Sri Lanka was an island paradise wrapped in barbed wire when I visited six months after the civil war ended in 2009. That conflict had lasted twenty-five years, effectively shutting down what had been a promising tourism trade. The questions were, how long would it take for the country to revive tourism or for investors to rush in and buy prime property at fire-sale prices, and, would tourism help the divided communities recover from those decades of loss and horror? Families were still searching for their missing; the country was waiting for a full and probably illusive accounting of the human and material cost of the conflict. In this atmosphere confidence in the future was in short supply.
On the thirty-minute drive from the airport our car had to pass inspection at three heavily armed guard posts. Rising above the skyline of tropical cement buildings and streets crowded with motorcycle taxis and bicycles were giant billboards of the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, smiling like a movie star and wearing his trademark red scarf over a flowing white shirt. When we reached my hotel—the five-star Cinnamon Grand—I wasn’t surprised to see barbed wire choking off access to the esplanade facing the sea.
The moment I checked in, I understood a basic consequence of the long war. My premium suite was a bargain. The Cinnamon Grand is the city’s premier hotel, with beautiful gardens and a swimming pool, in the best part of town. Yet it cost only $151 a night, breakfast included, less than half of what I had paid the week before in the far less lovely city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The cavernous lobby was bustling with locals—with the war over, everyone was hosting a dinner or a dance party; we tourists were in the minority.
My day job that first week was teaching journalism workshops on behalf of the U.S. embassy, culminating with a public lecture. My topic was postwar tourism. In the audience were two men who became my tourism gurus: Hiran Cooray and Geoffrey Dobbs. Cooray is the chairman of Jetwing, Sri Lanka’s foremost tour agency and a member of the commercial aristocracy of the island. His family is descended from Sri Lanka’s small Catholic community, which was first converted by Portuguese colonialists. Dobbs is from an English family that has a few colonialists in its past. He has the demeanor of a casual entrepreneur who almost accidentally put together a collection of high-end boutique hotels that are famous worldwide, not just in Asia. (He is also the brother of an old friend and colleague of mine from the Washington Post.)
Both Cooray and Dobbs were intrigued by an experiment, mentioned in my talk, that had occurred in Guatemala, where the government and tourism experts used new tourism to help once-warring communities work together. The results had been mixed, but I suggested that the idea could be transplanted to the island of Sri Lanka. Both Cooray and Dobbs had given their time, money and leadership to help the southern part of the island recover from the 2004 tsunami and knew from that experience that Sri Lanka’s communities were capable of rebuilding tourism from the ground up. Cooray thought Sri Lanka might be able to replicate the Guatemala experience of inviting former warring neighbors to design a new look for tourism.
Dobbs was dubious about using tourism to bring together the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. The war was so long and the wounds so deep, he said, “We’ll need a czar here.”
The Sri Lanka civil war pitted the minority Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, against the majority Sinhalese, who are Buddhists. After suffering under a government campaign of intimidation and repression, the Tamils launched a war in 1983 for a separate homeland in the northeast corner of the island. The fighting dragged on until 2009, with increasingly vicious fighting. The Tamil Tigers used suicide bombers. The government routinely ignored human rights and tortured and killed people they considered suspicious. Even the war’s end was a nightmare of ruthless overkill, and the United Nations called for an inquiry into war crimes.
I had seen that war five years earlier, when the capital’s Bandaranaike airport was covered in filthy shrouds of heavy plastic to hide damage from an earlier rebel attack. Only three international airlines were willing to fly in then—and one of them was SriLankan Airlines. I presumed that tourism had largely died in Sri Lanka during the war, as it had in Cambodia.
Somehow, though, throughout those years of terror, intrepid tourists remained loyal and came for sunshine holidays, sticking to the safety of the southern coast. At the beginning of the war half a million tourists visited every year. At war’s end that figure hadn’t changed: 500,000 tourists had traveled to Sri Lanka in 2008.
Then peace arrived and the island was up for grabs. Libby Owen-Edmunds, a thirty-one-year-old Australian and a tourism consultant in Colombo, met me for coffee at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel. She told me her phone started ringing in June 2009, a few weeks after the government declared victory. Private helicopters were ferrying investors, ready to spend money, over the sandy white beaches of the former rebel base, circling the area and evaluating which area would make the best new resorts. The land grab was on. Rumors of high-level corruption and murky real estate deals were in the air.
