Features

Jungles, jackfruit and community tourism: this is Sri Lanka at its best

Published

3 years ago

2023/02/12

By Nazia Parveen

(The Guardian, UK) There is a moment of absolute stillness – the battered football whizzing through the air, all eyes following it, before it crashes down into the glass case and tiny gasps escape little mouths. Thankfully, it rolls off, leaving the glass and the encased Buddha statue unharmed.

We are playing football on a dusty, sunbaked escarpment with a group of farm children, and amid the excitement I almost destroy the village’s religious relic. But the game goes on, with limbs flying everywhere, toes (mine) getting stamped on and the football continuing to fly skywards.

We are here to meet some of the 30 or so children who are part of Classroom in the Wild, a community outreach project initiated in 2014 by Chamintha and Rajindra Jayasinghe, founders of Ayu in the Wild Holidays, to create opportunities for children in Sri Lanka’s most disconnected communities.

For these children, a lack of access to learning English has stifled their progress, and for many of them joining their parents to work the land will be their only viable option. We meet them at their school – a hut accessed by a single road through rice paddy fields, around four miles from the world heritage site of Sigiriya. It is a wild, inaccessible area that takes up to four buses and a tuk-tuk ride to reach, which has resulted in some teachers refusing to come.

The journey is long, even though we are staying fairly close, but the rewards are great and it leads to one of the most enriching experiences we have on our family holiday. There is a lot of giggling and shyness at first, even from our own children (Seb, eight, and Jemima, four), but there is an opportunity to play some word games, and then the ice is well and truly broken when we start to play football.

There are bursts of conversation in between matches and we learn that the children are mainly from families who farm vegetables and work in the paddy fields; that they have been learning how to cohabit in these rural surroundings with elephants (the children live in a community where human-elephant conflict is rife); and that their lessons continued during the pandemic – each Saturday morning they logged into just one smartphone for an online lesson.

As we leave, Sithumi, 14, stands up in front of the class and in pristine English tells us how much they have enjoyed the day, and asks us to come back again.Chamintha first came across the children when she was travelling with her husband and saw them playing cricket with a deflated football. She says the visit to the school remains one of their most sought-after experiences, and it is easy to understand the reasons – it gives us an opportunity to really connect with a local community and gain an insight into their lives in a way that would be almost impossible in the confines of a hotel or visiting tourist attractions. In addition to supporting the weekly spoken English classes by fully funding the teacher and lesson planning, Ayu in the Wild employs a naturalist who regularly hosts discussions between travellers to develop the children’s vocabulary and confidence in speaking with foreigners.

Chamintha first came across the children when she was travelling with her husband and saw them playing cricket with a deflated football. She says the visit to the school remains one of their most sought-after experiences, and it is easy to understand the reasons – it gives us an opportunity to really connect with a local community and gain an insight into their lives in a way that would be almost impossible in the confines of a hotel or visiting tourist attractions. In addition to supporting the weekly spoken English classes by fully funding the teacher and lesson planning, Ayu in the Wild employs a naturalist who regularly hosts discussions between travellers to develop the children’s vocabulary and confidence in speaking with foreigners.

The ethos of Ayu in the Wild Holidays is community-based tourism, and from the moment we land at Colombo airport and meet our guide, Dhanu, we know that this will be a trip where we will see a different Sri Lanka, and why at this moment that is more important than ever. We arrive when it is relatively peaceful and calm, but the country is in turmoil, having defaulted on its debts for the first time in its history, as it struggles with a devastating economic and political crisis. This is against the backdrop of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 2019 easter bombings and the pandemic, all of which ravaged the country’s tourism industry.

We still decide to travel, and arrive in the early hours of the morning in late May 2022. Heavy rain batters the roof of the van as we veer off the main road and down what appears to be a dirt track. On the other side is the veranda of the Wallawwa, a restored 200-year-old manor house between Negombo and Colombo. We are handed freshly squeezed lychee juice and immediately forget any trepidation we’d felt just hours earlier as we receive the warmest of welcomes, with everyone telling us how grateful they are that tourists are still coming to the country.

