Sri Lanka

Two things feed this page. The first is a culture-and-conversation day around Kandy with a Sri Lankan friend, who answers most of the questions in the sections immediately below. The second is the daily vlog series Harry films across the country from February 2022, which supplies everything from “Arriving” onwards.

The Kandy conversation

Obs: everything in the next four sections — religion, the war, dating and the note on animals — is that friend’s account, given on camera. Harry repeatedly says he doesn’t know enough to check her, and invites the comments to correct both of them.

Practical

• Tuk-tuks can be rented and driven yourself, which is how the whole day runs. Buses own the road; the windscreen wipers are worked by hand.
• Foreigners pay roughly ten times the local price at attractions. Harry asks the local price out loud and does the sum on camera, and treats it as normal rather than a scam.
• Kottu is the food to order — he has it with cheese and with chicken, and rates it the best meal of the trip.

Buddhism

• Brought from India by the Buddha, and now the religion of around 70% of the population.
• The teaching, as she puts it: the relief of suffering.
• Reincarnation and karma — you don’t choose what you come back as, and where you’re reborn follows from how you lived.
• The iconography: the first seven steps taken on lotus flowers; a prince born into wealth who left it; enlightenment as the search for an end to suffering.
• Hindu shrines sit inside Buddhist temples — Lakshmi and Ganesh among them — and the two religions overlap in practice.

The civil war

Both of them handle it carefully and neither goes far, which is itself the observation worth keeping.

• Tamil and Sinhalese, and she was a small child at the time.
• Her framing: it isn’t something people bring up, and the conflict was not between ordinary people.
• Harry stops there, saying plainly that he doesn’t know enough about it.

Marriage, dating and family

The longest thread in the video.

• Families push marriage once you reach a certain age — less than they used to, and some families much more than others.
• A dating culture exists and is westernising. Marriage in the early twenties used to be standard and is shifting later.
• Traditional gender roles are common but not universal — the father earning, the mother at home — and changing.
• Children don’t move out at 18. Staying with parents is normal, which he contrasts directly with Britain.
• Hookup culture is taboo and not discussed openly, more so outside Colombo, though she says her generation talks about it more than the last.
• A statistic she offers: Sri Lanka is first in the world for searches of the word sex, ahead of India (from video – unverified — an internet claim neither of them sources).
• People under 25 are strikingly shy, which Harry raises several times and which visibly shapes his interviews.

Animals

His one flat criticism: animal welfare is not good. The prompt is a group of men killing a venomous snake in the street, and he says he doubts the dogs and cattle are treated much better.

Arriving (February 2022)

From the first day of the vlog series, which starts in Kandy.

• Entry was straightforward — a few pandemic forms and through — even arriving with no visa and no onward ticket. The difficulty was at check-in in Dubai, not at the Sri Lankan end.
• An airport taxi to Kandy cost about $35 for a drive of two to three hours.
• A SIM card cost about $6 with 30–40 GB of data on it.
• How Sri Lankans eat, as explained while ordering for the table: one main dish and a lot of small side dishes, shared out — rice or noodles as the base.
• First impression from the car: more developed than he expected, with clean roads and roadsides.

First impressions (February 2022)

From the first full day, in Kandy.

• The food is spicier than he expected, and than anywhere else he has been. His own ranking, delivered at a local breakfast: Sri Lankan above Pakistani, with Colombian nowhere near either.
• Infrastructure is better than he expected — roads, roadsides and buildings all cleaner and more developed than he had assumed.
• Cricket is the universal opening. Buying and wearing the national shirt changes the first line of every conversation he has that day, and the goodwill towards the English comes up unprompted and repeatedly.
• Traders will ask for dollars or pounds rather than rupees.
• Prices, as a baseline: about $2 for a twenty-minute tuk-tuk ride, about $1.50 for a local breakfast, about 50 cents for a fresh fruit smoothie, about $6 for a replica cricket shirt.
• Hospitality is the thing he keeps testing against Pakistan, and it holds up — including with the people who have nothing to sell him.
• A procession in white with drums turned out to be food being carried to a temple as a donation, not the funeral he assumed.

Getting around, and what is on the roads

From the drive north out of Kandy.

