Hidden Trails is the subject of this podcast, which steps off the tourist path to give you a glimpse of the things that really make Sri Lanka tick. Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visi…

Thirty miles north of Kandy marks the start of an extraordinary 5 temple circuit tour to places long lost to modern travellers. The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife – nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. She…

This episode is dedicated to a 200 year old mountain war. Hills are of course what Kandy is celebrated for - and its most famous city-centre mountain, Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, is home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. It was once, more memorably, home to some atypical human sacrifice, involving a particularly beautiful girl, D…

Kipling believed that to understand a country and its history you had to smell it. Yet the past is documented in so many other ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. Even so, their stories, like their secrets, are often hard to capture, and harder still to comprehend. It is…

One of Kandy’s greatest and most wonderful secrets is its nature. The city sits in a valley surrounded by 5 main hills, up which, like an indulgent bubble bath, buildings of later regret have begun to creep. But one side of the city remains nicely protected - UdawaththaKele Forest. Once a forest hunting reserve for the kings, it is now a magical 10…

This episode is dedicated to a walk down the secretive streets of Kandy. Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (so…

Very Close Encounters are the subject of this guide - a travelogue fixed on those attractions, adventures and activities that lie easily within a 10-15 miles journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. Kipling believed that to understand a country you had to smell it. Especially the perfumes of its past. Yet the past is documented in so man…

This episode is dedicated to the party that lasted for 22 years. Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders; albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity. Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historia…

This episode is dedicated to Sri Lanka’s best hotels. What modest moral argument there ever is to pick out the best in anything is fatally undermined in this guide - for it presents merely my point of view. No judge, still less a democratically elected jury is on hand to mediate and amend. The choices are, at worst, biased; at best, whimsical. Neve…

“It's love,” my music teacher assured us, “that makes the world go round.” He was trying to enforce some degree of harmony in the class at the time, burdened by having to learn yet another Mikado song. He might have cheered us all up had he shared W. S. Gilbert’s other great insight: “Man is nature's sole mistake”. But this he failed to do and so, …

A Little Bit of Expert, 14th February 2024 There is the BBC of course. CNN. Reuters. The New York Times. All News, if you will. And then there is real news. Recently, I have taken to walking the dogs up Singing Civet Hill, down the Coconut Gove, through the jungle path and out onto the newly planted Chocolate Walk that links back to the Spice Garde…

Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard. Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure the town like the country has more than its fairly allocated measure of gho…

This episode is dedicated to a single garden in central Sri Lanka – at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees. For i…

Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind the scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course with a welcome. And a thanks, for coming our way, for most of the readers of this guide will no doubt be our guests. Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and…

Retail Therapy in a Tuk Tuk, the subject of this guide, will take you down the one of the world’s busiest high streets. And don’t worry about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the …

Pretty Close Encounters is a travelogue fixed on those attractions and activities that lie easily within a fifteen-to-thirty-mile journey from Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. Almost two dozen strange and wonderous things lie within this radius, including the rumoured 5th century BCE tomb of the island’s first queen, the lost masterpiece of o…

Books to escape with is the subject of today’s podcast. Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inex…

This episode is dedicated to uncovering Sri Lanka’s most celebrated sapphires. Whilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade. The task of upgrading the crown is very straightforward. Get a sapphire. There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no…

The ordinary beautiful is the subject of this podcast – the search for Sri Lanka’s lost mammals. But first a health warning – for fans of Hi, Hallo or Hola, this is not a story of Sri Lanka’s mammalian celebrities, its kings and queens, or its most photographed princelings. Rather, it is a tour of the island’s plebs: its most ordinary of mammals, t…

Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world come up short when compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, this subject of this podcast. The world’s first Seven Wonders was assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian, Diodorus of Sicily, albeit with help from Herodotus who began the tally 400 years earlier…

The Search for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen is the subject of this podcast, which unpicks with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s first steps as a nation; and with two particular people: Kuveni and Vijaya. The pair were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 …