“Tourism is as vital to the island’s economy as cricket is to the island’s spirit,” says Chamintha.

“In December last year, tourism bounced back phenomenally with the end of the pandemic, and that’s the kind of welcome that will greet a visitor, with hard-working guides, drivers, experience-hosts and local vendors still smiling – still welcoming, despite reeling from the spiralling cost of living and a loss of income. We’re a pretty resilient bunch,” she adds.

At the Wallawwa we see this resilience first-hand, with the staff making our stay comfortable despite the national unrest. There is a beautifully kept jungle pool hidden among mango and weeping fig trees, and the hotel grows much of its produce in its vegetable garden, with water for the guests’ showers pumped from the garden’s wells, and solar power in use.

On our first evening, amid a din of insects and birds, the children play boules on the green, and we tuck into black pork and sweet, sticky prawns; colourful curries of jackfruit and aubergine; fragrant dhal and cheesecake with a rosewater and tamarind sorbet.

The food is wonderful. After dinner, Neil, the manager, teaches us how to play carrom, a tabletop game in which players flick disks to the corners of the board. “Focus,” he says, just before my husband whacks the small wooden disk, sending it ping-ponging across the cedar-wood board, missing its target.We travel around Sri Lanka in the company of our guide Dhanu and driver Eddie – who combine enthusiasm, knowledge and such warmth towards our children that they feel like family by the end of the trip.

What was the biggest adrenaline hit of the holiday was a constant source of debate: was it the wind-buffeted dawn ascent up Sigiriya rock; giant fruit bats hanging from the trees in Kandy; the sustainable wild elephant safari; snorkelling along a coral reef in bath-water warm seas; or a mountain path view of a crested serpent eagle taking off and cruising the thermals across the tea-field valleys below?

Between the jaw-dropping encounters with nature we take a breath with a four-day stop at the Uga Bay hotel in Pasikuda (studios from £130 a night) – on the island’s east coast – and have a holiday within a holiday. The hotel is bigger than other places we have stayed at, with its rooms arranged in an arc facing the pristine, white beach, but there is an underlying commitment to the local environment and their communities. Water-filling stations are placed around the property to reduce plastic waste; solar panels are used; the hotel is moving towards only working with ethical whale-watching companies that responsibly approach whales and dolphins; and it has announced a commitment towards bringing more women into its workforce.

There is a similar ethos at the final stop on our trip at Living Heritage Koslanda (forest pavilion cottages from £195 a night), a hotel in a wooded valley with its own waterfall and kitchen gardens, which employs mainly local people, most of whom are female. The hotel was initially the vision of Sri Lankan film director Manik Sandrasagara, who dreamed of creating an eco-resort in “one of the most sacred and secret places on Planet Earth” while protecting its natural biodiversity. The hotel was completed by his wife Lucy in 2012, four years after his death.

“It has been an incredibly difficult few years, but despite everything we continued with Manik’s dream, and what we have is something completely unique, says Lucy. “It is a place like no other.”

In the space of two weeks, we feel we’ve packed in about four different, breathtaking holidays in their own individual climates. We leave already plotting which bits we would want to see more of on our return, and it has alerted us to the importance of travelling with tour companies who have community at the forefront, reinforcing a sense of cultural identity and providing opportunities for sustainable development.

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Features

US’ anti-migrant stance set to intensify tensions in Western camp

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/11

Sahan Weerasooriya

Migrant boats land on Western beaches. Credit: PA

The announcement by the US authorities of an anti-migrant stance during a recent commemoration in France of the epochal D-Day Landings of June 6, 1944, ought to strike impartial observers as a supreme irony. Whereas what should have been expected was a vibrant celebration of the beginning of the process of Western Europe freeing itself decisively from Nazi or fascist control during the crucial stages of World War Two, this was not to be.

