Sri Lanka Travel Guide

A couple of years ago, we traveled to Sri Lanka, which is where my mom is from. She immigrated the the U.S. when she was 14, and I grew up eating the food and hearing the stories she remembered.

Growing up in Northern California, in a town that was .6% Asian where most people had never heard of Sri Lanka made me extremely curious! I wanted to go on a birthright trip! To connect with my roots!

It was an amazing trip. Sri Lanka is trying HARD to become a tourist destination. So many 5 star hotels are being built, and the hospitality industry is over-the-top. We ate amazing hotel breakfasts that were basically lunches, and we had a personal driver/tour guide the whole trip! All for about the same amount of $$ we would normally spend on a trip to Europe for less time, staying in Airbnbs, and using public transit.

Below are some of the foods and places we LOVED

WHAT TO EAT

This is, after all, The Bay Leaf Kitchen — a food blog! We ate SO many amazing things. The most famous of which is “rice and curry” pictured above — many different kinds of curries + rice. In order from top left to right, that’s fish curry, potato curry, dried fish curry, dahl (lentils), coconut sambol, green bean curry, eggplant curry, beet curry, and banana leaf curry.

Another famous dish — “Hoppers.” These are delicious bowl-shaped pancakes that can be made either as traditional hoppers with rice flour, egg hopper, with a nice egg at the bottom, or string hoppers, made with very thin rice noodles. The bowl holds “sambols” kind of like more substantial salsas — seeni sambol aka onion sambol, pol sambol aka coconut sambol, and chili sambol in the above egg hopper that I ate for breakfast.

Each region of Sri Lanka has a speciality. These seafood-forward meals were in Tangalle, a beach town at the south tip of the island.

Fresh fruit is plentiful and abundant. We stopped multiple times at fruit stands on the side of the road and ate things I’d never had before like mangosteens, and amazing fresh papaya with coconut tree honey/syrup and salt.

Where to go

DAMBULLA & SIGIRYA

Sigirya is home to “Lion’s Rock” — a HUGE boulder in the middle of a mostly flat forrested plain where a king built his lavish palace atop. It’s a fascinating place. It’s a bit of a climb to the top of the rock, with some scary narrow stairs. But I’m very afraid of heights, and I made it by holding on very tight to the railing! It’s completely fascinating, just learning about how they got water to the top of the rock for the palace — and not just drinking water — an abundance of water for infinity pools and waterfalls and fountains.

STAY: We loved staying at Jetwing Lake, a beautiful, modern hotel with the prettiest view of a lake and a mountain, and the best pool. The Jetwing hotel chain in Sri Lanka is overall fantastic. The food at breakfast consisted not just of typical hearty English breakfast foods like bacon, made-to-order omelets, sausage, beans (very English), toast, and pastries and fresh fruit, but soooo much authentic Sri Lankan food — chicken curries, fish curries, string and egg hoppers, dahl, etc.

ADAM’S PEAK

It’s a traditional religious pilgrimage to hike Adam’s Peak at midnight, to summit the top to watch the sun rise from the Buddhist Temple at the top. It’s called “Adam’s peak” because within the temple, there is a footprint that Buddhists say is Buddha’s, Christians say is Adam’s or St. Thomas’s, and Hindu’s believe is Shiva’s.

We were foolhardy enough to hike it! This was the most physically exhausting thing I have ever done in my life (and that’s from someone who has run 3 half marathons). It was the steepest steps that took us from 1 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. to climb, but it felt never-ending and painful.

We did watch the sunrise! And it was extremely beautiful. And I was so proud of the accomplishment. But will we ever do it again? NOPE. We were sore for days and vowed never to exercise again. A vow we broke a couple days later when we played tennis 😉

KANDY

Kandy housed the Temple of the Tooth — where one of Buddha’s teeth is enshrined. We went in the morning and were able to watch a ceremony with drums and incense, and also went upstairs to watch people offering food and prayers and jostling to glimpse Buddha’s tooth, which is in a gilded gold box within it’s own special mini-temple within the temple.

We also took the famous train from Kandy to Nuwara Eliyah, which is in the middle of the country — the tea-growing region. It was extremely beautiful scenery the entire way.

YALA NATIONAL PARK

We did a “safari” trip to Yala National Park, which is a UNESCO heritage site, and was very exciting and also just a bit disappointing. We did not see the elusive leopards! We even took the late evening safari, supposedly the best time for leopards, and missed them.

It was overall a really fun and unique experience. And we saw a few elephants, water buffalo, and birds I’d never seen before (including one taking a dirt bath to stay cool!)

TANGALLE

I’ve learned through my years traveling, that it’s always important to schedule some time just to sit on the beach, eat good food, and rest by the pool. This is what we did in Tangalle. Aside from a disastrous trip to try out whale watching (that ended in extreme sea-sickness), we stayed at our beach resort the whole time and thoroughly enjoyed it.

STAY: The Anantara Peace Haven Resort is fantastic. It’s beautiful, right on the beach, with amazing cocktails, a buffet breakfast, yoga classes, and tennis courts with mini-fridges full of cold water and damp, cold towels for the humidity. The rooms have beautiful soaking tubs and lounge chairs out on the balcony.

GALLE

Galle, the Old Fort, is an ode to colonialism. Once an old Dutch fort city, the entire town is walled off and sits next to the ocean. You can see old architecture, old military barracks and walk along the fortress walls. Sri Lanka’s history and culture is heavily influenced by it’s colonial past. In fact, my mom grew up drinking afternoon tea in Sri Lanka.

OVERALL ITINERARY

Driving around with a tour guide or a driver is completely expected here. Public transportation is either non-existent, complicated, and not traveler-friendly. We hired a travel company to help book everything and it was still so much cheaper than a comparative trip to Europe.

Below is our daily itinerary and how long we stayed in each place (I omitted the hotels I didn’t care for). Overall, I highly recommend traveling to Sri Lanka. It was the trip of my dreams and I can’t wait to go back.

DAY 1 – Arrive in Colombo
DAY 2 – Short visit to Negombo & Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage on the way to Dambulla (Stay at Jetwing Lake)
DAY 3 – Sigiriya Rock & Fortress (Stay at Jetwing Lake)
DAY 4 – Polonnaruwa tour (Stay at Jetwing Lake)
DAY 5 – Kandy 
DAY 6 – Adams Peak (Climb Adam’s Peak overnight!!)
DAY 7 – Nuwara Eliya (Stay at Heritance Tea Factory)
DAY 8 – Ella by train 
DAY 9 – Yala National Park (Stay at Jetwing Yala)
Day 10-12 – Tangalle (Stay at Anantara Peace Haven)
Day 13 – Galle 
Day 14 – Return