This episode is dedicated to Sri Lanka’s wicked monarchs. The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the…

It is unnecessary to employ the mind reading capabilities of Descartes or The Amazing Kreskin to discern how Sri Lanka might have reacted to Gotabhaya taking the throne in 253 CE. After decades of Lambakarna kings, many eagerly pious, ruling with unremitting incompetence,Gotabhaya was nothing less than a shock. After all, he had been one of the ver…

My Missing Sapphire Tiara, Friday, 10th December It was Mr Wijeratne from the Water Board who brought the missing tiara to mind when he called on us this morning, his beaming presence foretelling progress in our fixed line water connection. He is a generous, positive fellow, little given to jewellery – except for this fingers. These more than make …

Chinta, 13th of November, 2023 Today is the saddest of days, for Chinta has died. The inexorable world will not stop its spin around the sun, nor Sri Lanka pause to knows this. Even in our little town of Galagedera the news will affect just a few. But here on the estate, we all stop, deeply shocked, barely knowing how to react, or what to do next. …

Politics – and the art of family. Monday, 25th September 2023. “Spaghetti,” barked a planter friend, describing Sri Lankan politics. “Noodles. A ball of coir, all entangled. A roll of barbed wire. “ He was on roll himself here. “Pepper vine, “ he finally ventured: “all entangled but makes you sneeze too.” Politics was front of mind today. The count…

Two periods of state-sponsored homicidal self-indulgence were now to grip the kingdom. The first killings broke out in 195 CE; and the second in 248 CE. Both were leavened by brief moments of stability that managed, with seconds to spare, to prevent the country from collapsing altogether; and give it a modest but life affirming breathing space. Suc…

In 1929, as Wall Street crashed and the roaring twenties came to an abrupt end, archaeologists digging in faraway Trincomalee uncovered the remains of a once-lofty temple, built a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean, sometime after 307 CE. Beneath earth, trees, and jungle, stretching out to the shores of a great lake, the Velgam Vehera’s many scatt…

Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya. The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his …

It took a hundred and twenty-eight years for the last Vijayan kings to travel the final road to oblivion, years that made the mafia tales of the Prohibition era or a Shakespearean tragedy appear tame. But travel them they did – and with unforgettable horror – all eighteen monarchs, of whom at least two thirds were murdered by their successors, plun…

If ever there was a king who was entitled to get very cross indeed, it was Dutugemunu, one of the island’s standout sovereigns. Known, not unjustifiably as “The Great,” Dutugemunu was to rescue his car crash of a dynasty, only to watch it (albeit from the life thereafter) speed off the proverbial royal road yet again, and with such casual ingratitu…

Good advice is often nearer to hand than even the most foolish leader can imagine. Or be minded to seek. One hundred and fifty years earlier, and six thousand six hundred and one kilometres away, Thucydides, whose work, The Peloponnesian War, set such standards for history as to anticipate every conceivable future military and political ploy, had t…

In the previous 100 years Sri Lanka’s little Vijayan kingdom twice risked absolute oblivion, courtesy of its carefree kings. But twice too, in the following 170 years, the self-same state would step up, and prosper beyond all expectations, thanks to two other kings, both innate masters of nation building. For Pandu Kabhaya, and his grandson, Devana…

Monday, 28 August 2023 Damnit. I mean honestly. Just damnit. This is the second time in as many weeks. One more such episode and you can call me obsessed; or, at best, dull. Either way, I am due a real wigging. Pining for the fjords. Playing the piper. Deep sixth. Toes up. Terminated. Death is like one of those mildly irritating guests present at m…

“If I want a crown,” remarked Peachey, hero of Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King, and unexpected alter ego of Prince Vijiya, Sri Lanka’s first monarch, “I must go and hunt it for myself.” If Peachey’s motivation was glory and riches, plain and simple, Vijaya’s was about raw survival, dodging assassinations and evading parental disapprobation. If, tha…

Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch was to found a dynasty that would last over 600 years. Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off the start of recorded Singhala history despite its…

Adam’s Bridge was a bridge crying out for repair, even before the great storm of 1480 shattered it forever. Unpredictable, and uneven, sailing had long been the better option. But for Sri Lanka’s first settlers – who had still to master boats – a short walk from India was all it took. And walking was what they did: Palaeolithic and later Mesolithic…

Rusty, derelict, and irresistibly optically-challenged, the old Talaimannar Lighthouse is a gratifyingly improbable key to help unlock the start of Sri Lanka’s recorded history. It presents an even more unlikely clue to explain the profound differences the island presents with the rest of the world. Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher, with his fon…

It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interests in economics and Buddhism to note the singular connection between two of the most obvious characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka. “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.” It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka that Schumacher had in mind, but, as wi…

20th August, 2023. Everyone has their thinking space: the bath, the shower, the treadmill after work. Voltaire had his bed, Dylan Thomas his shed – and I a narrow track of road weaving through jungle hills and valleys. Flame trees and palms line the edges, and beyond stetch plantations of timber, pepper, rubber - and space. A thinking space. And a …

17th August, 2023. “Thanks for the warning,” came the text from Danby this morning. The message displayed his characteristic linguistic athleticism: lean, economic, pertinent, fully fortified against any misunderstandings, whatsoever. An expatriate, living in a house of books perched above a golden beach, and surrounded by battlements of cinnamon, …

The kerfuffle in the kitchen The kerfuffle in the kitchen has calmed down since I (at last) remembered the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth. And acted upon it. Sudeth and Kasun, our (pre) existing chefs, have stepped effortlessly into the gap created by the departure of a big enchilada and the pot is set again to simmer smoothly. T…

Hand Gestures: An Alternative Tutorial At 6 am Mr Goonetilleke the Younger’s workers were already busy tapping the rubber; and as I shot past them, four dogs on a single lead, I waved a good morning. The wave I got back reminded me that hand gestures in Sri Lanka are rarely like this – of the usual kind. Simple, easy to interpret, quick to deliver.…

The Pride Owl, 15th of June 2023 The owl’s hoot kicked it all off. It was 5.49 am and it rang out, sonorous, low, loud but not noisy. Mellow. Rather beautiful. Almost bewitching. A thing of the night, heard in the day. Just like Gay Pride, sounding out exactly where it shouldn’t. This is June, so the season of Pride marches is lighting up so-so dia…

Wednesday, 7th June 2023 The Lovely Now After days and days of heady sunshine, the rain falls. As ever, spectacular. Within minutes of the monsoon deluge starting, the lawns become shallow green lakes, their surface calm obliterated every millisecond by fat cool rain drops falling like a bedtime story from heavy skies. Cool damp breezes stir and wa…

Now Thank We All Our God Once, when people still had time for, or a belief in things other than shopping or raw survival, Sundays were special. There was getting up late for one thing - very late perhaps; or not at all. Staying all day in bed was always a wicked though rarely called-upon option. That was the point: getting up when you wanted to. Ev…

At the barbers H.R. Managers are in their happiest pace when discussing either redundancy terms or the compensation package that will tempt you to leap across to their well-moisturized limb of corporate life, and begin, once again, the ascent up the greasy ladder. There is the salary, of course, sometimes, but not always, cut up into digestible dis…

Thursday, 25 May 2023 There’s something very special - in that most ordinary of ways - about walking the dog; or dogs, in my case. It’s taken a few years to understand what the exercise is really about; but I believe that both the hounds and I have now properly taught one another how to behave so we all get the most out of it. For them, it’s about …

La Petit Mort: A Jungle Diary @ The Flame Tree Estate The French condition, “la petit mort” hung in my head as I woke up this morning, for there was a moment, as there is almost every day, when, upon waking, I could so easily fling myself back into sleep. Just like Ghandhi. “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die.” The room is dark, and cool, perfum…