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…

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…

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…

After a guesthouse reservation fell through in Colombo I decided to give Sri Lanka’s sweltering capital a miss and head five hours inland to the storied hill-station city of Kandy. Coming off Sumatra I hadn’t properly fleshed out my travel plans for Sri Lanka, but sometimes it’s nice to improvise, and learn things as you…

This photo was taken last summer, during my keynote speech at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral” festival, which is a kind of Central Asian equivalent of TED Talks. I also gave some smaller talks, including a “Travel Storytelling” session to a room full of young Kazakhs. The crowd was smart and engaged, and they had tons of…

The month I spent in Sumatra proved to be as spectacular a kickoff to any year I’ve experienced during my time on planet earth – but it was merely the first stop on a dynamic Air Treks itinerary that took me to a number of countries in Asia ( with Sri Lanka, as we shall…

The sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic last month (which, in real time, didn’t feel sudden, even as data changed on a daily basis) left us all scrambling to understand what was happening, why it was happening, and what we should do about it. One way I sought to make sense of the disease during…

I need to confess, as I come to the end of the Sumatra leg of these Dispatches, that the visual narrative of these posts is – perhaps inevitably – shaped by what I was able to photograph as a solo traveler on the island. A few weeks ago I illustrated a mini-essay about the joys…