to India for a more respectable princess, one who was drawing-room perfect, and banishing his native wife to the wilderness.  Rejected by both husband and the people she came from and had betrayed and killed, Kuveni climbed or was forced to the top of a mountain and hurled down, cursing her disloyal husband as she died. Her husband was to die without heirs. His successor was struck down by a (presumably related) disease, and his entire children made demented by bloodshed, civil war, and familicide.  Across the entire island a lonesome scrap of haunting folklore offers a hint as to the final tomb of Queen Kuveni. There is nothing to it except the curious behaviour of the local people. Visitors to the village are welcomed to its little temple, the Maligatenna Raja Maha Viharaya, but not permitted to walk to the top of the little hill above it, where the queen’s crypt is said to lie.  About 15 miles on from here is the Ridi Viharaya. Although substantially restored in the 18th century by the Kandyan king, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, the temple dates back to the 2nd century BCE – roughly the same time as the text of the Rosetta stone was chiselled into a basalt slab in distant pharaonic Egypt. To better understand the supreme importance of this ancient temple, take a look at pictures of the oldest of the island’s 3 greatest stupas, the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 to 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu.  The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle. “King Dutugamunu had the workers dig a 7 cubit deep excavation. He had soldiers brought in round stones and had them crushed with hammers. Crushed stones were placed at the bottom of the excavation and compacted using elephants. The Elephants had their feet bound with leather to protect their feet. Fine clay was brought in from a nearby river. This clay was known as butter clay since it was very fine. King Dutugamunu ordered to spread butter clay on top of crushed stones. After placement of the butter clay layer, the King ordered to bring bricks. Bricks were placed on top of the butter clay layer. On top of bricks, mesh of iron was placed. Mountain crystals were placed on top of iron bars. Another layer of stones was placed on top of mountain crystals. On top of stones, 8” thick copper plate was placed. Copper plate was sprayed Arsenic and Sesame oil. On top of the copper plate, seven inch thick silver plate was placed.” And that was just the beginning. The king was to die before the stupa was completed and the Mahavamsa tells the story of the dying monarch being caried on a palanquin to see the works. Standing for centuries, and now much restored, its fabled relic chamber has yet resisted all attempts at excavation. Within it is said to be a vessel filled with Lord Buddha’s artifacts, placed atop a seat of diamonds, encased in a golden container adorned with gems, and set inside a room decorated with murals and a sliver replica of the Bo Tree.  The Mahavamsa Chronicle notes its sovereign importance: “The relic-chamber shall not shake even by an earthquake; flowers that were offered on that day shall not wither till the end of Buddha Gotama's Dispensation; the lamps that were kindled shall not be extinguished; the clay that was mixed with perfume and sandalwood shall not dry; even a single scratch shall not appear within the relic-chamber; stains shall not appear in any of the golden goods that were offered.’” The money for all this construction came from silver ore that was mined from beneath the Ridi Viharaya, the ore itself a serendipitous discovery by monks and merchants. On an island famed for gemstones that seem to pour from its rivers, silver deposits are so rare as to be almost non-existent. This one, able to finance so great an undertaking as Ruwanweliseya, would have turbo charged the local economy for a period, a more modest version of the California Gold Rush which helped build California. Or the one in ancient Athens, where the discovery of silver in Laurium funded a navy which in turn turned Athens into a superpower. That the ore was used to build a temple in Sri Lanka is a telling comment on the very different priorities encountered here. In thanks for this, the king built Ridi Viharaya over the mine. Seen today, it comprises 25 caves, inhabited by (naturally) unseen Arhat monks, the entrance to the entire complex marked by a rock and stupa which is thought to be the location of the original temple and the place where the king once stood to be correctly dressed before beginning his devotions. Also visible is a Polonnaruwa era temple decorated with Kandyan paintings and carvings of dancers in a distinctly Hindu style; a pavilion for drummers; the main temple within the original cave from which the silver was extracted and now filled with ancient statues and tiled in Dutch porcelain Bible tiles; and the Uda ...

This episode is dedicated to a 200 year old mountain war.   Hills are of course what Kandy is celebrated for - and its most famous city-centre mountain, Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, is home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. It was once, more memorably, home to some atypical human sacrifice, involving a particularly beautiful girl, Dingiri Menika who lived right next to the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, in Galagedera.   Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of a Kandyan queen, the girl was kidnapped by soldiers, loaded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake for overnight consumption by demons. Quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first; rescued her, married her, in fact - and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king, Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of which was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees.   Protected by a necklace of high mountains - Alagalla Mountains, Bible Rock, Uthuwankanda, Devanagala, Ambuluwawa, the Knuckles and Hanthana - and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions. Secretive defensive, forever on the alert, the kingdom guarded its independence with valiant and unrelenting focus. Such behaviour was not quite on a par with the fabled Sakoku isolationist policies that made the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate so famous until they were breached by American gunboats in 1853 – but it certainly had much in common with it.   The Alagalla Mountains is an especial trekkers’ paradise, offering its visitors a range of hard core or easy treks. Its range of dry evergreen, montane, and sub-montane forests are home to many species of fauna and flora, including wild boar, monkeys here, squirrel, anteaters, porcupine, monitor lizard, tortoise – but it is especially noted for its 50 recoded bird species which include Sri Lankan junglefowls, Layard’s parakeets, and yellow-fronted barbets.   A little over 15 miles from Alagalla is Bible Rock itself, a stunning example of a Table Mountain. Over 5,500 feet high, its curious open book shape inspired early Victorian missionaries to give it its canonical name, though 300 years earlier it performed a vital task as a look out post for the Kandyan kings, eager to spot the latest colonial invasions, especially those of the Portuguese. A classic series of bonfires, running mountain to mountain, starting here, and ending close to Kandy was the trusted warning signal that was used, just like the famous Armada Fire Beacons in England in 1588. Steep though the climb is, it doesn’t take long to get to the top – and one of the best views in the country.   Some four miles away from Alagalla is the little town of Balana. The Balana , on the southern edge of the Alagalla Mountains was the second of two critical entry points into the kingdom, the other being at Galagedera. “Balana” is the Sinhala word for” look-out,” and look out it did, commanding from its perch 2000 feet about sea level, a perfect view of the entire territory that any enemy would have to cross.   Balana foiled a Portuguese invasion in 1593. Several later attempts by the Portuguese resulted in their armies being destroyed – most especially at nearby Danthure. The political, military, and religious machinations that led to this point were as intricate and complicated as anything since the ascent of man. They involved the scandalous conversion of Buddhist kings to Catholicism, the betrayal of a kingdom, the reassertion of Buddhist militarism, the forcible marriage of the last dynastic princess to a succession of Kandyan kings, and the last great throw of the dice by the Portuguese to seize control of the entire island. Shameless cheek, betrayal, gorilla skirmishes from impenetrable jungle depths, abysmal weather and escalating terror marked the Danthure campaign. It was to end on the 8th of October 1594, the Portuguese army of twenty thousand men reduced to just ninety-three at the battle of Danthure. The survivors were left wishing they had not outlived their compatriots as their noses, ears and gentiles were severed. A memorial of sorts, even if only in the heads of ing guests, can be felt at the Danthure Rajamaha built centuries before the events that were to immortalise it occurred.   Just a few years later, in 1603 another attempt was made. The Portuguese observer Queyroz wrote “the new fortalice of Balana stood on a lofty hill upon a rock on its topmost peak; and it was more strong by position than by art, with four bastions and one single gate; and for its defence within and without there was an arrayal of 8,000 men with two lines of stockade which protected them with its raised ground, and a gate at the foot of the rock and below one of the bastions which commanded the ascent by a narrow, rugged, steep, and long path cut in the Hill.”   