---
type: Video
title: "Sri Lanka's Hidden Paradise 🇱🇰"
description: A nameless waterfall reached through a stranger's garden, a pool full of fish that bite, leeches on the walk back, wild pepper and cinnamon eaten off the plant — and the cricket game Harry had been waiting three weeks to join.
tags: [sri-lanka, sinharaja, waterfalls, cricket, spices, hiking, food]
timestamp: 2026-08-06T18:50:00Z
resource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQV_BbaOnwo
video_id: VQV_BbaOnwo
upload_date: 2022-03-18
duration: 1109
---

# Sri Lanka's Hidden Paradise 🇱🇰

The final video of the Sri Lanka series, and the second day at the lodge near
[Sinharaja Forest](/places/sinharaja-forest.md) with [Mac](/people/mac.md) and
another creator: a waterfall nobody has a name for, and the cricket match Harry
has been trying to get into since [Colombo](/places/colombo.md).

*Obs: the group was invited to stay and the lodge is linked in the video
description, so it isn't named here.*

## The waterfall

- **About 20 minutes by 4x4** over rough track, then on foot — **through a
  stranger's garden** and out across tea fields.
- **It has no name.** Harry asks and is told it doesn't have one; people find it
  by being told about it. Their guide's pitch was that there would be no tourists,
  and there aren't.
- **Tall and thin**, which he puts at 10–20 m, into a pool he is told is **20 m
  deep**.
- **The water is fresh, clear enough to open your eyes underwater without
  stinging**, and colder than it looks but not cold.
- **The pool is full of fish that bite you** — the sensation of a fish spa,
  entirely painless and, by his account, deeply uncomfortable to sit through. They
  keep at it whenever anyone is still.

## What's on the walk

- **Leeches.** One attaches to Harry's hand and it bleeds properly once removed.
  He films it, apologises to the squeamish, and spends the rest of the walk
  checking his neck.
- **Wild pepper and cinnamon growing along the path**, both of which he eats
  straight off the plant. The pepper tastes overwhelmingly of pepper; the cinnamon
  bark stings slightly and is sweet, and converts him.
- **Mosquito repellent is needed** and is the source of the video's only running
  joke.
- **Tea seedlings being planted**, the bare brown patches next to grown bushes.

## Cricket, at last

They come across a village match and ask to join, and this closes a thread that
has run through the whole series — he has been saying since Kandy that playing
cricket with locals is top of his list and something always got in the way.

- **They bowl and bat**, badly, against players Harry rates as very good and very
  fast.
- **The American plays it as baseball**, which is the joke, and connects on the
  third ball.
- **The pitch is flat and the bounce is generous**, which is his one technical
  observation.

## The last meal

Late lunch, waiting for them the moment they get back: **prawn curry, poppadum-type
crisps, potato in a sauce he again compares to Thai green curry, pilau rice, salad
and dips.** Then **mango ice cream**, which all three of them guess wrong —
butterscotch, honeycomb, coffee.

The description of the stay that sticks is another of the group's: **a luxury
homestay** — taken to places nobody else knows about, a different meal every
sitting, and lunch carried out to them on the hike.

## Key moments

- `[01:43]` Tea seedlings, and the difference between the plots.
- `[02:47]` Through someone's garden to get there.
- `[04:49]` The waterfall, and 20 m of water under it.
- `[05:52]` The fish.
- `[08:07]` It has no name.
- `[08:37]` Wild pepper, eaten off the plant.
- `[09:09]` Cinnamon, and the sting.
- `[09:39]` The leech.
- `[10:42]` Crashing the cricket match.
- `[15:08]` The last lunch.

## Extracted pages

- [Sri Lanka](/countries/sri-lanka.md)
- [Sinharaja Forest](/places/sinharaja-forest.md)
- [Mac](/people/mac.md)