What the world heard instead was a call to contemporary Western Europe to arm itself against a seemingly rising and threatening migrant presence in the region. In other words, the migrant must be despised and ‘shown the door’.

Instead of a commemoration that rejoiced in the flourishing of liberal democracy and its values what one got was a strong affirmation of fascism and racial chauvinism. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vented his spleen against the migrant or foreigner presence in Europe reportedly thus: ‘Sadly today different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.’ To ‘beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?’

While at the outbreak of World War Two it was Nazi Germany that was doing the invading and bringing some principal European countries under its suzerainty, this time around we are being given to understand that it’s migrants to the West who are seeking to colonize the latter. It goes without saying that such inflammatory rhetoric would have the deleterious effect of keeping racial tensions alive in the West and jeopardize all possibilities of the countries concerned cementing and maintaining social stability.

The Trump administration gives the impression of taking a leaf from the politically underdeveloped regions of the South to keep the US polity stable and united. In South Asia, for instance, we are not short of ambitious demagogues who use what is referred to as the ‘race card’ to gather unto themselves a following and thereby further their political fortunes. By seeking to stir and sustain anti-migrant hysteria, the Trump administration is also essentially replicating Nazi Germany’s policy of anti-Semitism. That is, fascism is very much alive in the US under President Trump.

Such efforts at churning racial hysteria at this juncture in the US should not come as a surprise. For all intents and purposes, the Trump administration is nowhere near achieving its aims in West Asia, for instance, in the short term. It has failed to bring Iran down to its knees, as it hoped to do, but is adopting the expedient of keeping the world guessing and confused on what it is doing in the region, since it cannot withdraw from the theatre in a hurry without losing face.

While perhaps working out an escape strategy the Trump administration it seems, is hoping to maintain its following at home intact and silent by playing on their racial biases and insecurities. Hence, the anti-foreigner campaign.

Simultaneously, the Trump administration will need to keep a close eye on how economic pressures on the domestic front are panning out. Anti-administration sentiments first break to the surface at meal tables. On this score, the news cannot be good because the average US family’s spending power ought to be shrinking on account of rising energy and oil prices. Consequently, it would not be a bad idea to keep the attention of the US consumer diverted by adeptly playing ‘the race card’; once again, lessons from intellectually bankrupt Southern politicians are coming in handy.

To be sure such comparisons many politicians in vibrantly democratic countries would find quite unflattering. But the stark truth is that racism cannot be tolerated in civilized societies and those politicians who resort to it risk being branded as racists of the first degree. In fact they could be seen as being on par with the likes of German dictator Adolph Hitler and his close collaborators.

However, on the question of migrant policy the Trump administration would likely be at polar opposites with the most vibrant of liberal democracies of the West. This will be the case with the UK, France and Italy for instance. The latter continue to keep their doors open to legal migrants and they are likely to view a virtual blanket ban on migrants as reprehensible.

Moreover, in the foremost democracies of the West debates are vibrantly ongoing on the need to keep racism or any hint of it completely outlawed in the public plane. There is the case of the UK, for instance, where the authorities continue to emphatically pinpoint their adherence to the principle of anti-racism in the conduct of public affairs.

One proof of the above was the parliamentary debate relating to the killing of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in Southampton. Police handling of the victim came in for sharp scrutiny by particularly the opposition in the House of Commons but there seemed to be a consensus over the main political divide that the matter should not be politicized.

Moreover, the UK authorities stressed in the House the government’s strict adherence to the policy of non-racism. It was also pointed out that British institutions set up to manage racism at the national, county and neighbourhood levels, for example, were very much intact. In fact, Sri Lanka could gain considerably by studying and implementing locally, legislation modeled on the relevant UK laws if it is in earnest when it speaks of ‘reconciliation’.

Accordingly, it is highly unlikely that Western Europe would ‘cave in’, so to speak, to US pressure on issues related to migration. The liberal democracies of Western Europe in particular would remain for the foreseeable future migrant-welcoming, multi-ethnic and plural democracies.

