Galle

The south coast of Sri Lanka features the fort city of Galle, the preserved Dutch colonial (and later British) center. This is a fascinating and tourist-ready place. The old town is enclosed by huge ramparts that run along the water and inland, forming an enclosure. The area inside is made up of a grid of tiny streets that are lined with red-tiled roofs and white buildings.

We tried to have lunch here, at the Amangalla Hotel (formerly the New Orient, the Sri Lankan answer to the Strand, in Rangoon, or Raffles, in Singapore), but the kitchen was closed:

So we ended up here, at the Galle Fort Hotel, quite as nice and with food. (A Dutch gem trader's mansion.) So we sat in the inside courtyard above the gorgeous shaded pool, and took in the scent of lotus flowers and frangipani trees. This was the (colonial) life!

Every year they have an international literary festival, which draws lots of bibliophiles and writerly types, but they get some serious writers to turn up, like, for instance, Gore Vidal and Alexander McCall Smith (2007). My friend Deirdre told me Candace Bushnell came this past year, so maybe they've run through their A list already.... In any case, I could have spent a lot more time here, shopping and peering around corners, walking along the path beside the ramparts, or snooping through the grills in the Muslim Quarter. It's made for tourists, and this had to be the most concentrated white-person place I've been in two weeks since I landed in South Asia. Lots of Aussie accents, but still. We all sunburn the same....

The hardest reality of being in Sri Lanka showed itself this afternoon, on the coastal drive between Galle and Beruwala, where we're staying the next two nights. In 2004, the catastrophic tsunami that reached across the Indian Ocean from Thailand devastated the eastern and southern coasts of Sri Lanka. For a country many refer to as the "pearl of South Asia" the other saying showed itself grimly in hundreds of recent grave markers by the side of the road: "the teardrop of South Asia." Concrete houses were broken apart, roofs missing, abandoned. Thick jungle undergrowth has carpeted many beachfront swaths of land, but the recent graves still protrude. Many hotels and houses have gone up since the disaster, but the remnants are visible to anyone who passes by on the A2. Over 40,000 died here. This country has suffered enormously, and when you think that they were embroiled in a brutal civil war simultaneously, it's unthinkable how much they've been through.