“Hedge fund guys were already touring by helicopter, offering $10 million for 100 acres. . . . I must have gotten a call a week, or email, from a big tourist industry, wanting land for investment. Prices are going up by the day,” she said. “I’m so nervous about what this will mean for the east and north of Sri Lanka. There is so little infrastructure, and if we aren’t careful, we’ll reinvent ourselves in the worst way.”
The government had already issued “offering[s] of land for tourism development” for projects in Kuchchaveli, territory that had been held by the rebels in the northeast for more than two decades. The government was selling property along the coast in a new “tourism zone” that included some of the island’s most beautiful unspoiled beaches, which had been off-limits throughout the war.
That is the new lightning-fast cycle: war, revolution, peace, tourism, often overlapping. The phenomenon of tourists caught in crossfire is no longer rare. From Egypt to the Philippines, tourists have been shot at and killed in uprisings. Sometimes they are the targets. In Bali, terrorists specifically bombed a tourist hangout in 2005 and killed 202 people. In Thailand, rebels seized the Bangkok airport in 2008 and shut down tourism at the height of the season to force a change in government.
Now, governments understand tourism is part of the equation during and after an upheaval. In Sri Lanka the government is encouraging deals to bring back tourists and create new wealth.
Cooray, the chairman of Jetwing, invited me to his home in the exclusive Lake Gardens district of Colombo. Built near the sea, the home is filled with Sri Lankan art and handicrafts and surrounded with a garden of native plants. Over dinner of exquisite home-style Sri Lankan cooking with his wife Dharshi and his young sons, Cooray told me: “You can’t understand the relief in May when the war ended. Without victory, we would have been finished.”
No one knew when the war would end, he said, whether their country could survive, whether their businesses would collapse, whether their families could get by. Where tourism had once been the top moneymaker, employing the most people in the country, it had slipped to third place, behind the garment industry and remittances sent back home by Sri Lankans working abroad as common laborers. “The hunger for money . . . just to stay alive. Tourism had suffered for thirty years. Some people were begging.”
Cooray was the rare optimist. “Tourism should be the major industry for our postconflict recovery. It’s in our blood. It helps everyone on the island.”
To his mind, Sri Lanka now had a rare opportunity to redesign tourism. Because of the war, Sri Lanka had been spared the worst aspects of the global tourism boom of the previous decades. The coasts were not marred by high-rise cement hotels, the mangrove coasts and rainforests were largely intact, and the souvenir shops were filled with local handicrafts, not imitations made in China. By skipping that era Sri Lanka might be able to slide into a better future. “Done right, tourism could help save our environment, our wild spaces and our coast.”
The salient phrase was “done right.”
Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of Sri Lanka Tourism, welcomed me to his bare office along the esplanade in Colombo. His mandate was to encourage projects and optimism. A former ambassador in the Sri Lanka foreign service, Goonetilleke was newly appointed to his job, which required recalibrating the island’s image as well as building up its infrastructure, training Sri Lankans in tourism and lobbying the government to regulate tourism growth that enhances the beauty of the island rather than turning it into a cookie-cutter version of the beaches of Thailand.
His simple rule of thumb: “No hotel should be taller than a coconut palm tree and the beaches remain public property.”
Goonetilleke knew that international corporations were lobbying to buy up the beach property that until a few months ago had been battlegrounds. He worried that Sri Lanka’s poor human rights image would dampen the return of tourists. Europeans, in particular, have been adamant that the Sri Lankan government show greater respect for human rights and democracy.
It was as if ghosts haunted the island, a theme of the novel Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, the island’s esteemed author of The English Patient, who now lives in Canada. In the chilling prose of human rights reports, those ghosts are confirmed as victims of grave abuses and murder.
It turns out that most tourists don’t check out a country’s human rights record before taking a vacation. My husband Bill joined me for a week-long trip around the southern half of the island, famously shaped like a teardrop, where we ran into pockets of tourists from surprising parts of the world, none of whom were concerned about human rights.
We rented a car with a driver, the only practical alternative in this land of rutted, unpaved roads and questionable signage. Then we headed southeast, along the coast road toward Galle, the walled city first built by the Portuguese.