• Long-distance taxis are cheap and are how the group moves. Kandy to Sigiriya, two to two and a half hours, came to around 5,000 rupees — just under $25 — for a van holding four people and their luggage.
• There are wild elephants on the roads. One is standing in the carriageway between the two towns.
• Betel nut is chewed by drivers, for what Harry describes as a mild buzz.
• Western chains are much cheaper than at home: two medium pizzas and a water for about $11 at a highway Pizza Hut, which he rates well above the British version. Temperature checks at the door, in February 2022.
• Tea: Mac’s claim in the car is that Sri Lanka is the world’s biggest exporter of it (from video – unverified).

What a foreigner pays to get in

• Sigiriya rock: 6,090 rupees for one adult, about $30 — the foreigner price, and far above anything else the trip pays for.
• Guides at the base of a major site cost about 100 rupees, which is next to nothing against the ticket.
• Consistent with the Kandy tower, where the foreigner rate runs at roughly ten times the local one. Harry’s approach both times is the same: find out the number, say it out loud, and pay it.

Food, and what it costs

• Kottu is the national dish to order — chopped flatbread worked on a hot plate with onion, vegetables, spices and a topping. About 400 rupees, $2, for a portion Harry calls two meals.
• Spicy is a question you are asked, and the spicy answer is genuinely hot: he rates it above anything he ate in Pakistan and can taste nothing else through it.
• Spice is in everything, including breakfast, which is what he keeps coming back to — a tolerance built from childhood rather than a preference.
• Sweets are sold by weight: about 80 rupees per 100 g, roughly 40 cents.
• Choose the room with locals in it. His stated method, and the reason the meals on this page cost what they do — see eat at the local place.

History, in passing

• British until 1948, as a passer-by in Kandy explains next to a British-style postbox still standing in the street.
• Buddhist monks shave their heads and wear identical robes because hair and clothing are distractions from a simple life — Harry’s summary, given in the street.

Elephants

• They are genuinely on the roads. Harry meets wild ones twice in two days between Kandy and Sigiriya — one standing in the carriageway, one washing in a river.
• The captive alternative is Pinnawala, about $15 to enter, where the herd is bathed in the river until four and then walks back through the town in the open.
• Welfare is hard to establish and Harry doesn’t claim to have. See check animal welfare before booking. It sits oddly against the flat criticism in the Kandy conversation above, that animal welfare in the country is not good.

Markets, fakes and what things cost

From the Kandy market run.

• Two-tier pricing is open, not hidden. Ask a seller what a local would pay and you get a straight answer — see ask what a local pays.
• Counterfeits are a market category of their own: sportswear, and watches at around 1,700 rupees that would cost the same figure in pounds if real.
• The produce market is the better one. Tea, spices sold as medicine rather than as flavouring, vanilla pods, jackfruit and sugar cane, and a fish hall.
• Sweets worth asking for: oil cake, soft and syrupy, and soft sugar balls.
• Markets trade through heavy rain without shutting.

Jackfruit

Worth its own note, because it is the one ingredient Harry had never met and keeps talking about.

• Three sizes, three uses. Baby jackfruit stands in for chicken; larger fruit is cooked as a sambal or treated like potato; the largest is eaten as fruit.
• It carries whatever sauce it is in, which is why it works as a meat substitute — under a barbecue base he cannot tell the difference.
• Vegetarian food is easy to find; vegan is expensive, because the dairy substitutes are imported.

Breakfast, and the hotel version of it

• String hoppers are what he is told to order and never manages to get.
• Milk rice, dosa, vegetable sambar and beef or chicken curry are normal breakfast food, alongside a continental spread in any hotel that does both.
• Biryani here comes with a sauce, plus nuts, raisins, pineapple and a whole egg in the rice — not the dry dish Harry expected from Pakistan.
• Internet is the real constraint outside the cities. A group filming daily moved into a five-star hotel in Kandy purely to upload, after a rural stay with unusable wi-fi. Harry’s summary after a fortnight is that good wi-fi in Sri Lanka is a needle in a haystack; the fastest he finds anywhere is 61 down and 39 up, in a restaurant in Ella.
• King coconuts — the orange ones — cost about 100 rupees, 50 cents, and are less sweet than green ones.

