Sri Lanka’s Hidden Paradise 🇱🇰

The final video of the Sri Lanka series, and the second day at the lodge near Sinharaja Forest with Mac and another creator: a waterfall nobody has a name for, and the cricket match Harry has been trying to get into since Colombo.

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
• Sinharaja Forest
• Mac