Nor is it likely that Western Europe would be passively receptive to US demands that it drastically increases its defense spending to meet the latter’s aims. Within the Western fold the EU is remaining committed to backing Ukraine, for instance, in its ongoing armed resistance to the Russian invasion and it is not giving any indication of being deferent to US pressure.

However, although tensions would continue to bristle within US-Western Europe relations on the above and numerous other matters of contention it would be far too premature to announce a parting of company between the two sections of the West. In that sense, the post-World War Two order remains essentially intact. There are still many things in common between the two, particular on the economic plane, that will ensure the continuance of the partnership.

Features

A decade among Yala’s ghosts of gold

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/11

Sahan Weerasooriya

YM75 "James" surveys his territory from a tree-top vantage point, demonstrating the leopard's commanding presence in the landscape.

The first rays of dawn creep over the ancient rocks of Yala. The Indian Ocean glimmers in the distance, and the wilderness slowly awakens. Somewhere amid the scrub jungle, a pair of amber eyes scans the landscape.

For wildlife conservationist and leopard researcher Milinda Wattegedara, moments such as these have defined more than a decade of dedication to one of Sri Lanka’s most iconic creatures—the Sri Lankan leopard.

What began as fascination evolved into a remarkable conservation journey that has transformed the understanding of Yala’s leopard population and placed Sri Lanka firmly on the global wildlife research map.

“Long before I ever lifted a camera, leopards had already captured my imagination,” says Wattegedara. “What fascinated me was not merely their beauty but the complexity of their lives—their hunting strategies, movements, reproductive behaviour and their remarkable ability to adapt to changing environments.”

That fascination led to the birth of the Yala Leopard Diary in 2013, an ambitious long-term project dedicated to documenting individual leopards and unraveling the mysteries surrounding their lives.

For many visitors, a leopard sighting is a fleeting thrill. For Wattegedara and his team, every encounter is a chapter in an ongoing scientific story.

“Each photograph was never the end of an encounter,” he explains. “It was the beginning of deeper questions. How did a particular leopard use the landscape? How did its behaviour change with the seasons? What environmental pressures shaped its decisions?”

These questions drove years of meticulous fieldwork. Every sighting was carefully recorded with details including location, habitat, behaviour, date and time. Photographs were analysed to identify individual animals through unique spot patterns, allowing researchers to distinguish one leopard from another with remarkable accuracy.

What followed was groundbreaking.

YF77 “Shelly” pauses in quiet observation, embodying the alertness
and grace that define Yala’s leopard population.

From 2013 to 2026, the Yala Leopard Diary identified an astonishing 189 individual leopards within the Yala Block 1. The research revealed a leopard density of approximately 0.524 leopards per square kilometre, making Yala one of the highest leopard-density landscapes ever recorded anywhere in the world.

Such findings have elevated Yala’s status among global wildlife researchers.

Nestled between the Indian Ocean and a mosaic of habitats, ranging from rocky outcrops to dense scrub forests, Yala offers an ecological stage unlike any other.

Here, leopards are photographed silhouetted against ocean horizons, perched atop ancient granite formations, resting on tree branches and stalking prey across sunlit grasslands.

The images tell stories of extraordinary lives.

There is Haminee, a devoted mother navigating the challenges of raising cubs in a competitive landscape. There is Lucas, one of Yala’s most frequently documented males, striding confidently across the Gonalabba Plains with the vast ocean forming an unforgettable backdrop.

There is Ruki demonstrating the species’ incredible strength by hoisting prey onto branches, and Shelly, quietly surveying her surroundings in a moment of feline vigilance.

Together, these individuals have become familiar characters in a living wilderness drama.

YM31 “Ruki” secures prey on a branch, illustrating the remarkable strength and coordination of the Sri Lankan leopard.