Three days of bitter fighting eventually led to its capitulation, the Portuguese conducting a special Thanksgiving service in the fort, but it was a very short victory. Within days the Portuguese had fled, their long retreat back to Colombo beset by guerrilla fighting. But by 1616, aided by the accent of Senerat, one of the few notably inept Kandyan monarchs, Balana was reoccupied by the Portuguese - and improved with a drawbridge over a moat, the addition of a large water tank for sieges and the clearing of trees to a distance of a musket shot. Ruins of the fort remain even to this day, most especially the foundations opf the higher buildings in their quadrangular layout of 3 circular bastions. Parts of the lower fort are lost in the jungle - its many ramparts, ditches, and buildings.   And it was here, around Balana, at the Battle of Gannoruwa, that the imperial ambitions of the Portuguese finally                met their grim finale. The mercenary army of Diogo de Melo de Castro, the Portuguese Captain General, had marched up from Colombo a third time to try, in 1638, to capture the Kandyan kingdom of Rajasinghe II.  The king, sitting with deceptive and majestic leisureliness under the shade of a great tree, conducted the battle with razor sharp stratagems. Weakened by mass desertions, just 33 Portuguese soldiers survived of the 4,000 that made up the army, almost all of them reduced to heads piled up before the victorious king.    The king, with his alliance with the Dutch, had managed to drive the Portuguese from the island once and for all. This proved to be a mixed blessing as his dubious association merely saddled him with a new colonial occupier. The Dutch were to prove much more professional and ruthless than the Portuguese as they went about their colonial mission.    Bnut Portugal’s failure marked the blossoming of the last kingdom - the kingdom of Kandy. The kingdom was to endure for over two hundred years; and to meet head on the invasive forces of two more colonial armies – the Dutch and the British. And although it ultimately succumbed, betrayed more from within than without, it put up such a fight as to ensure the continued survival of the island’s culture until it could be better cherished after independence in ...

Kipling believed that to understand a country and its history you had to smell it. Yet the past is documented in so many other ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. Even so, their stories, like their secrets, are often hard to capture, and harder still to comprehend. It is thought that there are well over 1,000 temples scattered in and around Kandy and its hinterland. Few are properly documented and remain secrets to all but the people living next to them. Each one would have once had a pivotal position in its society, its influence casting itself out like a fishing net to encom the istration, governance, and politics of its local society in ways that are now long lost. To see such places today, shorn of all this context is like being told something intimate and confidential but having little wherewithal to properly interpret their mystery.   For the island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. If every you are able to read them right, you will read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects back the country’s life for over two thousand years. Many of the island’s greatest medieval and early modern temples lie in and around Kandy. And many of these were built or restored by Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the second Kandyan king from its third and final royal family, the Nayak Dynasty of Madurai, India. An especially ionate Buddhist devotee, with a fondness for the religion’s more aristocratic expressions, it was his reforms that did much to restore Buddhism which had been badly damaged by the unrelenting forces of colonialism, especially – at the time – from the Dutch.   Given Rajasinha many other challenges, including fighting the Dutch and seeing off serial internal rebellions, it is surprising he was so successful with his religious priorities. In order to jump start what by now was a most depleted Buddhist Sanga and to purge it of what he saw as practices inconsistent with the teachings of Lord Buddha, he enlisted the help of Buddhist monks from Thailand and backed the founding what became the Siam Nikaya, which is now the largest of the two most prominent Buddhist chapters on the island.     This most establishment of establishment orders is located at the Malwatu Maha Viharaya, a complex of temples and monasteries that were given the 14th century pleasure gardens of the earliest Kandyan kings as their new address. Like the White House or Vatican, Malwatu Maha is a power magnet, fusing religion and politics into so certain a draw as to ensure that, should you ever have problems locating the President, important ministers, notable visiting foreign dignities or ambitious politicians and celebrities, there is a more than certain chance that you are likely to find them queuing outside the doors of the chief prelate of the Chapter here.   Barely five miles away from Malwatu Maha is another of Kirti Sri Rajasigha’s temples: the Galmaduwa, the loneliest temple in Kandy. Barely anyone goes there; indeed it is not even a proper temple, its construction being abandoned by the king whose busy mind had moved from temple making to fresco painting. Yet it is an arresting building, the most Hindu of Buddhist shrines with a high tapering gateway exactly like those used to highlight the entrances to temples across Tamil Nadu.    The frescos the king abandoned Galmaduwa Viharaya for can be seen a mile or so up the road at the Degaldoruwa Raja Maha Vihara. With hindsight, the king’s change of priority was bang on for the frescos that cover the walls of this temple are among the very greatest ever commissioned by any of the island’s kings. Despite being inevitably religious in character, telling with due piety, the story of Lord Buddha, their sub text, as well as their sheer artistry, marks them out as exceptional. Into their scenes are incorporated the images of their times – Portuguese firearms, for example, the uniformed attendants of the kings, processional elephants, fish, trees as stylised as corals, the inside of homes, flowers, furniture, coaches, queens, guest arrivals and dinner parties.   On the opposite and western side of Kandy, are several other incomparable temples – albeit ones whose daily visitor numbers can be recorded with the forlorn fingers of a single hand. The greatest by a whisker is the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, built around 1350 by the kings of Gampola, Versillian rulers with a reputation for enjoying all the finer points of culture.    As the Black Death destroyed faraway Europe, Sri Lanka’s late medieval kings enlisted the artistry of a Tamil architect famous for his Hindu temples to create a Buddhist edifice that merged the Sinhalese architecture of Polonnaruwa period with Dravidian and Indo Chinese flourishes. It could have been a car crash of a building; instead Sthapati Rayar, the architect, pulled off a masterpiece. Elegant, highly incised white walls stretch into a roof of patterned tiles across three granite stories, the inside adorned with frescos.    A few miles on is the Gadaladeniya Temple. Built around the same time as the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, by the same kings, to the design of another renowned Tamil architect, Ganes Varachari, this temple is, if anything, yet more distinctive, its Vijayanagar architecture blending Dravidian, Deccan, Islamic, Hindu and Rajput features with other more common Singhala qualities.   Remarkable though these temple are, one other exists that is yet more heart stopping for its sheer, naked beauty. It is best appreciated – at first at least – from afar. Very afar. From the Presence Chamber in London’s Kensington Palace in fact. For here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace of limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons. No wood sculpturers are the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. None - expect one practicing at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari.    Mulachari is renowned for many things but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale. A medieval masterpiece, the temple had withstood wars, weather and most especially the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom – in nearby Kandy. By the 1750s it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari who lived nearby, his family, one of a number of Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work. Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, - Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy; and most especially Rajasinha. In this the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.   Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. Although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By comparison, at Embekke Devale, you enter instead a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts.    In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a stroke of artistic genius in of itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mother...

