One great thing about travel is the way it forces you to come to terms with the rich complexity of history – particularly the amazing historical sites you had no idea existed until you set off to wander the world. Many fellow-travelers recommended that I visit Sigiriya when I was in Sri Lanka, but it…
Travel to majestic historical sites is, when it comes down to it, an act of creative imagination – and few things serve to remind the traveler of this fact like the task of waiting in line to see said historical sites. This image (one that is usually left out of visual travel accounts) documents me…
The day before I ascended Adam’s Peak, I formulated a creative plan to get to the ancient Sri Lankan rock fortress of Sigiriya immediately after the climb. Since the traditional Adam’s hike begins just after midnight and ends just after dawn, I figured I’d skip a second night in the trailhead-town of Dalhousie and head…
Adam’s Peak is the second-highest mountain in Sri Lanka, and (since reaching the peak is a pilgrimage ritual for adherents of the country’s four biggest religions) it is by far the most popular for hikers. Local Buddhists believe a rock on the 7,359-foot summit bears the footprint of Lord Buddha; Hindus think the footprint belongs…
News analysis: Rolf and writers like Pico Iyer and James Fallows speculate on what travel will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.
After traveling classic Sri Lankan train routes across the highlands from Kandy to Ella to Nuwara Eliya, I ended up taking a long-haul tuk-tuk from Nuwara Eliya to the Adam’s Peak trailhead town of Nallathanniya. This wasn’t planned in advance; I did it at the suggestion of my driver, Suranga, whom I’d hired to take…
This is Nuwon, who oversees a restaurant named Mandala Café just down the road from the train station in Ella. Mandala Café has an unabashedly Rastafarian vibe, and pictures of reggae great Bob Marley hang in every corner of the restaurant. Though Ella is a mountain town smack in the middle of Sri Lanka, Mandala…
Located in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, Ella is a classic backpacker town. Sure, there are parts of Ella that exist independent of tourism, but it’s not hard to spend a week in the town entirely in the company of travelers from Europe and North America. There are plenty of things to do in…
While trains are a great way for travelers to get around in many parts of the world, in Sri Lanka they are something of an attraction in and of themselves. On the Kandy-to-Ella train through the central highlands – and again on the Ella-to-Nuwara Eliya train – my fellow travelers spent hours hanging out the…
Friends and vagabonders, I’ve been writing these updates for more than two decades now – it’s something I’ve been doing for such a long time that, in the age of continually updated social media, a website Update page feels downright anachronistic. Yet for all the years I’ve written travel-updates from various corners of the world,…
Having arrived in Kandy without a hostel reservations (or even a Sri Lanka guidebook), I fell back on the old backpacker trick of asking local folks at the train station for recommendations. Two decades ago they might have pointed me to a hostel (which was what I had in mind), but now that I’m in…