Recognising the immense value of long-term documentation, Wattegedara joined forces with fellow researchers Dushyantha Silva, Raveendra Siriwardana and Mevan Piyasena to establish the Yala Leopard Centre in 2020.

Located at the Palatupana entrance to the Yala National Park, the centre is believed to be the world’s first information facility dedicated exclusively to leopards.

“The centre serves as a repository of knowledge, accumulated through years of observation and research,” Wattegedara says. “Our goal is to connect visitors with the science behind conservation and foster a deeper appreciation of these magnificent animals.”

The project’s impact extends far beyond Sri Lanka’s borders.

Research arising from the Yala Leopard Diary has been published in internationally recognised scientific journals. One study introduced an innovative framework for identifying individual leopards, while another documented an extraordinary and previously unrecorded case of a leopard cub being consecutively adopted by two different adult females—first a relative and later an unrelated leopardess.

The discovery attracted international scientific attention and highlighted the complexity of leopard social behaviour.

Yet for Wattegedara, the most important lesson remains one of humility.

“One conclusion has become increasingly clear,” he reflects. “Our understanding of these leopards remains far from complete. We are only beginning to understand how they live, adapt and persist in one of Sri Lanka’s most dynamic protected landscapes.”

YF15 “Hope” descends Rukvila Rock at dawn, showcasing the agility and adaptability of Yala’s leopards.

His words underscore an essential conservation truth: the more we learn about nature, the more mysteries emerge.

As Sri Lanka navigates growing environmental challenges, the Yala Leopard Diary stands as a shining example of what sustained observation, scientific curiosity and public engagement can achieve.

Beyond the stunning photographs and remarkable sightings lies something even more valuable—a growing body of knowledge capable of informing future conservation decisions and ensuring that future generations inherit a wilderness where leopards continue to roam free.

For more than a decade, Wattegedara and his colleagues have followed the tracks of Yala’s elusive predators through dust, rain and scorching heat.

Their work has revealed that every leopard has a story, every sighting has significance and every photograph can contribute to conservation.

And perhaps, most importantly, it has reminded us that the golden ghosts of Yala still have many secrets left to share.

By Ifham Nizam

Features

Glamour, music and community spirit …

Published

11 hours ago

2026/06/11

Sahan Weerasooriya

Sri Lankans are quite active, all around the globe.

News has just come my way, from Glasgow, in Scotland, where the glamour of masks, music, dancing, and community spirit, came together, in spectacular fashion, at Masquerade Night, bringing together members of the Sri Lankan community for an evening filled with music, fashion, food and entertainment.

Organised by Mahesh Balaaratchi (DJ Mowgli) together with Sulochana Asmone, Hiroshini, Prasad, Ashi, and Shawn, the evening provided guests with an opportunity to socialise, enjoy live entertainment, and celebrate in a unique and elegant setting.

Guests arrived from 6:00 pm, dressed in formal attire and decorative masks, creating a colourful and vibrant atmosphere throughout the venue.

DJ Mowgli: The main
organiser of
Masquerade Night

There was a delicious selection of Sri Lankan cuisine and street food, which proved popular throughout the evening.

The buffet offered a variety of traditional favourites, giving attendees a taste of home while adding to the festive atmosphere.

Entertainment was provided by DJ Mowgli, whose performance kept the audience engaged throughout the night. His playlist featured a mixture of popular favourites, dance classics, and cultural music, remixed for a younger generation.

One of the highlights of the evening was the Baila session, which brought a distinctly Sri Lankan flavour to the event.

The Baila segment highlighted the importance of preserving and celebrating cultural traditions, while bringing people together through music and dance.

As familiar rhythms filled the room, guests enthusiastically took to the dance floor, creating one of the most memorable moments of the night.

The crowd was described as lively, energetic, and welcoming, with attendees embracing the spirit of the masquerade theme while enjoying the opportunity to reconnect with friends and meet new people. The family-friendly atmosphere ensured that guests of all ages could take part in the celebrations.