One of Kandy’s greatest and most wonderful secrets is its nature. The city sits in a valley surrounded by 5 main hills, up which, like an indulgent bubble bath, buildings of later regret have begun to creep. But one side of the city remains nicely protected - UdawaththaKele Forest. Once a forest hunting reserve for the kings, it is now a magical 104 hectare protected nature reserve. It is home to 460 plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupine, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats. But its real draw are its birds. Over 80 species have been recorded here, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl.   Other birds – turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons – can be found swimming away on Kandy Lake. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surround by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometer circumference and is overhung by huge rain trees. In its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling and monitor lizards, turtles, and numerous fish including an exotic 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a wide snout, and razor-sharp teeth.   Nature tamed is another aspect of the city. “Will you come to our party to-day, Carrie Wynn? / The party is all ready now to begin; / And you shall be mother, and pour out the tea, / Because you’re the oldest and best of the three.”    Elizabeth Sill, a Victorian children’s writer, was the first person noted to use the phrase “being mother” when it came to pouring out the tea. It echo is heard in almost every country of the world, pouring, one hopes, Ceylon Tea. But although tea is now synonymous with Kandy, it was something of a late comer to the city’s attributes.   Just outside the city centre is Giragama, a tea factory set amongst several hills of tea which offers Stalinist style tours and presentations. The factory is a short hop from where the very first tea bushes were grown on the island. Tea first arrived here in 1824, with plants smuggled from China to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya. Now the island’s dominant culinary export, the crop began life accidentally. Famous though the island it for its remarkable teas, it was first famous for its coffee. In 1845 there were just thirty-seven thousand acres of the crop but by 1878, coffee estates covered two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres.   Tamil labourers arrived (seventy thousand per year at one time) to help the industry grow and in 1867 a railway was built from Kandy to Colombo just to carry coffee. It was, said the papers, a “coffee rush,” but one that benefited many – for a third of the estates were owned by native Sri Lankans. Investors flooded in and by 1860, Sri Lanka was one of the three largest coffee-producing countries in the world.   But in 1869, just as it seemed as if the coffee boom would go on and on, the crop was hit by a killer disease - Hemileia vastatrix, "coffee rust” or “Devastating Emily” as it was known by the planters. It took time to spread – but within thirty years there were barely eleven thousand acres of the plant left. The industry was wiped out. That the country did not follow suit is thanks to a Scot named James Taylor and his experiments with tea. He emigrated to the island in 1852 to plant coffee and spotted early the effects of coffee rust. On his Loolecondera Estate in Kandy he immediately started to experiment with tea until, from plant to teacup, he had mastered all the necessary techniques and processes necessary to succeed with this new crop.   In 1875 Taylor managed to send the first shipment of Ceylon tea to the London Tea Auction. Despairing coffee-planters, sat at Taylor’s feet to learn tea production. Within about twenty years the export of tea increased from around eighty tons to almost twenty-three thousand tons in 1890. Tea had caught on. The few estates that made up the eleven hundred acres of planted tea back in 1875 had, by 1890, grown to two hundred and twenty thousand acres. Today, the country is the home of the cuppa. Its climate is perfect for the plant and its modern history is in part moulded by it. Tea s for almost two percent of total GDP and employs directly or indirectly, over a million people.   Terrain, climate, light, and wind shape quite different brews. The varied regions of the island make distinctively different teas – just as the different parts of or Spain make such dissimilar wines. The most subtle tea is said to be come from Nuwara Eilya. Here at six thousand feet the climate is rugged, bracing, cold enough for frost, and best able to foster teas that are golden-hued with a delicate, fragrant bouquet.    A more balanced flavour comes at four to six thousand feet from the Uva region. Here the bushes are caressed by both the NE & SW monsoons; and a drying Cachan ocean wind that closes the leaves, forcing a high balance of flavour. It is aromatic, mellow, and smooth. A very tangy flavoured tea comes from Uda Pussellawa, at five to six thousand feet, a thinly populated region, famed for rare plants & leopards, and bombed by the NE Monsoon to give a strong dark pungent tea with a hint of rose.   From Dimbulla, at three to five thousand feet, comes a tea with a very clean taste. The region is drenched by the SW monsoon – which means crisp days, wet nights, and a complex terrain that makes a reddish tea, most famous as English Breakfast Tea. Kandy, the first home of tea, is noted for its most classic of tea flavours. Here the tea plantations are typically at two to four thousand feet, to inspire a bright, light, and coppery tea with good strength, flavour, and body.    A more caramel flavour is found at a little over sea level - Sabaragamuwa, home to sapphires and humid rainforest. The region is hit by the SW monsoon which makes for a robustly flavoured dark yellow-brown tea. The last and lowest lying tea region is Ruhuna which runs from the coast to the Sinharaja Rain Forest. The region is shielded from monsoons and has a soil that promotes rapid long, beautiful leaves that turn intensely black and make strong, full-flavoured dark teas.   Tasting all this delicious tea that emanating from so many different parts of the island is more than a little distracting – for the greatest irony in the country’s tale of tea is just how secretive its real origins have since become. Loolecondera, the estate where it all started, still exists just outside Kandy, surrounded by hills of tea – but it is almost entirely inaccessible. Determined tea adventurers with reliable 4 wheel drives can just about make it up to the estate. But like so much in Kandy, it hides in plain sight. It is perhaps a human inevitably that anything given half a chance to become a secret, will become so – though perhaps this is truer in Kandy than elsewhere.   The only secret Kandy cannot really hide lies just outside the city centre: the Perediniya Royal Botanical Gardens. Here, glorious, drunken avenues of Cook's Pines, Palmyra Palms, Double Coconuts, Cabbage Palms, and Royal Palms lead off into shady dells. The garden was refashioned in 1821; and is today one of the finest, if not the finest, botanical garden in Asia; the modern garden set up by Alexander Moon for the receipt and experimentation of plants introduced for c...