Driving along the palm-fringed coast road, we marveled at what was missing: no chain stores, no international designer boutiques, no fast-food joints and no ATMs. Women still dressed in traditional pastel-colored saris and shopped at small greengrocers and roadside stalls. This part of the island was spared during the civil war, which was fought largely in the northeast. Driving along, we saw extraordinary wildlife, from purple-faced langur monkeys to peacocks, butterflies, brilliantly colored parakeets, and, from a distance, leatherback sea turtles. We traveled past spectacular stretches of beaches and lush tropical forests. Traffic was spare. Trucks and antiquated buses hogged the center lanes, careening on worn tires. Three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, or tuk-tuks, hugged the periphery. Ours was one of the few private automobiles on the road.
By the time we arrived in Galle, we felt as if we had traveled backward in a time machine to 1975. Our first stop was Dutch House, a former colonial mansion that was transformed into the island’s first boutique hotel by Dobbs. He was waiting for us at this eighteenth-century hideaway.
With top ratings and awards from magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and Hip Hotels Orient, Dobbs operates in an atmosphere light years away from the mass tourism market that has nearly died out on the island. His business secret was to attract the top-end tourists while staying within the local economy, buying local and hiring local. This frugality preserved the unique beauty of his hotels while saving him money and buffering him from the ups and downs of war. Through war and the tsunami, Dobbs said he never lost money. His high-end travelers were largely Brits and other Europeans who came and went, vaccinated from the war in the cocoon of Galle. Peace is expanding his roster. A South Korean film crew interviewed Dobbs while we were there. The reporter asked Dobbs: “Koreans don’t know Sri Lanka—what is its charm?”
Where to begin listing the charms of this island? Arthur C. Clarke, the British science fiction writer and futurist, moved to Sri Lanka for its extraordinary beauty and because it is “a small universe; it contains as many variations of culture, scenery and climate as some countries a dozen times its size.”
With peace, all of the island’s protected areas are open for scuba diving among the tropical fishes or viewing wild elephants, leopards, sloth bears, langurs and countless birds in one of Sri Lanka’s four large national parks. The cultural heritage is as staggering, with its seven World Heritage Sites and countless temples. Its literature, dance and arts are part of the rich South Asian culture—as is its cuisine. But it is not overwhelming, as India can be. Galle is often compared to Marrakesh. Both are magnificent walled cities lovingly restored by foreigners and resented by locals.
But Dobbs said it wasn’t so much this beauty but its near devastation by the 2004 tsunami that convinced him to settle permanently in Galle and give up his primary home in Hong Kong. He had been celebrating Christmas in Galle with his mother, his brother Michael and Michael’s family when the tsunami’s huge waves struck. Michael Dobbs wrote of the near-death experience in the Washington Post, saying that he was swimming in the ocean when he was surrounded by waves 15 feet high in what “seemed like a scene from the Bible.” Miraculously everyone in the Dobbs family survived. Geoffrey Dobbs then devoted himself to helping the island in the aftermath.
To aid the recovery of local tourism, Dobbs started the Adopt Sri Lanka charity that repaired 125 guest houses, the traditional hostels for Sri Lankan travelers. To promote new international tourism, especially the high-end tourists, he founded the Galle Literary Festival, luring authors like Germaine Greer, Alexander McCall Smith and Simon Winchester to read and mix with locals and tourists. Soon after, he founded the Galle Film Festival and is planning a Gourmet Galle food festival.
It’s hard not to sound like a tourism brochure when describing how Dobbs redid the Dutch House or the Sun House, Dobbs’s other boutique hotel, across the road. Both are straight out of a film by Merchant and Ivory. He remained faithful to the colonial proportions of the Dutch House, keeping the verandahs that catch the breezes and filter the light during the hottest hours of a tropical afternoon. The interior lawn and gardens are home to a mongoose, who entertained us at breakfast. A pool is discreetly hidden on the back slope. We could see why so many British couples chose this mansion for destination weddings, even during the war. At dusk we gathered in the great room for drinks amid polished antiques and comfortable sofas that were the antithesis of the overdecorated hotels of London or New York.
During our stay we met other Americans and Europeans visiting Galle, but we were the only guests at his four-suite hotel, except for election night when an old friend with a home in the middle of town repaired to Dutch House to be safe in case there were riots during this first postwar balloting—a reminder of the toll of war.
It was difficult to leave and head out for rougher territory. Dobbs wished us well: “The roads are rubbish—you’ll be pushed and pulled in all directions.”
