Field notes, kept by hand.
Dispatches from the road, longer reads, and the occasional letter from a hotel verandah at the wrong end of monsoon.
Earlier entries, in the order they were written.
3 minThe Perahera comes in July.
What the Esala Perahera actually is, how to be positioned for it, and why the crowd on the final night is part of the occasion, not an obstacle to it.
2 minThree hours in Pettah.
A walk through Colombo's main market quarter before the heat arrives, and the case for treating the city as a destination rather than a transfer point.
3 minA verandah in Bogawantalawa.
On planter's bungalows, what they are, what the best of them give you, and why a morning high above the Bogawantalawa valley is unlike anything else.
2 minThe east coast, opening.
A field note on the week in May when the main point at Arugam Bay begins working and Sri Lanka opens on a second coast, one that most visitors never reach.
1 minThe southern monsoon, observed.
A short note on the rains that close the south for half the year, and why the wettest week is often the one we send people for.
1 minThe planter's pencil ledger.
A tea estate kept by a man who counts in fingers, weighs in pounds, and has not raised his voice in forty-one years.
1 minOne Sunday in Galle.
The hour after the shutters close, the ramparts in low light, and a private supper that arrived in two clay pots and a covered basket.
1 minWhales we did not see.
An early sea morning that gave us, instead, an hour of dolphins, a flat horizon, and a captain who told us the sea would do better next week.
1 minThe leopard's window.
An hour of rain in Yala, a tracker who would not move the jeep, and the long pause that ended in a single quiet animal at the water's edge.
6 minA letter from Bentota.
On Ayurveda, on the rooms that smell of warm oil and old wood, and on the small grief of leaving them after a week.