This episode is dedicated to a walk down the secretive streets of Kandy.    Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why.   Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan , given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s true and real soul. Its heart.   This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record in having withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning.    But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, s, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea.   No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods shipped by the colonists from the island – but given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was big. Very big. And, and the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.”   As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out, a Sinhalese citadel, offering its shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important.   It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that could be bettered by donkeys. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the unfulfilled promises of ing politicians.   Nor is it mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few - though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous, discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed full of ancient flags and wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios.    And then there is the very Sir Lanka approach to specialised products. Every so often as you travel the island you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise goes back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls and ornaments, religious objects, and body decoration. Three hundred years later the craftsman remain, melting and moulding, deg, and decorating, stamping, and sealing, engraving, and polishing.    A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories or mass manufactured ornaments and head for Kandy’s Royal Bar & Hotel. This old walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying with hints of bashful sorrow, the still remaining traces of striking 17th, 18th, and 19th century vernacular architecture.    Walauwas – or mansions are they are called in the West – abound in the city, as Kandyan nobles set up their family residences as close to the royal palace as possible. Proximity is power - but after the king was deposed this particular force lost its draw; and their city address became of diminishing importance.   The city’s greatest walauwe is now The Queen’s Hotel. It was first turned into a mansion for the British Governors, before transcending into the hotel equivalent of an aging maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s unequalled site, on a corner overlooking both temple, lake, and palace, makes you want to go round and round the block just to take it all in properly.   Many other such buildings hide down other city streets, balconies and verandas, screened windows, and opaque courtyards, squirreled away secretly behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Kandy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities. Its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most.    “Secrets,” noted James Joyce, “silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” But Kandy’s many secrets, held by old families in lofty mansions high above the city; in the unspoken concerns of the people who walk its streets, may be weary now – but they are most unwilling to ever be dethroned. Like threads you pick at, they unwind from way, way back - to explain almost everything. Here history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout.   Before you even get to the city’s colonial tribulations still less its modern day ones, its deeper history is a still more byzantine tale of competing plot lines in which kings, caste, money, and religion complete with such complexity as to make Human Genome Project look like a walk in the park.   Its first line of kings from the Siri Sanga Bo family, wrested the kingdom’s independence from an older Sri Lankan kingdom. But beset by forcible catholic conversions, fever, and internal strife, they petered out, exhausted and baffled, in 1609, barely a hundred years later.  

Very Close Encounters are the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions, adventures and activities that lie easily within a 10-15 miles journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.      Kipling believed that to understand a country you had to smell it. Especially the perfumes of its past. Yet the past is documented in so many different ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story.    The island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. Read them right and you read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects back the country’s life for over two thousand years.    Fortunately, two of its greatest medieval temples lie near at hand, together with a Buddhist temple that looks Hindu; a Hindu temple built by the last Buddhist king; a temple equally favoured by both religions; a Victorian church that’s escaped from the home counties - and the holiest Buddhist site on the island.    Equally close is a mountain range beloved of trekkers; and one named for gnomes adorned by a vast statue; a lake beloved by cormorants and pelicans; a forest sanctuary for birds – and probably the best botanical garden in Aisa. In between these places are lands of a different sort – tea plantations; a farm famed for mushrooms; melancholy cemeteries and a battlefield where colonial ambitions met a bloody end.   Close by is the island’s greatest surviving royal palace; frescos that tell tales centuries old; a rock pierced by a road; and an antique version of the Nine Arch Bridge. And for oniomanias there is a shop and museum dedicated to tea; a village dedicated to copper and brass and an antique shop that never ends.   But let’s start with a song.    All good days begin with a rousing hymn and this one starts with “All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.”  So goes Mrs Cecil Alexander's anthem in “Hymns for Little Children,” published in that most revolutionary of years – 1848.    But it is her second verse that calls most to twitchers and eager ornithologists. “Each little bird that sings,” it goes: “he made their glowing colours, He made their tiny wings.”  It is a tune worth humming as you drive to UdawaththaKele Forest, 12 miles away from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel and perched just above Kandy’s Temple of The Tooth. It is one of the country’s loveliest bird forests: remote, wild – but accessible.   All creatures great and small live in its 104 hectares, along with orchids and ferns, four hundred and sixty plant species; butterflies, snakes, snails, lizards, toads, frogs, insects, monkeys, civet, deer, loris, boars, porcupine, the ruddy mongoose, giant flying squirrels, bandicoots, and bats.   But it is of course the birds that draw most of all. Over eighty species have been recorded, many endemic, including Layard's parakeet, the yellow-fronted and brown-capped babblers, the Sri Lanka hanging parrot, the three-toed kingfisher, mynas, golden-fronted and blue-winged leafbirds, spotted and emerald doves, Tickell's blue flycatcher, the white-rumped shama, the crimson-fronted barbet, the serpent eagle, and brown fish owl.   Appropriately, for a trip inspired by a hymn to animals, just beneath the forest lies the Church of St Paul, built in 1846, two years before Mrs Cecil Alexander's hymn was published.    Over succeeding decades, the church’s terracotta bricks - now weathered to a red-ochre hue – would have echoed with the tuneful musical notation added to her hymn by William Monk. Monk’s great other hymn was “Abide with Me” – and that is precisely what this most home counties of Anglican churches has done. It has withstood more than the most expected tests of time.   Just two years after its completion it weathered the shattering 1848 Matale Rebellion – and then all the succeeding wars and insurrections that beset the island, protected by vast gates of wrought iron fabricated far away in Edwardian England. Inside the dimly lit church is a majestic pipe organ donated by Muslim businessmen from Bradford, a silver-gilt communion set gifted by the King of England – and a blazing 1874 stained glass window of the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Angel in the Tomb, and the Nativity, the gift of a planter’s widow.   Outside, beyond its residual beam is Kandy Lake, and its prospect of a bracing walk. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surround by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometer circumference and is overhung by huge rain trees. Across its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling ducks and monitor lizards, turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons, and numerous fish including an exotic and savage 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a wide snout, and razor-sharp teeth.   A circuit of the lake starting at The Temple Of The Tooth itself takes you all the way round to the Temple’s back entrance where lies, most conveniently, Slightly Chilled, a hilltop bar slavishly dedicated to snacks and cold beers.   Here also, just beside the temple’s back door, lies the entrance to the British Garrison Cemetery, created in 1817 - two years after the formal annexation of Kandy. It is home to almost two hundred souls, laid out like crazy paving, including John Robertson the last European to be killed by a wild elephant in Ceylon; William Robert Lyte, grandson of the author of "Abide with Me;” and the colonial ruler, Sir John D’Oyly whose penchant for sarongs and beards made him the country’s first foreign hippie.   A visiting Englishman wrote that “a stranger visiting this spot would be charmed at the magnificent scenery which surrounds it. In this lonely spot lie many hundreds of kindly Scots, who cut off in the very prime and vigour of their manhood, sleep the sleep which knows no waking, under the rank weeds and wiry grasses which cover their neglected graves. Many a sad tale of hardship, agony, and pain, could the tenants of these nameless graves tell, were they permitted to speak.”   In equal sorrow - if not the same disorder - lie two hundred of the eighty-five million victims of World War Two, intombed in perfect order at the flawlessly maintained Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery. Ceylon escaped much of the horrors of that conflict but rather eccentrically found itself the location of Southeast Asia Command, set up in Kandy under Lord Mountbatten to be in overall charge of Allied operations. Far from the real battlefield, Queen Victoria’s great grandson, found plenty of time to invent cocktails at the nearby Queens Hotel where he is still occasionally ed.   The hotel, once the Walauwa mansion of the British Governors, is now the hotel equivalent of an aging maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s bar, where somnambulance has evolved into a competitive sport, is the ideal spot to collapse in after a visit to the Kandy’s greatest and most overwhelming sites – the palace of its last kings and The Temple of The Tooth.    These two places, though part of the same complex, are easily mixed up, a confusion that makes clear the unremitting opacity of the line between religion and state has always existed in the country. &nbs...

