Sri Lanka trip -The Safest Place to Be Afraid
Six days in the water, and one long drive inland
I
Colombo is not far. The map says so plainly — a short hop across a narrow stretch of sea, nearer to me than half of my own country. It was the connecting flights that made it feel like a journey, that stretched a hundred-odd kilometres of ocean into the better part of a day.
Then I landed, and the arrivals hall was playing Bollywood.
It was both surprising and comforting, that music, though I couldn't have told you which of the two it was more of. The airport itself was an ordinary Asian airport — I had arrived with expectations it had no interest in meeting. The market seemed to begin at the terminal, the hawking and the haggling already underway before I had cleared the doors.
The first thing that went wrong was my phone. Airtel refused to redirect to its Indian domain and sent me instead to a Sri Lankan one, which made recharging my international roaming impossible. My mother fixed it from a thousand kilometres away, as mothers do.
And for a few minutes after stepping out, I half-expected the signal to hold anyway. CMB is barely a hundred kilometres off the Indian coast. Surely a tower somewhere on the Tamil Nadu shoreline was still reaching for me. It was only when the bars finally dropped away that I understood I had gone abroad. That is a strange thing to learn from a phone rather than from your own eyes, but that is how it happened.
II
Two names dominate the ground transport outside the terminal: PickMe, the incumbent, and Uber, working its way in. Getting an Uber was easy — easier, in fact, than almost anything else I would try to arrange for the rest of the trip, though I didn't know that yet. I had planned to take a private taxi south. Standing there, I felt adventurous and changed the plan at the last minute in favour of the local train from Colombo to Weligama.
On the drive in from the airport, the Chinese presence is impossible to miss. It announces itself in advertising first — BYD banners strung large across the roadside, the automotive market being colonised in plain view. And then it announces itself in concrete. The Lotus Tower, the tallest structure in Colombo, built on Chinese money and Chinese engineering, stands over the city exactly the way the Central Radio & TV Tower stands over Beijing. If you have seen the one, you cannot unsee it in the other. The tower has been widely criticised as a monument to vanity, a project of no discernible economic value financed by loans that will outlive the novelty. It looks the part. It is beautiful and it is a debt.
III
Stepping into Colombo Fort Railway Station is stepping into the nineteenth century, and the British left the door open.
There is no electric signage. Ticket counters are staffed by human agents who look up when you approach. There are no vending machines. The trains do not glide in — they chug and roar and haul themselves to a stop under thick black smoke, and the smoke hangs in the station afterwards like it belongs there. The infrastructure is sorely lacking, and I mean that as a description rather than a complaint, because the lack is also the charm and you cannot have one without the other.
A small confederacy of tourists formed at the station out of sheer necessity — several of us, none of us knowing anything, asking the station master for our platform and then, having found the platform, asking a second time for our coach. The first-class ticket cost almost nothing.
And then the train ran out along the coast, and the coast was the whole point.
The tracks are laid so close to the water that for long stretches there is nothing between the window and the Indian Ocean. I gave up on my book. I gave up on my phone. I spent hours with my eyes fixed on the break line, watching waves stand up and collapse and reassemble further down the shore, trying to work out what exactly I was heading towards and whether I was going to be equal to it.
The train halted at Galle. As it slowed, I saw canals — proper canals, cut straight, lined with low buildings, threading away from the station into the town. My first thought was that this was an accident of drainage that happened to resemble Amsterdam. My second thought, arrived at later and with the help of a little reading, was that it was not an accident at all. The Dutch held Galle for a century and a half, and they left behind what they always leave behind. The canals are a signature.
IV
The train journey turned out to be long — considerably longer than the timetable had led me to believe — and by the time I reached Weligama, the day was gone.
Weligama is the surf town. That is not one of its features; that is the whole of it. Surfing is the reason the town has an economy and the reason anyone under forty is there. If you tell somebody in Sri Lanka that you are staying in Weligama, they do not ask what you're doing there. They already know.
I found a decent Airbnb — a small room tucked away, which I located in the dark through heavy rain, the sort of rain that arrives without discussion. I never met the owner. A keeper handled the key and everything after it, and what I knew of her I had to assemble from the room itself: she was Czech, and she had taken visible pains to make the place as European as she could manage. It worked, in its way. There was no television. For reasons I still cannot fully account for, the absence of a television was the single most peaceful thing about the place. It made the room feel less like accommodation and more like a retreat, somewhere people came to do one difficult thing and then sleep.
I had not eaten lunch. With the rain coming down and a kind of unearned adrenaline running through me, I went out for hot dinner and ordered kotthu, because kotthu was the thing to order.
