Episodios

  • The Jungle Spice Garden

    The Jungle Spice Garden
    Dec 14 2025
    Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intended of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar. The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten. But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough, our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before Land Reforms decimated it, were incorporated on long-term rents until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. One large plot was planted with vegetable beds, but lay so close to a misbehaving river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is more complicated even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variation in water caused sulky dieback. The tree’s high-maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties. When all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived. An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well-drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any genuine attempt to be commercial. The old rubber terraces were entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trees to produce quick flows of sap, injuring them for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.” Greenhouses for tomatoes and peppers were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef would use. Several acres' worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves, and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale to the local agriculture board, though porcupines, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas. As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleeping under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-got lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated ...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 56 m
  • Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors

    Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors
    Dec 14 2025
    Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out, in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in a proper, functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes a struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; 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 terms, 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 remarkably considered by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s authentic and genuine soul. It's 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 of withstanding 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, administrators, 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 the colonists shipped from the island. Still, 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 significant. Very big. 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 as a Sinhalese citadel, offering shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years 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 essential. 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 donkeys could better. 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 passing politicians. Nor is it a 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 in the city centre built in an almost inoffensive architectural style, 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 with ancient flags, wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. And then there is the very Sri Lankan 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 that dates back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls, ornaments, religious objects, and body decorations. Three hundred years later, the craftsman remains, melting and moulding, designing and decorating, stamping and sealing, engraving and polishing. A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and your cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories, or mass-manufactured ornaments, and head for Kandy...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 9 m
  • The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka

    The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka
    Dec 14 2025
    Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch founded a dynasty that would last over 600 years. Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off recorded Singhala history, despite the first 100 years being anything but plain sailing. Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be, and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land. Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura. They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, with an almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by their unusual, holistically philosophical approach to life and governance. Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting-edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers, and all the other disciplines critical to a prosperous ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most, if not all, of the island. To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself. To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch. Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time. All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking. Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites, Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas, and other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations with sound hegemonic hereditary rule. It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything. In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE. Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary, but they also took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism. Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and, despite later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more appropriately described as a philosophy. In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs, governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation with achieving a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is, of course, its second explanation. And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge. Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism their magnetic north. However, most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings as they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land. For however ordinary Sri Lankans are, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded. Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own. Right across the world, experts and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a ...
    Más Menos
    2 h y 4 m
  • The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

    The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka
    Dec 14 2025
    Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world fall short compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, the subject of this podcast. The world’s first Seven Wonders were assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian Diodorus of Sicily, with help from Herodotus, who began the tally 400 years earlier. Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and the Near East, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including a painting, a monastery, a book, a revolutionary new piece of technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake. It covers about a thousand years of the island’s earliest period of recorded history, from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder, for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island. This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing, for Sanskrit, a Bronze Age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues in an antique detective story, can be traced back to many others in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages. Orphan language, it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past but also to its present. Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured the island, with each new renaissance, could draw on the best of its past to inform its future with profound and confident certainty. The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 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 outlasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschilds’ 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 previous 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 invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittites, 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 most fabulous kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after his 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 outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the help of the head of the 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 Oedipian 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 ...
    Más Menos
    41 m
  • Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty

    Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty
    Dec 14 2025
    Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya. The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his forsaken native queen, and the country’s first recorded Singhala kingdom. Kuda Vilach Chiya sits on the eastern edge of what is now Wilpattu National Park. Reaching the spot is no easy matter, since it lies within a deep, entangled jungle, for which special permission must be granted to gain access. Even after that, it still requires a tractor to get you any closer to the site, followed by a lengthy walk. For countless centuries, this has been leopard country. Wilpattu’s vast 130,000-hectare wilderness is one of the island’s best kept wildlife secrets, so well off the tourist trail as to exponentially nurture its hundreds of rare species of fauna and flora - along with many endemic species: the Toque and Purple-faced Leaf Monkeys, Golden Palm Cat, Mouse Deer, Dwarf Toads, Hour-Glass Tree and Wood Frogs, Ceylon Jungle Fowl and Ceylon Grey Hornbill. Even the ultra-rare Sloth bear can be seen here, attracted by the sweet golden fruit of the Palu Tree. But despite all these exceptional features, it is for its water that Wilpattu matters most. Its name is more literally translated as the “land of Villu,” “villu” meaning “lakes.” The whole area is pockmarked with shallow rainwater lakes. But the lakes are eclipsed by Kuda Vilach Chiya, a much more deliberate water feature that is hard to make much sense of at first. Today, it amounts to little more than a long, two-to-three-kilometre embankment overgrown with trees and grasses, breached in many places by migrating elephants. It is all that remains of the extraordinary man-made lake that was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha. Hardier survivors from that time are two masterpieces of ancient aqua engineering, the creation of which allowed Sri Lanka’s builders to construct astonishingly vast water reservoirs. These, in turn, would propel the 500-year-old kingdom into the political stratosphere. The constructions – Bisokotuwas – allowed water to exit a reservoir without placing excessive pressure on the dam embankment, thereby preventing it from collapsing. As a result, the size of the reservoir could scale to unprecedented levels, water in unimaginably enormous quantities could be collected to extend agriculture, support ever larger and more urban populations, and produce crops whose surplus would rapidly and exponentially enrich the young state. The Bisokotuwas at Kuda Vilach Chiya are precision-made structures; the stone slabs used on the inner face fit so perfectly together that there is no room for even the smallest weed to grow. Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen, part of the same remarkable lost laboratory of water. The same Lambakanna king, Vasabha, is also credited with the construction of the Mahavilach Chiya Wewa, a tank barely five kilometres from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of 2,400 acres, which is still a key part of modern Sri Lanka’s water infrastructure. Quite why two such large tanks were built so close to one another is a mystery. But their very existence, and that of the Bisokotuwas that made them possible, is the point that matters most. The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, bears the impact of multiple significant historical events. Not for nothing was it chosen for its capacious reservoirs. It was once a place of some importance. Ten thousand years earlier, and thirty kilometres north, are hypnotic Neolithic cave paintings at Tantirimale. Two hundred or so years earlier, the local temple, Thanthirimale Rajamaha Viharaya, marked the spot where the sacred Bo tree rested as it travelled to Anuradhapura from India under the protection of the Indian Emperor Ashoka’s daughter, Sangamitta. Some historians even believe that the site was once home to the lost kingdom of Panduvasdewu Nuwara, the early Vijayan realm that most immediately predated Anuradhapura itself. A monastery lies on the same site, its excavated gardens littered with stone containers carved to hold gems, and the statues of gods and lions, ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. And in the nearby jungle, ancient monastic caves crouch, decorated with a script that predated Buddhism itself – Brahmi. All around it stretch the flat and softly undulating lands of the country’s massive Dry Zone. Much of Sri Lanka is very dry - as if the land itself had been bled white and hung out to dry. It is not perennially wet like Bangladesh. This is especially true of the Rajarata, the land most ...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 30 m
  • The Jungle Hotel

    The Jungle Hotel
    Dec 14 2025
    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 thanks for coming our way; most of the readers of this booklet 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 navigated our driveway of buffalo grass 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, and even 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, a 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 did we get 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 members 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 Pass, 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 on, little happened in the jungle that is. Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, and the Cold War beset Europe. 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 weakened 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 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 and the buildings were lovely; they 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 ...
    Más Menos
    35 m
  • And That's How It All Began: Sri Lanka

