Sri Lanka

The wildlife is what we didn’t expect from Sri Lanka. Yala National Park, on the southeast coast, is hundreds of square miles of scrub, grassland and marsh that looks more like an African safari than an Indian Ocean island — search it on Google and you get elephants and leopards, not beach photos. We stayed two different ways inside it. Wild Coast Tented Lodge puts you in canvas “cocoon” tents built inside boulder-shaped pods that genuinely blend into the surrounding rock; it’s camping only in the sense that canvas is what’s between you and the jungle. Chena Huts sits inside the park boundary itself — you hear real bush noise at night, not a recording of it.

Yala sits six hours from Colombo by road — long enough that we split the drive into two stops instead of pushing straight through. Anantara Tangalle comes first, almost exactly halfway, right on the beach under a stretch of palm trees; we stopped here with a newborn in the group, and it was the easiest leg of the whole trip. Cape Weligama is the second stop, on a clifftop 100 feet above the Indian Ocean near Galle, the historic town down the coast — the road in winds through small villages, a real look at daily life here. Colombo itself we almost skipped; we’d planned the whole trip around Yala and the coast. A few days at Shangri-La, Colombo, on Galle Face, the city’s beachfront promenade, changed our minds. It’s mid-construction and a little chaotic close up, but walk that stretch at sunset and it’s obvious why the area is becoming Colombo’s tourist center.