This episode is dedicated to the party that lasted for 22 years.     Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders; albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity.   Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the ending of the ancient world itself – 500 CE, for just 5 years beforehand that the ancient world itself had come crashing to a bloody end around the base of this 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE.    With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally out lasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschild’s surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the last martini on board the Titanic.   Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittie, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck. Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise.   Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV.  In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow - and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later.   Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun.  And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne.   The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s greatest kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after this father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile.   But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa played family politics with a cardsharp’s skills. He out manoeuvred his brother, and, with the help of the head of army, deposed his father, Dhatusena.   Had things ended there we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings.  But with Oedipean or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign.    And, to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anduraupura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri; and headed for Sigiriya. Its like, anywhere in Aisia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking some twelve hundred years later, in 1707.  A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many.   The fortress itself sits atop a massive lump of granite - a hardened, much reduced magma plug – all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermits monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by Kashyapa as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE.   Much of it is hard to identify today but, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it:  water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel.   Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders that mimicked an artless park with long winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens.    Across it all stretch double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematic precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion. The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place, “Sigiriya” being the Singhala for “Lion’s Rock.” It is as if the walls of heaven itself defend it.   When Kashyapa died, having wisely chosen to drive a sword through his own body rather than be captured alive, the city sank into a desolate retreat for a handful of monks getting so overgrown by jungle through the ing centuries that its rediscovery in 1831 by Major Jonathan Forbes of the 78th (Highlanders) Regiment of Foot was the sensation of the year. Forbes was no ordinary officer. His book, Eleven Years in Ceylon published in 1840, is regarded as a masterpiece and he himself was so obsessed rumours of Sigiriya that he dedicated himself to detection, writing later: “From the spot where we halted, I could distinguish massive stone walls appearing through the trees near the base of the rock, and now felt convinced that this was the very place I was anxious to discover.”   Decades after the publication of Forbes’ book, the full and real glory that underwrote Sigiriya was gradually discovered.  Central to it all was its reliance on the most advanced water technology in the world to power its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls.  Rock-cut horizontal and vertical drains, underground terracotta pipes, tanks, ponds, interconnected conduits, cisterns, moats, and waterways channelled surface water to stop erosion and tapped other water sources to deliver water to the huge ornamental gardens, the city and palace - and harness it to help cool the microclimate of the royal residences.   Exhibited here in Sigiriya are all the greatest advances the country made in developing technology and practices to empower the water that powered the state itself.  Climbing to the top will not reveal them; indeed most of it is still lost underground or in forest.  But it is there – traces of it, obvious to the trained eye.   “There will,” stated Stephen King deferentially, “be water if God wills it.”  But as any ancient Sri Lankan would have told him, this is only half the truth...

This episode is dedicated to Sri Lanka’s best hotels.   What modest moral argument there ever is to pick out the best in anything is fatally undermined in this guide - for it presents merely my point of view.  No judge, still less a democratically elected jury is on hand to mediate and amend. The choices are, at worst, biased; at best, whimsical.  Nevertheless, it is my history of happiest stays that best explains these most likely contenders for the happy stays of others.   Of Sri Lanka’s 10,000+ places listed as offering accommodation, the greater majority are privately let villas and apartments, supplemented by homestays. Less than a quarter of its accommodation is classified as a hotel 2,500 in all.    A third of these hotels are 4-star and less than 8% (200) are rated as 5-star.   For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of the 200 5-star hotels are small private operations that focus on providing authentic boutique experiences rather than long corridors of identical bedrooms.    The hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world have yet to put in much of an appearance in Sri Lanka. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory across the island, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality that can be evenly experienced in any of their branded hotels.    Most hotel development has, of course, followed the tourists and so hugs the coastline from Negombo, near the airport, to Yala in the far south, with the greater number coalescing around Galle.   A much more modest sprinkling of other 5-star hotel dusts such locations as Kandy and the cultural triangle, with a few outstanding examples reaching out into the north and east.    We start, as visitors rarely do, in Colombo, where 14 hotels jostle for attention, a mere handful of the many others, and the more being built now.   Affordable, comfortably tatty and very environmentally minded, The Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, is a much overlooked boutique hotel is within walking distance of many of Colombo’s nicest haunts. Sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road, it is a habitat of rare calm and tranquillity, its lush pool and rooftop bar among its many subtle delights.    More noticeably boutique chic is Maniumpathy.  By checking in at the beautifully restored walawwa, you can pretend that you are anywhere but in a big city. Cool, quiet, and calm, the little hotel, despite having changed hands multiple times, is a great option for anyone wishing to replace big brand hotels with something on a much more human a scale.   For fine establishment boutique you can’t beat Tintagel. The graceful Colombo residence of the Bandaranaike families and scene of the assassination of S.W.R. Bandaranaike, Tintagel is now an impressive boutique hotel run by the Paradise Road designer and entrepreneur, Udayshanth Fernando. If sinking into unquestionable peace and luxury is your principal need, this is the place for you.    At the other end, boutique casual you might say, is Uga Residence.  The landmark hotel in a small and growing local chain, Uga Residence is a 19th century mansion that has morphed delightfully into a lavish boutique hotel. Set like a delightful navel in the heart of the city, its bar offers an inexhaustible range of whiskeys.   Colombo’s most famous hotel, The Galle Face Hotel, has a Victorian era guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the time, this iconic hotel is the only one in Colombo that still enjoys direct sea access – though to bathe off its slim, rocky beach to invite prescient thoughts of mortality. It started life as a modest Dutch Guesthouse before the opening of the Suez Canal turned the tickle of eastward bound Europeans into a river.    Continually enlarged and upgraded, most notably by Thomas Skinner in 1894, it became the city’s top luxury meeting point attracting an international A List. Gandhi, Noel Coward, Che Guevara, Yuri Gagarin, Nixon, Prince Philip, and Elizabeth Taylor all booked rooms. Vivien Leigh sulked in her bedroom, sent home in disgrace by her husband Laurence Olivier.   Little has changed since her repeated calls to room service: it is just as lovely, weathering a recent upgrade with rare, good taste. It is the best place to Wedding Watch as it hosts around one thousand society weddings a year. Enjoy them as you nibble Battenburg cakes on the terrace, sip Pimm’s and watch the Crow Man scare away the birds.   The Cinnamon Grand is the flagship hotel in a chain of Cinnamon Hotels, a stone’s throw from the President’s Office. Despite its corporate, blocky architecture, its secret weapon is its people. It makes a point of knowing who you actually are and what you really want. From lavish pools to flaky croissants, themed restaurants to battleship-large reception desks, it offers all you would hope for from a large, successful hotel.    Still a beacon for cloistered modernity is Colombo’s Hilton Hotel.  Weathering a troubled birth, it was nevertheless one of the first globally branded hotels to wash up on Colombo’s then more parochial shores. It was finally launched in 1987, a year which, but for this, the country would choose not to dwell upon. Civil war raged, Jaffna was besieged and a serious of murderous race riots broke out. But to honour the hotel’s thirty years of indefatigably providing guests with all the best services of a major hotel (and one of the best brunches on offer in the city), a stamp and a first day cover were issued by the Sri Lanka Post in 2017.    It new competitors however are giving it a run for its money.     One of the milestones in Colombo’s journey from an overlooked and embattled post-Independence past into a more materialistically glamorous future was the creation of the high rise Shangri-La Hotel.    Built by the Chinese as a sort of offshoot of their Belt-and-Braces mission, it overlooks the sea at Galle Face Green with half a dozen bars and restaurants, and lavish bedrooms well able to match the best in any other globally branded five star hotel.    Just a stone’s throw away is China’s greater investment in the country - Colombo International Financial City, a 300 acre, $15 billion, special economic zone reclaimed from the sea which, the suits claim that will be a place that “fuzes the culture and energy of a nation with best international practice.” Whilst the exact meaning of this penetrating solipsism is hard to unpick, and the planned architecture so modernistically predictable as to make it tricky to know whether you are in Dubai, Shanghai, or London Docklands, Pricewaterhouse Cooper insists it will add almost twelve billion dollars to the country’s annual GDP.   And then there is the Taj Samudra.  One of the oldest luxury hotels in Colombo, the Taj was constructed before astonishing s was put on the capital’s sea facing land. It therefore enjoys a rare calming green skirt of lush gardens and wings that go out rather than up. Scion of the Taj India chain, it offers its guests everything they might hope for from a massive corporate hotel, including excellent restaurants (especially YUMI), a hai...

Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard.       Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure the town like the country has more than its fairly allocated measure of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed that is little different now to when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE.   From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka, to the country’s founding father, a terrorizing prince descended from lions, the island’s very earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral sprits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort.    Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam – albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors.   And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible.    It is not what it seems, a small town of ing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears it reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as crown of sapphires under a hoodie.    The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the age of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town.   Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast.   Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged around the western seaboard, the hill country, and the far south.    The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside.   Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura, and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park, whilst a third, the A15 leads towards the coastal villages of the south.    None bring with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing.    A beautiful sparse and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding very occasionally to almost green forests. A most untwenty first century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice at Trincomalee itself.   And almost immediately you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other.  Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park. Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words    “Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear iral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear iral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.”   Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently  burst like firecrackers over world fiction – from Sri Lanka itself of course, but also from Canada, Australia, the UK, the US or New Zealand, part of a raw diaspora created by civil war and corruption.     Their fiction has become an unexpected globally embassy, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.    Family was close to Charles Austen’s heart far beyond his famous sister for he was to create a titillation of scandal back home for his serial marriage of two sisters. But this failed to detract from his lasting memory, and he is ed by one of his subordinates as stoic and dutiful to the end.    “Our good iral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.”   All around his grave are earlier and later graves, mostly of British colonists, military officers and engineers who staffed this most distant part of the empire. Out of tombs and obelisks boosting the weathered details of Georgian architecture grow trees and shrubs. Buffalo graze amidst them. “Home at last, thy labours done, “reads the tomb of Charles Frank Miller, who died aged 235 in 1899, “safe and blessed the victory won…angels now have welcomed thee.”   It is rumoured that occasionally a few dedicated of the Jane Austen society fly out to tend Charles Austen’s grave; but come more often they must, for within the next few decades the graveyard will be all but obliterated by weather and neglect, like the vanished church of St Stephen’s that once oversaw it all.    In the placid residential suburbs north of the graveyard lives another fast disappearing record of the island’s colonial times – this one linked to the Portuguese, who first came to the island in 1505. For here, around the self-contained streets of Palayittu live the last descendants of island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local wo...

This episode is dedicated to a single garden in central Sri Lanka – at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.    “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.”  Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees.     For it was gardens, not love, occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, its regimented perfection even stretched out into a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well mannered.    Of course, it helped that they were tended by armies of gardeners, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said.    Later when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses albeit with green bits.    Over the years I tested this theory: in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner; on Bayswater balconies, Welsh seaside cottages, Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle.    We had bought, incautious and without any help whatsoever from Excel, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. Its 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765; and until the civil war the estate stretched over 100 acres with 3 working elephants.   When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around.   Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed.    So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice.   Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites.    Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly slowly our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created 4 different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets.   Of these 4 walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments.    This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height making it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species.    Layard’s parakeet is an easy one to spot for it has a long light blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness of sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub.   Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: The Alexandrine parakeet is similar to the rose-ringed parakeet – only much larger. It’s a bit of a city dweller. The other, the sparrow-small, endemic Sri Lankan hanging parrot or lorikeet is a rare creature: a twitcher’s crowning glory.   All these birds can be found in G. M. Henry’s celebrated 1958 Guide to The Birds of Ceylon, which sits in the hotel library, together with some of his original watercolours. Henry was one of the last great ornithologists – the sort you would fight to sit next to at dinner.    A discoverer as much as a describer of species, he wrote extensively about the island’s wildlife. Born on a tea estate in Sri Lanka in 1891, his bird guide is remarkable not simply for being comprehensive but also because it is so entertaining. His descriptions are unforgettable and funny; of the lorikeet, he remarks, the bird is not simply another parrot but a convivial and restless one with highly ridiculous breeding habits. Reading his identifiers, you almost feel you have met the bird concerned at a party, conference, dentist’s waiting room or orgy.   Close to our blushing Cassia is KASHYAPA’S CORNER, a small garden of Frangipani trees, named for the anonymous 5th century mistress of Kashyapa, the king who built the Sigiriya pleasure palace, partying there for 22 years before being murdered.    Its frescoes show her holding the wickedly fragrant frangipani flowers – wicked, because, despite lacking nectar, their dreamy scent tricks moths into pollinating them. Arguments rage gently over whether there are twenty or 100 species of the tree; but none of this matters in Sri Lanka where the plant has been so eagerly adopted by temple goers that it is called the "Araliya" or "Temple Flower Tree".   South American by origin, it spread around the world on the backs of gardening missionaries, though this does nothing to explain how its flowers came to be depicted over 1500 years ago in Sigiriya. A small tree, rarely more than 20 feet high, it flowers in shades of red and yellow, white, and peach; and even when bare is as close to architectural marvel as any tree can get.   Stretching out beyond KASHYAPA’S CORNER is a croquet lawn, rather unwisely planted with Australian grass for its smoother velvety feel; but continually under siege by the more rampant and feisty Malaysian grass which possesses the invasive qualities of pirates. A much-sheered golden dewdrop hedge surrounds it; the plant is liberally tolerant of the hardest pruning and has become something of a poster girl for tropical topiarists.   Growing through them are a few dozen stately Queen Palms. We call them DONA CATHERINA’S PALMS, after the island’s most beguiling queen, Kusumasana Devi. Three times tempestuous queen of Kandy (1581 to 1613), Dona Catherina died of grief, outwardly Buddhist, inwardly Catholic.    It was her bad luck to be caught up in...

Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind the scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course with a welcome. And a thanks, for coming our way, for most of the readers of this guide will no doubt be our guests.     Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon.   To have made it this far, your car will have managed our driveway of buffalo high grasses and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords.    We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random – is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, still less a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope.    Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth we got here in the first place.   Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country; nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet.   The hotel sits, belly button like, in the middle of 25-acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves; and rarer trees.   Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired of the Household Calvary.    But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera , which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers - fortified by the Kandyan king’s army - rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment to much later, little happened. In the jungle that is.    Elsewhere America declared itself independent, the Holy Roman Empire got itself dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here.    In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection crippled the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes.  Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate; and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors.    Later, we arrived on a holiday; and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion – which was, of course, to buy it.  The estate, the buildings were lovely; and only needed some love back.   The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London.    There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them.    And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s wives: some jailed, some cherished. There was monsoon, material shortages, power cuts and work schedules giddily interrupted by alms giving and wakes.    And of course the Easter bombings, COVID, the bankruptcy and collapse of the government, and shortages of everything from fuel to yeast.    But with each cloud came the most golden of silver linings, the fostering those most Sri Lankan of virtues - patience and fortitude.   As a thirteenth century Sufi mystic put it: “What comes, will go. What is found, will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description.”  With a wisdom you might expect from one who put up with Genghis Khan, Rumi was right. In the jungle everything, eventually, settles back down. Nicely. And so, finally restored, the estate opened as a boutique hotel in 2019, to become one of the island’s Top albeit tiny 5-star hotels.   Most hotels start their blubs with room details or menus. This one starts with plants. As befits a jungle hotel, we love them. Especially trees. We have planted almost 8000.    The gardens that cradle the hotel include yellow and pink shower trees, frangipani, flamboyant and Illawarra flame trees; coconut, lipstick, and queen palms; mangos, and wood apples.    In outer garden grow cycads, orchids, sapu, Cook and Norfolk Island pines, jak, jacaranda, and tea. Rarer palms too - travellers, foxtail, ruffled, stilt and golden; pomegranates and citrus in force – from lime to kumquats, grapefruit to tangerines.   Small paths crisscross the estate with four easy walks laid out in the Garden, the Outer Gaden and a half or full estate walk, with a fifth taking you further into the jungle and nearby hamlets.    Down one of these paths is our private Spice Garden planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger; nurseries of herbs, vegetables and rare saplings, the Elephant Graveyard, and a grove of cocoa. Beyond all this stretch the plantations where the jungle is kept at bay with ever more deliberate degrees of lassitude.   Deliberate – because that’s what the wild creatures demand in most surveys we have carried out.   Birds especially. Over 200 species breed on the island, 33 endemic.  We have counted over 50 species here including, kites, eagles, peacocks, paraquets, owls, hor...

Retail Therapy in a Tuk Tuk, the subject of this guide, will take you down the one of the world’s busiest high streets.       And don’t worry about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world. Marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first village you encounter as you drive into the hills of Sri Lanka from its central plains.   Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalization and changing consumer habits have made only the most modest of footprints.  Within the next 30 years this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk tuk is like time traveling in Tardis.  Once upon as time, your village looked a little like this.   The tour may may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no change of breaking for martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter.  Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail park.   Galagedera high street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and business on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road.     At almost any time of the day it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks.  Pause and watch.  People talk.  They pause and gossip, trade news, they know one another.   In amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fish mongers, and butchers, wood carvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, are a wide range of businesses and services.   LEFT OUT OF THE GATES and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country.  Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant death.  It runs parallel with paid-for private health care with its faster and sometimes more advanced treatment.  And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system that is ed by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching collages and a bespoke government ministry.,   Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and around 20 who are itted to its wards, cared for by around 5 doctors and 40 nurses.  Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care and maternity care are all provided for, but the more complicated cases and conditions are referred to the main state hospital in Kandy.     This includes – on average – 10 snake bites it encounters annually but not the scorpion bites which can be treated locally.  Colds, flu, road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts.   Next up is the village’s central bus station which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala all through the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide and a short walk away from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide.     Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: real looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric.     Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School.  Founded in 1906 this is the only girls school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on.    The village’s main school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the village.  Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students from ten to eighteen years, with about 70 staff to educate 1,000 students.   For hardcore consumers, a retail treat offers itself next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 bothers, the hardware tycoons of the village.  The second brother trades in such item as cement, plumbing and electrics and the third in glass.  They are as second generation business family, the enterprise having started 40 years earlier.   Their rather surprising neighbour is Green Life, a plantation investment company that specialises in guavas.    Given that the fruit, delicious in jams, deserts and chutneys, originated from south America but has been used in traditional Sri Lankan medicine for hundreds of years, it is likely that it arrived sometime after 1505 with the Portuguese.  Guavas are grown mainly in the dry zone, not the hill country of Galagedera so this anomaly of an office is rare and mysterious thing, as much to me as to its manager.     Then you encounter one of the village’s great retail treasures: the Ayurveda Medicine Shop.  Once little larger than a wardrobe, this enterprise has ballooned in the past 8 years and sells over 100 different pungent herbs, which are made up to whatever prescription the customer presents.     Amongst its many wonders is devil’s dung.  Made from the dried latex of carrot related plants from central Asisa, this curious version of Asafoetida finds greater favour amongst cooks than patients for the smooth onion like flavour it bestows with generous grace to any dish to which it is added.   The village boasts a branch of Durdans Laboratories whose range of basic medical tests often saves a longer journey to the main hospitals in Peradeniya.  The chain began in 1945 and is one of several leading private health care providers, such as Lanka Hospital and Asiri.   The village, being about 40% Muslim, naturally boasts its own mosque, this one a large white and green structure, whose Imman’s call to prayer, a welcome musical improvement on the previous incumbent, can be heard daily across the jungle.   Sri Lanka has well over 1 million tuk tuk on its , so it is no surprise to find several 3-wheel garages in the village, one of the better ones being New Chooti Motor Centre.  Most tuk tuk drivers are careful and law abiding souls; even so, the vehicles for almost 4,000 road incidents annually, almost 8% of them fatal.   As the row of shops thins out on the left, you the Government Vet, their animal mandate including the usual tally of cats and dogs, but also sizable numbers of goats and some 100 weekly out calls for cows.   Nearby is the Hanna Gold Shop, one of several tiny gold shops in the village, their products typically 22 carats or less. It lies close to a large Village Sports ground - usually silent and locked except on those days when politicians come to town, eager for large rallies; or for very occasional music performance or even sports tournaments themselves. 

