SL delivers what the Caribbean could not

The Globe and Mail The upshot for tourists is that Sri Lanka has delicious white-sand beaches, natural wonders and the colonial towns and temples like in India. Yet, here we don’t have to share them with a billion others, states The Globe and Mail writer in a report published recently.

When Sri Lanka started to crop up in travel blogs and the Facebook pages of oversharing friends, we dismissed it outright. There was no way, we imagined, that the mere 29 kilometers that separated the island from India could ever really separate them in spirit. We’d

already spent our youth getting lost in the mad rituals, music and crowds of India. With two kids tagging along, we’d also outgrown the $5-a-day travel ethos, too, The writer said.

The country has more in common with Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Antigua than India. For the full Caribbean effect, visitors in the family way stay close to the crescent of land in the southwest. Using the historic port town of Galle as a hub. The villas around Galle do a fine job of sequestering you, with their tropical gardens and lap pools and antique cabinets stocked with gin, states The Globe and Mail.

“It definitely feels like a country on the cusp, though. Markets everywhere are beginning to gentrify. Museums are in the works. The restaurants in town have discovered pizza for Western toddlers averse to the vernacular curries.

Every inn has a new wing in development.

What comes next will either bolster Sri Lanka’s appeal as a Barbados of the East or send it the way of Cancun,” the writer Ellen Himelfarb said.

The writer says that Mirissa beach, whose blissful landscape we’d heard about in hushed tones, had a handful of thatch-roof cafés on a

bay edged by palm-forested cliffs. We’d come for lunch without our beach gear but by the end had stripped naked (the children, at least) and coated ourselves with hours worth of salt and sand. The kids would still be there today had we not dragged them home via Weligama, a still more isolated beach with a single snack shack looking onto an atoll that’s been converted into a luxury resort.