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  • Kandy Fringes

    Kandy Fringes
    2025/05/22
    3 分
  • Kandy Central

    Kandy Central
    2025/05/22
    Welcome to an episode of Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast, brought to you by The Ceylon Press._________________________________________________________________________________________Very close encounters in Kandy Central is the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions found in the heartland of Kandy city central an easy ride from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.Surprisingly, 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. For the city regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as its true and real soul. Its heart.This characteristic is not something acquired merely by the fact that it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also down to the fact that Kandy withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. It was the very 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.Through all this time it was able to foster, protect and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island before European soldiers, administrators, vicars, businessmen and planters arrived, their gimlet priorities starving the island’s culture of all that was most needed to sustain it.Kandy was the Sinhalese citadel, offering its protection to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. And 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 the interminable traffic jams, edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; traffic plans that could be bettered be dead civets; and armies of unnecessarily stressed people forced to talk on tiny or invisible pavements as the cars go sluggishly by on wide roads, which once were shaded by gorgeous trees – before health and safety got to work.If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and decent urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim priorities of businessmen and women, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the largely unfulfilled promises of passing politicians.So before setting off the explore the city, take a seat at the Royal Bar & Hotel, an old walawwa that dishes out welcome bowls of chips and frosted glasses of lime juice. It is a good place to contemplate all this before seeing it for yourself. The hotel 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. Balconies and verandas, screened windows and opaque courtyards hide behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Even so, to the discerning eye, beauty is there to be glimpsed; there to remind you that all is not yet lost, architecturally. For Kan dy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities: its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most. It is said that nearly 500 historical buildings hide in plain sight in this way along city streets that still follow the medieval grid that first encompassed this island capital.One such building is the Kataragama Devalaya, a Hindu shrine built by an 18th century Buddhist king. It is a perfect example of just such a surviving treasure – its architecture enlivened by the most intricate carvings, and colours chosen to forever banish grey. Still more dazzling is the nearby Pillaiyar Kovil, a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Siva; and built by a Buddhist king for his Tamil Dobhi. Its Muslim equal is the arresting Red Mosque, built around 100 years ago with a candy striped façade in reds and whites. Spotting hidden wonders like these is like playing hide and seek with a particular naughty child. You eventually get the hang of it. It is like coming out of a major cataract operation and seeing the world as once it was. For Kandy has plenty of beauty to reveal to the patient eye. And if shopping is your thing there are three ways to best do it. Either throw all your chips in at the Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city.Or hit upon the scores of tiny hops selling everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles in the old Kandy Bazaar. Or wander up and down the many streets in the centre in the hope of coming ...
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    1分未満
  • Very Close Encounters

    Very Close Encounters
    2025/05/22
    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 ...
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    44 分
  • Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years

    Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years
    2025/05/21
    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 ...
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    23 分
  • The 50 Best Hotels

    The 50 Best Hotels
    2025/05/11
    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 ...
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  • Gods & Ghosts

    Gods & Ghosts
    2025/04/01
    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 passing 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 passage 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 Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral 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 ...
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    3 分
  • The Garden Companion

    The Garden Companion
    2025/03/19
    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 ...
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    1分未満
  • Encounters At The Jungle Hotel

    Encounters At The Jungle Hotel
    2025/03/11
    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 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 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...
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