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, which we picked on a trip built around young kids and came away glad we did — you hear real bush noise at night, not a recording of it.

From Yala, the six-hour drive back to Colombo is the reason to break the trip into stops instead of doing it in one push. Anantara Tangalle sits 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 other halfway point, on a clifftop 100 feet above the Indian Ocean near Galle, and it’s the most dramatic setting of any hotel we stayed at on the island. Colombo itself we almost skipped — we’d planned the whole trip around Yala and the coast — but a few days at Shangri-La, Colombo, on the Galle Face beachfront near Fort and Pettah, changed our minds. The city feels a little unfinished right now, mid-construction and busy in that slightly chaotic way; walk over to the beach and it’s obvious why this stretch is becoming Colombo’s tourist center.