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Sri Lanka has seduced travellers for centuries. Marco Polo called it the finest island of its size in the world, while successive waves of Indian, Arab and European traders and adventurers flocked to its palm-fringed shores, attracted by reports of rare spices, precious stones and magnificent elephants. Poised just above the Equator amid the balmy waters of the Indian Ocean, the island has inspired a sense of romance even in those who have never visited the place. Fancifully minded geographers, poring over maps of the island, likened its outline to a teardrop falling from the tip of India or to the shape of a pearl (the more practical Dutch compared it to a leg of ham), while even the name given to the island by early Arab traders, Serendib, gave rise to the English word “serendipity” – an unexpected discovery leading to a happy end.
Marco Polo’s bold claim still holds true. Sri Lanka packs an extraordinary variety of attractions into its modest physical dimensions. Idyllic beaches fringe the coast, while the interior boasts a compelling variety of landscapes ranging from wildlife-rich lowland jungles, home to extensive populations of elephants, leopards and rare endemic bird species, to the misty heights of the hill country, swathed in immaculately manicured tea plantations. There are plenty of man-made attractions too. Sri Lanka boasts more than two thousand years of recorded history, and the remarkable achievements of the early Sinhalese civilization can still be seen in the sequence of ruined cities and great religious monuments that litter the northern plains.
The glories of this early Buddhist civilization continue to provide a symbol of national pride, while Sri Lanka’s historic role as the world’s oldest stronghold of Theravada Buddhism lends it a unique cultural identity which permeates life at every level. There’s more to Sri Lanka than just Buddhists, however. The island’s geographical position at one of the most important staging posts of Indian Ocean trade laid it open to a uniquely wide range of influences, as generations of Arab, Malay, Portuguese, Dutch and British settlers subtly transformed its culture, architecture and cuisine, while the long-established Tamil population in the north have established a vibrant Hindu culture that owes more to India than to the Sinhalese south.
It was, for a while, this very diversity that threatened to tear the country apart. For almost three decades Sri Lanka was the site of one of Asia’s most pernicious civil wars, as the Sri Lankan Army and the LTTE, or Tamil Tigers, battled it out in the island’s north and east, until the final victory of government forces in 2009. The decade of postwar peace since then hasn’t always been easy, but the island is now looking once again to the future with a fresh sense of optimism and energy.