Honestly? It was fine. I was not especially satisfied. But it was native to the place, and that turned out to matter more than whether I enjoyed it — I needed to eat something that could not have been served to me at home, because that was the confirmation I was after. And with it I ordered a pot of tea.
That tea, in that room, on that rain-loud evening, was the best tea I have ever had. I drank three cups.
V
I woke up the next morning afraid.
My last surf trip, to Bali, had left me scarred. I had tried to work my way out of it by surfing alone in Phuket, but Phuket is not a surfing town — Phuket was child's play, and I knew it even while I was doing it. What I actually could not get past was a single image: the line-up at Batu Bolong, hundreds of heads bobbing in the water, boards everywhere, no room to fall. It lives rent-free in my head. Something about crowds frightens me, on land as much as at sea, and the sea is worse because you cannot step out of it.
Weligama, I knew, was going to look like Bali.
So I gave myself the first day off. I called it acclimatisation, which is the word you use when you are buying time. I told myself I would use it to get the feel of the place and plan the six days ahead.
The beach was a six-hundred-metre walk. Before going down to it, I had breakfast at Nomad Café, a European-style bistro with European prices, the kind of place that has clearly worked out who its customers are: almost entirely white, almost entirely young, almost entirely in no hurry. It is a good place for an easy morning.
There I ran into an Indian man who introduced himself in Hindi, having spotted my Axis Bank debit card. He had bought a piece of land in Sri Lanka and built a hotel on it. Not managed, not leased — owned, outright, and not only that one; he had several properties by then, and he spoke about them the way other men talk about a commute. He employed Sri Lankans and he was doing well.
It was, I realised while listening to him, simply a different way to be alive. He had looked at a map, picked a coastline, bought some of it and built. Nothing about it was extraordinary to him. I could not stop turning it over afterwards — not with envy exactly, more the vertigo of learning that a life you had assumed required permission only required a decision.
Over the following days I saw that arrangement everywhere. Hotels, restaurants, surf schools, cafés — owned by foreigners, run by Sri Lankans. The owner sets the terms; the staff execute them. On one reading, this is straightforwardly good: foreign capital arrives, jobs are created, standards rise, the money circulates. On another reading, it prompts a harder question, which is not whether foreigners own the businesses but why they are the ones who end up owning them. What does a place have to have been through for that to become the default? Is there a word for it that isn't investment?
I turned that over more than once, and I never arrived anywhere satisfying.
VI
That was also the day I understood what Uber is actually for.
Sri Lanka does not have a well-organised tourism market. In most places I have travelled, movement is a solved problem — there is a portal, a fixed price, a rating, a receipt, and it covers everything from a two-kilometre ride to a full-day tour. In Sri Lanka the platforms have not taken hold in the same way, largely because the local drivers have resisted them, and one can hardly blame them for it. But the consequence lands on the traveller: outside of a few pockets, you are at the mercy of the tuk-tuk drivers.
The opening quote is 3x. After a decent haggle you can bring it to 2x. Below 2x, they simply refuse, and they are right to, because the next tourist along the road will pay it.
This annoyed me more than it should have on that first day. I was paying a genuinely absurd amount — by Indian standards, not European ones — to be carried two kilometres. It wasn't the money. It was that the quality on offer did not justify the price. Europe is expensive too, but in Europe the expense buys you something. Here the expense bought me a two-kilometre ride in a tuk-tuk.
The rest of that day I spent crawling around the town, and at some point ended up at a scuba instructor's shop. I had assumed diving would be cheap. I was wrong again. And even setting the price aside, committing to diving when I had come to practise surfing felt like a way of doing neither properly. The clincher was that Sri Lanka does not have the corals to make it worth the trade. I let it go for another country.
VII
Day two, I finally got into the water.
I went in with a softboard and no pretensions. I did not want to swagger in as though I were an intermediate, because I am not one, and there is no shame in saying so out loud. Finding a board to rent, however, took some doing. I had a slightly ugly exchange with a couple of shop owners which read to me — I may be wrong, but it read to me — as racial, an Indian tourist being sized up and priced differently. Eventually I found a surf school willing to rent to me.
Their reluctance had a commercial logic underneath it, which I only worked out afterwards. Once a place becomes commercially synonymous with surfing, it fills with absolute beginners, and teaching absolute beginners pays several times what renting a board pays. Everyone in Weligama wanted to teach me to pop up. Nobody wanted to hand me a board and let me go.
I declined the lessons, politely. I have taught myself every sport I play. That is simply how I am comfortable learning — badly at first, alone, on my own clock. It was never going to be different here.