Trains

• Three classes, and third is about 200 rupees — a dollar — for a four-hour journey. No reserved seats in third; getting one is a scramble, and the locals stand up before the train is in sight.
• The Kandy–hill country line is routinely called one of the most beautiful in the world, and Harry agrees. It runs largely for tourists now; his platform was almost entirely Western.
• Vendors and musicians work the third-class carriages, which is Harry’s whole argument for travelling in them — see take the cheapest class.
• First class costs about $5 for four hours and is air-conditioned, reserved and quiet. Its windows do not open, which on the scenic stretch between Nuwara Eliya and Ella is the whole argument against it.
• People ride in the open doorways, and there are signs saying not to.
• Timetables are approximate, and station names are easy to miss. He gets off a stop late and takes a tuk-tuk back.
• The railway history, as he tells it: the country was Ceylon, and the line was built in 1842 by European coffee planters to move goods between Kandy and Colombo (from video – unverified — his own reading, hedged on camera).

Language, and the two halves of the country

• Sinhala in the centre, Tamil in the hill country. The greetings Harry learns in Kandy stop working an hour up the line in Nuwara Eliya, which is the most concrete thing in the bundle about the division the civil war ran along.
• English is widely understood in both, and the goodwill towards England is something people volunteer.

The garment trade, and what “fake” means here

The most substantial explanation anyone gives Harry in the country, from a market seller in Nuwara Eliya:

• Sri Lanka manufactures clothing for Western brands under contract.
• A production run is quality-controlled and a large share is rejected — his example is two or three thousand pieces out of ten thousand made for a German customer.
• Rejected stock cannot legally be sold locally carrying the brand, so the labels are cut out and it goes to the markets.

Which makes real or fake the wrong question about a label-less branded jacket on a Sri Lankan market stall. It may be the same factory and the same fabric, sold without the name; it may be an unrelated copy. Harry cannot tell the difference and says so, and puts it to his comments instead. (The seller’s account, given on camera and uncorroborated.)

Hoppers, and the rest of a Sri Lankan breakfast

Harry finally gets the dish he has been told about all trip.

• Hoppers are a very thin bowl-shaped bread — soft rather than crisp, which surprises him — eaten with coconut sambol, a spicy onion relish, and chicken.
• String hoppers are a separate thing — rice-flour noodle cakes, and he spends three weeks failing to get any before finding the sweet version at 20 rupees on a Colombo food street, made with coconut and jaggery worked into the middle.
• Dal is creamy and not spicy at all, which is a relief in a cuisine where most things are.
• Milk rice — sticky, served with a chilli on top — is the item he asks for twice.
• Chicken bacon and chicken sausage are standard on hotel breakfast buffets, and he rates both.

Roti

Worth separating out, because the word covers two different dishes and Harry eats them side by side in Ella.

• Indian-style roti is a wrap — thin paratha-like bread folded round a filling and served with sauce.
• Sri Lankan roti is coconut roti — a thinner, softer flatbread torn and dipped, usually with something hot alongside.
• Dessert roti exists and is the same bread round banana, coconut and chocolate, fried in butter.
• $2 to $4 a plate, which makes it the cheapest way to eat well even in the most touristed town in the country.
• Lion beer is the national beer.

Colonial railway engineering

• The Nine Arch Bridge outside Ella, completed 1921, is described in Harry’s source material as one of the best surviving examples of colonial-era railway construction in the country — built by a Ceylonese builder in consultation with British engineers, and still carrying scheduled trains.
• Together with the 19th-century Colombo–Kandy line, it is the second time the country’s railways turn out to be the colonial infrastructure that became the tourist attraction.

What accommodation costs, across the whole trip

The spread is unusually wide for one country in three weeks, and all of it is split between three or four people:

• $7 a night each — a hostel dorm taken privately in Weligama, on the beach.
• $150 a night for a four-bedroom villa near Sigiriya.
• $300 a night for a villa in Kandy.
• A five-star hotel in Kandy and a new hillside hotel in Ella whose rates are never stated on camera.