Pretty Close Encounters is a travelogue fixed on those attractions and activities that lie easily within a fifteen-to-thirty-mile journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.     Almost two dozen strange and wonderous things lie within this radius, including the rumoured 5th century BCE tomb of the island’s first queen, the lost masterpiece of one of the world’s great carvers; the nemesistic battle field of a Portuguese king; some of the best mountain ranges for trekking; a bird sanctuary; a controversial orphanage for elephants; a temple cherished by the country’s first all-island king; the forest retreat of reclusive monks; the hidey-holes of a freedom fighting king famed for his boomerang resilience; the village of a latter day Robin Hood with Oscar-Award winning looks; the home of the bible of Buddhism; and an eccentric vertiginous jungle tower.   But to get the level of things, we start 8,734 km from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel at Kensington Palace’s Presence Chamber. Here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace of limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons.    No wood sculpturers are the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal.    None - expect one practicing at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari.    Mulachari is renowned for many things but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale, a 16 miles drive from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A medieval masterpiece, the temple has withstood wars, weather and most especially the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom – in nearby Kandy.    By the 1750s it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari who lived nearby, his family, one of a number of Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work.   Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, - Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy; and most especially King Kirthi Sri Rajasinha whose 35-year reign - to 1782 – was preoccupied by restoring many of the hundreds of Buddhist temples destroyed in the colonial wars. In this the king was greatly helped by Mulachari., who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.   Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. But although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry.    The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By comion, at Embekke Devale, you enter instead a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts.    In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in of itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breast feeding children, double headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world class carvings.     But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a women; a bird takes on human attributes, a slight of hand revels that an elephant is a bull; another, that is a lion.     Sixteen miles in the opposite direction you encounter Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. Founded back in 1975, it is a very popular tourist attraction, but it has increasingly looked out of place in a modern world more respectful of animal welfare, especially that of wild animals.   A report by Born Free, the wildlife charity which opposes the exploitation of wild animals in captivity, has cast a shadow across the claims made by the Orphanage. The charity’s report takes issue with the very term “orphanage,” explaining that their “breeding of more animals for the purpose of being kept in zoos, or sent to private collections or temples, clearly does not satisfy” the implication that their animals have been rescued. Its profit motivation, they claim, undermines their mission. They also take issue with the centre’s level of animal welfare.    Their chaining of male elephants wounds the legs and the use of a spiked shark hook as a training tool is simply cruel. Why anyway, they ask, should elephants be trained at all?   One recent tourist was to blog that “I ed numerous elephants chained in solitary confinement. Now, I can’t claim to understand elephant behavioural patterns fully but the fact they were shaking back and for and only doing repetitive movements disturbed me. They also looked like they were in deep distress.”   Notwithstanding the amazing sight of scores of elephants bathing collectively in the river at set times of the day, many tourists opt instead to see elephants in their wild setting – in Minneriya, for example, a wildlife park near Dambulla. Though a longer drive, it offers grand sights that are still more unforgettable.   Six miles away is the small Kurulu Kele Bird Sanctuary which, despite its proximity to Kegalle, nevertheless is famed for the sheer abundance of different species that live in its forest. A 25 mile drive from here takes you into trekking country.    Protected by a necklace of high mountains - Alagalla Mountains, Bible Rock, Uthuwankanda, Devanagala, Ambuluwawa, the Knuckles and Hanthana - and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions.    The Alagalla Mountains, twenty miles from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and to the west of Kandy is an especial trekkers’ paradise, offering its visitors a range of hard core or easy treks, the easiest being a hint of a path that begins at Pilimathalawa and ends at Pottapitiya. Its more off-road adventures including climbing, rock scaling, and navigating through forests.    Its wide range of dry evergreen, montane, and sub-montane forests are home to many species of fauna and flora, including wild boar, monkeys here, squirrel, anteaters, porcupine, monitor lizard, tortoise – but it is especially noted for its 50 recoded bird species which include Sri Lankan junglefowls, Layard’s parakeets, and yellow-fronted barbets.   A little over 15 miles from Alagalla is Bible Rock itself, a stunning example of a Table Mountain. Over 5,500 feet high, its curious open book shape inspired early Victorian missionaries to give it its canonical name, though 300 years earlier it performed a vital task as a look out post for the Kandyan kings, eager to spot the latest colonial invasions, especially those of the Portuguese. A classic series of bonfires, running mountain to mountain, starting here and ending close to Kandy was the trusted warning signal that was used, just like the famous Armada Fire Beacons in England in 1588. Steep though the climb is, it doesn’t take long to get to the top – and one of the best views in the country.   3 A DEADLY WAR   Some four miles away from Alagalla is the little town of Balana. Of the many attempts made to invade Kandy from 1574 to 1815, nine were to prove almost, but not quite, overwhelming. In 1574,...

Books to escape with is the subject of today’s podcast.     Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuse the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.”   One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating; and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book group meets. hip is by invitation only and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales.    There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis.   But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from holiday in Kandy.   Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said.   And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did.  Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a list of books that is long enough to keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Time enough to give up the day job; and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only.   The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar of genres. But it will then upturn them with the most unexpected of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive Through.                                                                    Suprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds that are framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests.   Needed they most certainly are. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape; and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit.  It’s nice enough.  But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing.   Sri Lanka presents the opportunity to slip out of this literary listlessness. Through, why, you may disputatiously ask; why Sri Lanka? Why not another other of the world’s 200 odd countries?  Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world.    Or can you? Few other countries are currently creating such a wealth of world class literature as is Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst like firecrackers over world fiction. Try just a few; and you will see.    But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with?   This guide brings together many of the best – all, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan.    Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy.    And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first.    The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction.     A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, and, of course, the perennial themes of the island: family, love, the jungle, loss, and living.   Take Carl Muller and his famous trilogy – which is to Sri Lankan literature what John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” is to England or “The Godfather” is to New York. A saga writer first and best, he is rightly celebrated for the three books he published from 1993 onwards about the Burghers of Sri Lanka as told through “The Jam Fruit Tree,” “Yakada Yaka” and “Once Upon a Tender Time.”    His trilogy unpacks a time when the world was golden, a kinder halcyon life that the later civil war would render almost unbelievable.    A much darker world is inhabited by Michael Ondaatje, whose novel “The English Patient” catapulted him to global recognition. In 2000 “Anil’s Ghost” came out, one of his most impressive works, a mystery set in Sri Lanka and riven with love and fear, identity, and antiquity.    But “sometimes,” wrote Cassandra King, the Queen of Southern storytelling, “we laugh to keep from crying.” And Romesh Gunesekera does just this with his novel “Reef,” a slow burn tale of a young chef so committed to pleasing a seafood-obsessed master, that he is oblivious to the unravelling of his own country.    But for something less cathartically seismic there is Yasmine Gooneratne. Normally, to be an academic teaching English literature is a necessary condition to disqualify you from ever writing good novels.    But not Gooneratne, whose novel “The Sweet and Simple Kind,” is one of the greatest friendship novels you will encounter. Set in the newly independent nation, this coming-of-age tale of two cousins, Tsunami, and Latha, intertwines with language and religion, politics and privilege, humour, and ion. It will keep you up all night long.    It was published the same year another author, Nihal De Silva, died, victim of a land mine explosion at the Wilpattu National Park. One of the country’s most talented thriller writers, his war story, “The Road from Elephant ” won a place in all readers for its story the LTTE Tamil woman and her Sinhalese army officer.   And then, as if by magic, the island’s writers moved on, articulating a measured, and confident ...