The day before, while lounging under a beach umbrella, I had got talking to an instructor about the quality of the waves and, more to the point, the safety of them. He told me this was about the safest place in the world to learn, because the bottom is sand the whole way through — no reef, no rock, nothing underneath you that can open you up. I was thoroughly reassured, and in the days that followed I came to agree with him completely.
That first morning I was rusty. I could not read the take-off point; I kept committing too early or too late. But the paddle-out was surprisingly easy, and this mattered more than I expected — it meant I spent my energy trying to catch waves rather than fighting my way out to where the waves were. I caught a couple. I slipped off both as I stood.
The instructors, quite reasonably, wanted their students to have a good session, and me flailing about in the middle of their lesson zone was a bit kookish. After some prodding I moved to the right spot.
Here is the part I want to be honest about. I had not been riding in the crowded area by accident. I was there because it felt safer, and because I did not have the confidence to take a place further out among people who knew what they were doing. What moved me was not courage. It was that my chosen spot had become dangerous — for the beginners and for me — and so I was pushed out to where I should have been all along. Sometimes you get where you need to go for reasons that do you no credit.
VIII
I came out of the water feeling good.
Going in, I had been supremely anxious. The night before I had spent turning over in bed asking whether this was really a sensible way to spend a holiday. Vacations are for chilling, aren't they? Why put myself deliberately in the way of the weather and the current and the washing machine? I could just sit on the beach with a smoothie and my New Yorker.
Except that I had tried exactly that, the day before, the day I had officially designated for settling in. It doesn't work. I do not know how to relax, and I know it least of all when I am travelling alone. Something in me refuses to let an hour go unused in a foreign country, and the impulse only gets louder the further from home I am. Better to go into the water than to spend the day losing an argument with myself.
And there was the arithmetic of the moment, which I could not ignore. I was between jobs. I was standing on what I had been assured was the safest beach on earth to learn this. I was alone, which meant every hour of the day was mine to spend. I might never get all three of those at once again.
If not now, then when?
So I pushed myself in that morning, and I was glad I had. I was not glad about how I surfed. Those are different things, and I have stopped expecting them to arrive together.
IX
I had set that day aside for Galle and Ahangama.
If someone asks me what I remember of September 2024, the honest answer is that I remember watching Sri Lanka play New Zealand. My screen time that month went almost entirely to cricket highlights. Some dormant thing woke up and I watched every format, every match, every package. For that one month, cricket comfortably outranked tennis in my affections. And since so much of it was being played at Galle — the ground sitting under the walls of the fort with the Indian Ocean behind it — I had no chance of not going.
I reached by noon and spent the afternoon walking the ramparts, which is the correct way to spend an afternoon in Galle. You go slowly and the sea keeps reappearing on your left.
What made the day is that it happened to be the national election. The main polling centre for the region was inside the fort itself. Through the afternoon and into the evening the fort filled with party supporters, election officials and police patrols, all of them going about their business among the tourists.
But the detail I keep returning to is quieter than that. The open greens inside the ramparts, which through the day belong to visitors taking photographs, began to fill in the evening with local families. Mats, food, children, the whole apparatus of a weekend picnic. The election gave the evening its charge, but the reclaiming would have happened anyway — the fort is a monument by day and a park by night, and only one of those is for us.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake won. The mood, from what I could see of it, was ecstatic — not relieved, not vindicated, but ecstatic, the way people are when something has finally given way. Two years earlier the country had run out of fuel and cooking gas and the president had left by the back door. What I was watching was the other end of that. People had wanted change badly enough to be desperate about it, and now they had it, and the fort felt like a festival.
Though I should qualify that, because honesty demands it: I suspect anything at Galle Fort would feel like a festival. Put a few hundred people inside those walls on a warm evening with the sea on three sides and you will get celebration out of almost any occasion. I cannot fully separate what I saw from where I was standing when I saw it. That is a problem with reading a country from its most beautiful square kilometre, and I have no solution to it.
X
Over the next couple of days I rested, surfed a little more, read a great deal more about surfing than I actually surfed, and went to Mirissa.
I had wanted to snorkel. Reading the reviews, I worked out fairly quickly that nothing here was going to come close to what I had already done in Phuket, and so I didn't bother.
This is the tax travel eventually charges you. The more places you see, the less likely any new place is to stand out on looks alone. The visual appeal wears thin — not because the places get worse, but because your baseline keeps rising, and there are only so many ways for water to be blue.