Our next stop was the hills that cluster in the center of the island. Our route took us back on the coast road, stopping at an extraordinary three-story-tall Buddha built by Japan in memory of the people of Sri Lanka who lost their lives in the tsunami. Farther up the road we saw the small guesthouses—Bright Sunshine Guesthouse, Mali Guesthouse. At a pizza parlor named Rotty, I talked to the forty-four-year-old owner, H. H. Pluma, who bemoaned the death of the foreign hippie trade that dipped when war broke out and disappeared after the tsunami. “I had to go work abroad in Dubai to make ends meet,” she said.
Posters along the highway celebrated the government victory with paintings of Sri Lankan government soldiers posing with the macho air of a Rambo movie. Homemade signs offered land for sale, and several promised new casinos for tourists. When we turned off the main road to climb into the hills, we understood Dobbs’s warning. A drive that should have taken a few hours required an entire day of swirling around potholes and deep trenches. The scenery, though, was breathtaking. Gentle water buffalo lumbered through paddy fields. Higher up we were surrounded by terraced tea plantations. After a series of hairpin turns we saw the mist-covered hills and arrived at Kandy, the former royal capital and the favored hill station under the British colonialists.
Kandy is centered on a lake, and surrounded by the best of Sri Lanka and Britain: botanical gardens, a royal palace, the sacred Buddhist Temple of the Tooth and wedding-cake hotels. There is more than a hint of lost grandeur. We left the city and continued our climb to Hunas Falls in the jungles above Kandy. We stayed in a Jetwing hotel that was only one-third full, and in the morning we took our coffee out to the balcony to watch a troupe of gray langur monkeys swing and somersault in the trees. Then we tried to count the finches, sparrows, swallows and crows flying through the air. In the breakfast room we ran into different tourists who had stayed loyal to Sri Lanka despite the war. They came from the Persian Gulf region. I was the only woman in the dining room who was not wearing an abaya or a head scarf. These tourists—couples and families—told us they came to the lush green hills of Kandy to escape the desert heat at home. Airlines from the Gulf were among the few that had continued flying into Colombo throughout the war, and Sri Lanka’s small Muslim community welcomed the tourists to their mosques.
We ran into them again later that morning when my husband played a round of golf on a six-hole course laid out on a nearly vertical slope. I tagged along in sandals and had to scrape the leeches off my ankles afterward. After a few days walking in the hills around the Hunas Falls, we paid our bill. Another bargain: our two nights with breakfast and dinners totaled $169.93.
It was easier driving down the hills toward the plains and we reached the coast before dusk. We spent our last day in Sri Lanka at Negombo, the beach resort area just north of Colombo and close to the international airport. This was pure mass tourism. Think Thailand in the 1980s. Europeans who bought Sri Lanka package holidays during the war ended up here. The beaches are hardly the best on the island, but they were safe. Buses took the tourists into Colombo by day and returned them at night. On the beach and on the dinner menu the first language was German. We stayed at another Jetwing hotel, and the manager said that Germans were the most loyal visitors to Negombo. A beach holiday at low prices was a big reason.
We left the next day. On the drive to the airport we saw a Buddhist shrine and a Christian shrine, with the portrait of Jesus displayed much as the statue of Buddha. From this direction, we were required to show our papers at only one military guard post. The lasting impression was an island frozen in time. The infrastructure is terrible. The possibilities are endless. I was reminded of the anomaly of the demilitarized zone that divides North Korea and South Korea. For sixty years it has kept out people—developers and tourists—and is now one of the more pristine wildlife preserves in the world, a refuge for birds and bears and endangered plant species despite the fact that it is seeded with land mines. Korean conservationists are in the awful position of worrying what peace might do.
As Cooray said, “this is the perfect opportunity—either we make the right tourism that lifts up all the communities—Sinhalese, Tamil and the minorities—or we ruin it—ruin the landscape, the beaches and the communities.”
One year later Cooray sent me an email saying he was encouraged that the government still cared about sustainable development. Tourism had grown an astonishing 46 percent in a single year—with almost 1 million visitors. “Hoteliers are finally regaining the confidence to put money back into tourism,” he wrote. His life had also changed. He became the first Sri Lankan named as chairman of the Pacific Asia Travel Association. “Peace fever,” as he called it, was as high as ever. Foreign governments and international companies were lobbying the government for fast-track approval of their tourist developments. Cooray wrote that “this puts unwanted pressure on the government and this worries me as they may side track regulations (to protect the environment, habitat, etc.) in order to expedite development.”