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by Reggie Fernando, our London Correspondent

Sri Lanka's ailing tourist industry was blessed with a much needed shot in the arm here last weekend when the prestigious daily, 'The Independent' carried a full page report portraying the island as a wonderful holiday destination, where all the world's "landscapes and weather patterns" are moulded into one.

On the front page of this popular broadsheet's weekend travel supplement 'The Traveller', read by millions across England and Europe, was a sprawling half page picture of a herd of twenty or more elephants bathing at Yala. The other half of the page was filled with editorial matter glorifying Sri Lanka from every point of view.

It said: "One of the many unfathomable mysteries of Sri Lanka is how it manages to squeeze so many different landscapes and weather patterns into an area no larger than Ireland. An eight-hour drive form Colombo provides a divergence of views that could fill a continent. The capital has the chaotic bustle of Istanbul. The shimmering west coast beaches resemble the Caribbean. The tropical rain forest of the south-west I imagine to be Amazonian. The green, misty hills in the centre of the island, where the British laid out tea plantations, could have been transported from Ireland, while the mock Tudor and Georgian architecture of the colonial hill towns echoes the Home Counties circa 1958."

There was much more encouraging information for would be holiday makers but the pick of it was: "Now that the focus of international news has shifted to Afghanistan and Kashmir, Sri Lanka's civil war has been relegated from the front pages. Even the safety-first British Foreign Office has toned down its warning to travellers. This week its website bulletin began. 'Most visits to Sri Lanka are trouble free'

However, referring to the Foreign Office website which advises British holiday makers the article states:

"Like most dispatches from the British Foreign Office, it tells only part of the story - most visitors to Sri Lanka are also restorative, memorable, magical and as filled with the thrillingly unexpected as when my path crossed with elephants of Yala."

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