What I have slowly worked out is that when this happens, the answer is not a better beach. It is to go at the place differently — to stop seeing it and start doing something in it. As the Norwegians put it in their line about sustainable tourism: travel less, experience more.
So whenever I felt that particular despair creeping in — that there wasn't much here to look at — I went looking instead for what there was to do.
XI
One of those days I went to Hiriketiya.
I had headed out in the afternoon for a surf session and found the wind blowing hard and flattening everything. The locals reckoned it would drop within the hour and leave something decent behind. I did not have the patience. I had already lost sessions to the weather and I was not in the mood to lose another to a forecast delivered by a man in a plastic chair. So I made an on-the-spot decision to go and find waves somewhere else, and Hiriketiya was an hour away by tuk-tuk.
Every beautiful surfing photograph you have seen of Sri Lanka was taken at Hiriketiya. I knew this. I still was not prepared for how small it is. It's a tight C-shaped bay, held in on both sides, and walking into it I had the distinct feeling of entering somewhere I hadn't been invited. You can see immediately why surfers found it and kept quiet about it — it is a bay built for practising in peace.
That is over now, of course. Hiriketiya has surf shops, and plenty of them. But it is not yet Weligama, and everyone there seems quietly aware of the direction of travel.
XII
Which brings me to what I eventually decided about Weligama.
Weligama is not selling surfing. Weligama is selling the first thrill of surfing — the day you first stand up, the photograph of the day you first stand up, the feeling of having done it. Most people there were passing through for a day or two, en route to Galle or up to Ella, and for the great majority it was an item on a shared itinerary: a couple, or a group of friends, having a good time.
I found almost no solo travellers. And the beginners in Weligama were beginners in the strictest sense — people who had not touched a board before that morning and would not touch one again after that week.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. But it explains the economics of the place entirely, including why nobody wanted to rent me a board.
XIII
And then, on the last day, it clicked.
Not spectacularly. I should say that first, because I have read enough of these essays to know how this paragraph is supposed to go, and it did not go that way. The waves I rode were small. There were fewer of them than I had hoped for — considerably fewer, if I am counting honestly against what I had promised myself on the flight over. But they were rides. I got to my feet and the board went where the wave went and I went with it, and that had not been true on day two.
I also got destroyed. At some point that morning I took one badly and went into the washing machine properly — over the falls, tumbled, no idea which way was up, held down long enough to start negotiating. I came up laughing. That was the actual difference, more than the rides were: a week earlier that would have ended my session and possibly my trip. My t-shirt did not survive it. The wave took it clean off me, and I surfaced half-dressed in front of a beach full of people and found that I did not particularly mind.
And then, near the end of the session, an instructor paddled over and asked me to move.
He wanted me out of the beginners' area. I was in the way — taking off on waves the first-timers were waiting for, riding through their zone, being a hazard. He pointed me further out, towards where the intermediates were sitting, and paddled back to his students.
It was the same instruction I had been given on my second morning, word for word almost, and it meant the exact opposite thing. On day two I was moved because I could not stay on my feet in a crowd of people who also could not stay on their feet. On the last day I was moved because I could. Nobody congratulated me. Nobody had any idea it was the best thing that happened to me all week. I paddled out to the intermediate zone, sat up on my board among people who had been surfing for years, and did not feel like a fraud, which is a sentence I did not expect to be able to write when I started this.
I still went home having caught fewer waves than I wanted. Both things are true and I have stopped needing them to reconcile.
XIV
My last destination was Sigiriya, six hours inland.
I had seen it on my desktop for years before I ever thought of going — one of those Windows wallpapers that lodges itself in you without permission — and I was stubbornly determined to get there despite the distance. So I set out on a long road trip that took me through some genuinely beautiful green stretches of national highway under torrential rain.
Somewhere in the middle of it, on a completely desolate road with not a soul visible in any direction, my driver was fined for speeding. The police were behind the trees. They had presumably been behind those trees all morning, waiting for a speedometer to blip, and there is something almost admirable about the patience of it.
We reached Sigiriya late at night, with two climbs waiting: Pidurangala and Sigiriya itself. The correct time to start is five in the morning. After the previous day, I started at 6:15.
My driver came along for Pidurangala and proved far more useful than I had any right to expect, driving around to find the entrance, which is trickier than it sounds.
And then I climbed.
The views from the top of Pidurangala were gold. I have looked for a better word and there isn't one. You come up onto a broad shelf of warm rock and the plain opens out flat and green in every direction, unbroken to the horizon, and sitting alone in the middle of it is Sigiriya — the whole rock, entire, exactly as it appears in the wallpaper, except that it is three kilometres away and real and there is nothing between you and it but air.