The hill country is the expensive part and the coast is not, which is the opposite of what the weather would suggest.

The south coast

• Hot, humid and cloudless where the hills were 15–20°C and under cloud. The weather Harry was promised arrives only when he reaches the sea.
• A private car from Ella to the south runs about $70 for four, routed around the national parks.
• The surf towns are openly touristed, with surf camps along the front.

The south coast as a place to work from

• Weligama has a digital-nomad economy: a co-working space by the beach, vegan and health-food cafés, and cheap long-stay rooms at around 3,000 rupees.
• Surf lessons run about 3,500 rupees with an established instructor, less if you ask on the beach.
• Mirissa, ten minutes away, is the expensive evening: about $16 a head on the beachfront, against $2 for kottu inland.

Religion, in practice

• A mixing pot, as Harry puts it after three weeks: Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and other Christian denominations, with mosques, temples and churches within a few streets of each other in the same towns — and, so far as he can see, no friction between them.
• That sits alongside the Kandy account of Hindu shrines standing inside Buddhist temples.

Salt on fruit

A national habit worth knowing before you are offered it: salt, and sometimes pepper, goes on fresh fruit — and into fruit drinks. Harry disliked it on mango elsewhere and is won over by it on pineapple here. The 30-cent lime drink sold on the street is sugar, salt and pepper together.

Visiting religious sites

• Buddhist temples are open 24 hours. Muslim and Hindu ones have set visiting times — the Hindu temple in Colombo closes at five, and mosque entrances may be restricted to worshippers at prayer time.
• Shorts will keep you out. They cost Harry the Red Mosque in Pettah.
• Shoes come off, everywhere.
• A temple ticket can cover more than one site: 400 rupees, about $2, bought him two in Colombo.
• The Hindu share of the population is put at about 11% (from video – unverified).

Arrack, toddy and kithul treacle

Explained to Harry at a restaurant in Colombo, and the clearest chain of facts anyone gives him in the country:

• Sap is tapped from the kithul palm, a relative of the coconut palm.
• Reduced, it becomes treacle — the syrup served over baked curd.
• Fermented, it becomes toddy, an alcoholic drink of 4–6%.
• Distilled, toddy becomes arrack, the national spirit.
• The same process runs wherever the palms do — Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Java were the countries named.

Baked curd is the dessert to order alongside it: buffalo-milk curd with condensed milk and cream, oven-steamed, served with the treacle. The same syrup turns up again at the top end of Colombo cooking, served with crab liver pâté — sweet against savoury is a recurring Sri Lankan move rather than a one-off.

The economy, March 2022

This is the context the rest of the page should be read against, and it arrives late and quietly.

First, in passing. In a Colombo market Harry remarks that the financial situation in the country is bad at the moment, and that this is why sellers are so eager to get anyone at all into their shops.

Then, from someone living in it. Three days later, invited into a home in the alleys behind the Aluthkade food street, he is told by a man who has lived there 33 years:

• Food prices are very high.
• Electricity is very high.
• It has become very difficult to manage a family — the phrase he returns to.
• It predates the current government, which has promised reductions.
• His work is intermittent.

And Harry says he has heard the same thing from many people — which is the important part, because it means this had been a running theme off camera before either video recorded it.

Everything else on this page — the prices, the half-empty tourist towns, the eagerness of the traders, the $7 hostel beds — was filmed in February and March 2022 and belongs in that frame. Nothing in the sources explains the cause, and this page does not supply one.

Crab and seafood

• Crab is the dish the country is known for at the top end, sold by graded size and cooked either black pepper — boiled in a pepper stock — or garlic.
• The prawns are the sleeper. Deep-fried then simmered in garlic and chilli oil, and eaten for the head butter, the fat inside the head, scooped out with fried bread. Harry rates it the best seafood he has eaten anywhere.
• Coconut turns up in the desserts as well as everywhere else — a coconut crème brûlée is the one he scores ten out of ten.

Tea, from leaf to packet

From an unofficial walk through a working factory near Sinharaja Forest, dating from 1962.

