Sri Lanka

With palm-lined beaches, turquoise waters and a good selection of guesthouses and restaurants, Unawatuna is very popular with travelers. The resort's location is superb, with the historic city of Galle just 6km away and a wooded headland to the west dotted with tiny coves.

This most holy of towns is a compelling mix of pomp and procession, piety and religious extravagance. Along with Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada), Kataragama is the most important pilgrimage site in Sri Lanka; a holy place for Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Veddah people.

Prepare your senses for overload, for the South is Sri Lanka at its most sultry and enticing: a glorious shoreline of dazzling white curves of sand set against emerald forested hills. Yes, you'll find the region a delight to explore, with each bend in the coastal highway revealing yet another idyllic cove to investigate.

Negombo is a modest beach town located just 10km from Bandaranaike International Airport. With a stash of decent hotels and restaurants to suit all pockets, a friendly local community, an interesting old quarter and a reasonable (though somewhat polluted) beach, Negombo is a much easier place to find your Sri Lankan feet than Colombo.

In Tissamaharama (usually shortened to Tissa), eyes are automatically drawn upwards and outwards. Upwards to the tip of its huge, snowy-white dagoba and outwards, beyond the town’s confines, to nearby wildlife reserves crawling with creatures large and small. With its pretty lakeside location, Tissa is an ideal mellow base for the nearby Yala and Bundala National Parks.

Weligama (meaning ‘Sandy Village’) is an interesting blend of lively fishing town and beach resort. The sprawling main settlement and coastal road is somewhat scruffy and not that easy on the eye, but you'll find the sandy beach is attractive once you're away from the main section; there's a couple of cove beaches west of the centre. At the east end of the beach, there's an enormous new concrete Marriott hotel, which towers over the surrounding buildings and looks completely out of place.

Crack open a coconut, slip into a hammock and rock gently in the breeze, allowing the hours, days and even weeks to slip calmly by. Welcome to Mirissa, a stunning crescent beach. Modest guesthouses abound and there's a string of simple restaurants at the back of the sand.

Wilpattu means 'natural lakes' in Sinhala and '10 lakes' in Tamil and lakes are exactly what you'll find at Wilpattu National Park. Visitor numbers remain low, even in high season, which gives Wilpattu a genuine sense of wilderness. On the flip side, however, the dense forest and general skittishness of the animals means that actually sighting wildlife is less of a sure thing than in the country's more-visited parks. This is a place for the more dedicated safari-goer.

I nio månader har Sri Lanka varit stängt för utländska turister på grund av pandemin. Men nu öppnar landet åter för besökare. Från och med. 21 januari gläntar man på dörren och öppnar för besök på den tropiska ön i Indiska oceanen.

Rising dramatically from the central plains, the enigmatic rocky outcrop of Sigiriya is perhaps Sri Lanka's single most dramatic sight. Near-vertical walls soar to a flat-topped summit that contains the ruins of an ancient civilization, thought to once have been the epicenter of the short-lived kingdom of Kassapa, and there are spellbinding vistas across mist-wrapped forests in the early morning.