That is the joke of the place, and nobody tells you before you go: the best view of Sigiriya is not from Sigiriya. It cannot be. From the top of Sigiriya you can see everything except the thing you came for. You have to be standing on the other rock.
XV
So I went to the ticket counter at Sigiriya, and they wanted my passport.
I had a photograph of it on my phone, which was not acceptable, and the passport itself was back at the hotel. I stood there and did the arithmetic — the drive back, the drive again, the queue again, the climb in the middle of the day with the heat coming off the stone.
I was tired. I had been tired since the six-hour drive. And underneath the tiredness was a thought that arrived quietly and would not leave: I have already seen the best of it. I had stood on Pidurangala at half past six in the morning and looked straight at the thing. Climbing it would give me a fort, a staircase, some frescoes, and a view of everything except the rock I was standing on.
So I didn't. I turned around, went back to the hotel, and spent the rest of the day lying on the lawn.
I want to be clear about how strange that is. This is the same man who, eight days earlier, had set aside a full day to settle in and discovered by lunchtime that he had no idea how to do it — who could not sit on a beach with a smoothie and a magazine without feeling the hours draining away unused, who went into the water partly because going into the water was easier than sitting still. I had driven six hours across a country, in the rain, for a rock I had first seen on a computer screen. And then I skipped it and lay on some grass.
Nothing in me had changed. I want to be honest about that too. I didn't relax because I had finally learned how; I relaxed because a passport requirement and a long drive made the alternative unattractive enough that the decision got taken out of my hands. It was the same as the line-up at Weligama — the crowd pushed me out to the proper peak, and I went, and it looked from the outside like nerve. Sometimes you get where you need to go for reasons that do you no credit.
But I got there. I spent an afternoon on a lawn in the middle of Sri Lanka doing nothing at all, and it was the only afternoon of the trip I hadn't budgeted for, and it is one of the two or three I actually remember.
The other, of course, is the rain in Weligama, and the pot of tea, and the room with no television in it.
I had come to Sri Lanka to make myself do a hard thing in the water, and I did, badly, and I would do it again. But the trip did not turn out to be about the water. It turned out to be about the small number of hours I spent not trying to get anything out of the day — a train window, a tea, a lawn. I would not have chosen any of them. That may be the point. Travel less, experience more; and if you cannot manage the first part, at least be somewhere that occasionally takes the choice away from you.
XVI
On the drive back to Colombo I sat in the front, next to the driver, because I had ten days of questions and one last chance to ask them.
We talked mostly about potential, which is a word that comes up quickly in conversation about Sri Lanka and then does not go away. He had the specific, unsentimental frustration of a man who has watched a good thing be badly run for a long time. The country has everything — coast, hills, ruins, waves, tea, a language advantage over most of the region — and almost none of it is organised in a way that lets an ordinary person show up and use it.
And here, finally, I got the explanation for my two-kilometre tuk-tuk ride.
The reason the ride-hailing apps stop working properly once you leave the airport corridor is not consumer preference and not regulation. It is that inland, in the towns, there are people with an interest in them not working — his word for them was goons, and he did not soften it. Organised taxi services get discouraged. Drivers who sign up get discouraged. The fare stays negotiable, which means the fare stays at 3x for anyone who looks foreign, which means a tourist economy runs on a hundred small acts of friction that no one can fix from the inside.
I spent a good part of that drive doing the thing I always do, which is turning a complaint into a business. A country this size, this dependent on tourism, with this much of its market still unorganised — booking, transport, surf rentals, guides, the entire spine of a trip still being conducted through WhatsApp numbers and roadside haggling. The opportunity is enormous and completely obvious, which is usually a sign that the obstacle is not technical. The obstacle, as my driver had just explained, was standing at the taxi rank.
Then the road went quiet for a while and I found myself thinking about cricket instead.
Because it struck me, watching the country scroll past the windscreen, how small it is. You can cross it in a day. And this is the country that assembled elevens capable of going to England and Australia — nations many times its size, with money, academies, infrastructure, a hundred times the pool to select from — and beating them. Not once and not by accident.
I understood the pride then in a way I had not before, and I say this as an Indian, from a country whose cricketing achievements are impressive largely in the way that a very large number is impressive. To find eleven world-class players in a population that size is a statistical near-miracle. To find them repeatedly, for a generation, while the country itself went through what it went through, is something else entirely. Of course they are proud. It would be strange if they weren't.
That was the last thing I thought about properly before Colombo came up around the car — that this is a country that has produced far more than its dimensions entitle it to, and is still, in a hundred small ways, not being allowed to.