• Tea is Sri Lanka’s biggest export, per Harry.
• Roughly five stages, including oxidation: hand sorting of the raw green leaf, weighing, drying, rolling and blending through progressively larger machines, further drying to a fine flake, and hand packing.
• Pickers collect into a sack slung from a strap across the forehead, working the slopes below the plantations’ buildings.
• The factory workforce is Tamil-speaking, like the hill country generally.
• Local tea is sold in village shops, along with cinnamon. Harry rates it above English breakfast tea.

Obs: he asks on camera when Ceylon became Sri Lanka and gets two different answers — 1948 and something in the 1970s (from video – unverified). The video doesn’t settle it; 1948 is the independence date recorded elsewhere on this page.

Eating with your hands, off a leaf

Worth knowing before it arrives: outside hotels, a full meal may be served onto a banana leaf and eaten by hand, from clay pots, with a bowl of water for your fingers. Rice, chicken, dal, beetroot, salad and a poppadum-like cracker is the standard spread. Harry’s report is that it feels wrong for about a minute.

Cricket, as a way in

It runs through the whole series as a social fact rather than a sport.

• Wearing the national shirt changes how every conversation starts — Harry buys one on day two in Kandy and trades on it for three weeks.
• Cricket is the first thing raised with an Englishman, in markets, shops and tuk-tuks, almost without exception.
• Games are everywhere and you can ask to join one. He spends three weeks saying it is top of his list and finally gets into a village match near Sinharaja Forest on his last day.

In the forest: leeches and biting fish

• Leeches are a real hazard on rainforest walks. Check as you go.
• Freshwater pools can be full of small fish that bite — painless, and identical to a fish spa.
• Wild pepper and cinnamon grow along the paths and can be eaten off the plant.

Source

• Local Girl Shows Me Sri Lanka’s Burj Khalifa 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lflY_l0wZFQ
• Surprising Luke Damant, World Nomac and Go With Ali in SRI LANKA 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrUxSDr5GPI
• My First Impressions of SRI LANKA (Not what I expected)🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O4tALBRRTY
• Epic Sri Lanka Road Trip 🇱🇰 (Sigiriya) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtbrTzCz8Ow
• Foreigner Visits 8th Wonder of the World (SRI LANKA)🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g61l7kAyggk
• Sri Lanka’s Spiciest Kottu! 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq-JwHf4NWA
• We met Elephants in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9fzTuhp2DY
• Fake Market Hunt in Kandy, Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De-9d_GIqCY
• Sri Lankan Food and Temple Tour 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1wXnnVkodc
• Best 5 Star Hotel in Kandy, SRI LANKA 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TESJWUAc3ug
• Chaos on $1 Sri Lankan Express 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RToF3gJBTeY
• We didn’t expect an English Town in Sri Lanka! 🇱🇰 Nuwara Eliya — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx6IP7cFyVQ
• $14 North Face Jacket in Nuwara Eliya 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsCbHfG6sM8
• Best Train Ride in the World (Only $5)🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_b8ggPhVvA
• $200 New Jungle Hotel in Ella, Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY3Lm9rR7nI
• I Didn’t Expect This In Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAAahBHRNrM
• Sri Lanka’s Best Roti 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlE2VSHAcAw
• The Most BEAUTIFUL place in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHfoPiIeL-U
• Avoid This Man in Sri Lanka! 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQIe_cWTfrM
• Day In The Life Of A Youtuber In Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDx8Pvi3Xrc
• $0.30 Local Breakfast In Welligama 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i846Jw9vCY4
• First Impressions COLOMBO, SRI LANKA 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3bjlPSOic
• $50 Sri Lankan Beef Wellington 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmBWRs9rDQY
• Avoid This Sri Lankan SCAM!🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpt_7rQ5Feo
• Funny Challenge In Sri Lanka’s Biggest Market 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BISOsMW8Avk
• Sri lankan Stranger Won’t Let Me Pay 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4cfGg2ACo
• $200 Fine Dining in Colombo, Sri Lanka🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsmCzMDuwv4
• Kind Sri Lankan Family Gets A Reward 💰🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRzDvy5mGI
• Why I LOVE Sri Lanka (Sinharaja Forest) 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M_Noig4i9w
• Sri Lanka’s Hidden Paradise 🇱🇰 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQV_BbaOnwo