    And That's How It All Began: Sri Lanka
    Dec 14 2025
    It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interest in economics and Buddhism, to note the singular connection between two of the most apparent characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka. “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.” It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka, that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths. Sri Lanka is both small and beautiful. So small, in fact, that it could fit into India 50 times, into Britain almost 4 times, or even into Peru nearly 20 times, its nearest neighbour, Tamil Nadu, could accommodate it twice over, with land to spare. Head a little further north, and 10 times as many people crowd into nearby Pakistan, or six more into Bangladesh. Schumacher’s only other book, published on his deathbed in 1977, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, is a study of how humans live in the world – but it could easily have lent its title to a mandatory guidebook for issue to every person who passes through Bandaranaike Airport, citizen or guest, VIP or economic migrant. For little about the island is straightforward, despite or because of its size and beauty. Confronting it for the first time is like encountering Rubik’s Cube for the first time, that infamous multi-coloured rotating brick toy whose coloured ends seem so easy to organise into blocks. The outcome, though satisfying and apparently almost effortless, remains virtually impossible to achieve. Just below the surface of almost everything on the island, and simmering with delight, richness, chaos, or just plain thwarting befuddlement, lies the complexity of what is quite possibly the most byzantine and bewitching country in the world. The more you see, the more you wonder. Why? Why, for example, make a simple presidential election quote so convoluted and full of enough own-goal traps to risk making the spoiled votes equal to the good ones? The 2024 presidential election brought almost 40 candidates forward for a preferential-style vote so complex that the Election Commission had to issue a 200-word note on how to correctly mark the ballot paper. But perhaps this is to worry unnecessarily, for the country’s political system has, as horse riders might note, plenty of form. By 1978, when the current constitution was adopted, it had already enjoyed three earlier ones, roughly one every 16 years. Now regulated by this, its second constitution since independence, Sri Lanka possesses a governing document of such elastic resilience that it has undergone an average of one significant amendment every second year and has still survived. Such political robustness is nothing less than what should be expected of an island whose circuitous history meanders through over 2,500 recorded years to take in at least 12 former capital cities, as many, if not more, kingdoms, and 300 recorded kings, some half of whom were estimated to have murdered the other half. Conundrums, reversals and the sudden appearance of polar partisan opposites have riotously followed almost every step of that wild journey. The kings eventually made way for the world’s first elected female head of a modern state when, in July 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister. Yet in 2018, a new President reimposed a four-decade-long ban on women buying alcohol. Given that barely 6% of the country’s supreme law-making body, its parliament, is filled with female MPs, this institutional sexism is understandable – but to fully explain it, one needs to look little further than the fact that just under a fifth of all MPs have just one A-level to their credit. But there’s much more to the rule of law than exams. Should parliament depress you, look to the country’s Supreme Court, a focused and resilient body that has thwarted attempted coups and power grabs through the decades. “Do I contradict myself?” asked the American poet, Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.). And so too does Sri Lanka. Despite Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Booker Prize-winning writers, and architects who have profoundly reshaped how people live across the tropical world, its best universities barely scrape into the top 1,000 worldwide, with a pedagogy that deliberately fails almost half its students. Honest domestic consumers eager to pay their electricity bill must first correctly guess which of 8 categories they fit into before they can pay up, proof, if ever it was needed, that here at least there is little pleasure to be had in being a consumer. Used car prices have more than doubled in the past few years, and at any given time, eggs, onions, rice, milk powder, or even turmeric have entered an Alice-in-Wonderland world, priced well out of reach of ordinary people. Yet still the kiribath is made. ...
    Más Menos
    1 h y 1 m
  • A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

    A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera
    Dec 14 2025
    And we start with a little bit of retail therapy, which will take you down one of the world’s busiest high streets. And if you wonder 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 highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands. Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out, where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace, returned to Colombo, and accepted defeat. Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As the retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalisation and changing consumer habits has 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-travelling in the Tardis. Once upon a time, your village looked a little like this. The tour may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no chance of breaking for a 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 parks. Galagedera High Street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and businesses 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, and they know one another. Amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fishmongers and butchers, woodcarvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, there is 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 deaths. It runs parallel to paid-for private health care, offering faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching colleges, and a bespoke government ministry. Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and admits around 20 patients to its wards, cared for by around five doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care, and maternity care are all provided, but more complex cases and conditions are referred to the central state hospital in Kandy. This includes, on average, 10 snake bites per year, but not scorpion bites, which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, and 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 throughout the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate's Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide, and a short walk 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: authentic 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 primary school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the town. Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students aged 10 to 18, with about 70 staff members educating 1,000 students. For hardcore consumers, a retail treat comes next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 brothers, the hardware tycoons of the village. The second brother trades in items such as cement, plumbing, and electrics, and the third in glass. They are a second-generation business family, with the enterprise ...
    Más Menos
    51 m
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_DT_webcro_1694_expandible_banner_T1