Visiting Sri Lanka with Lankesh

Sri Lanka is a country that only the young and intrepid would consider visiting on their own. Although travel agencies do organize bus tours there, it is not uncommon for people to take private tours instead – just two or three in a car with a guide who is also the driver. Few do it alone but a friend of mine did and thoroughly enjoyed herself. So that is the decision I made.
All the hotels tourists stay in, except in Colombo, have special rooms and a special dining room for guides. So they get to relax in the evenings with their friends and laugh or moan about their clients. And we get to enjoy the hotel and other tourists without struggling to make conversation with a stranger we’ve just spent all day with.
Sounded perfect.
And so Lankesh and I became a team for two weeks.
He’s in his thirties, married, with a cute 3 year old son. (He showed me pictures on his cell phone.) His English is quite passable if I don’t change the subject too fast or make a joke he’s not expecting. He was a ship’s engineer for 8 years upon leaving school and, after 6 months training, has been a guide for 5 years. He says he loves it, and his unfailing cheer leaves no doubt that he’s telling the truth, though it must be a hard job for a man with a family. (Perhaps harder on his wife and son than on him.)
Lankesh knows a lot about the various sites he takes his tourists to visit, and is always ready to propose something not on the program that he thinks you’ll enjoy. The ideal thing about a private tour is that you can spend a little longer at places you like and leave a little earlier if you’re done.
Though he always encouraged me to take photos of the views and sites tourists are supposed to take pictures of, he was also very good about finding a place to stop so I could take pictures of things that caught my eye.
I wouldn’t have wanted to miss those water buffalo!




He met me every morning at reception– never on time; always early -- with a smile and the same two questions:
“Good sleep, Mum?”
“Good food, Mum?”
Then, he opened the front passenger door of his brand new freshly washed white Toyota, his pride and joy. “Only twenty of this model in all of Sri Lanka, Mum.” And we were off on another adventure.