Beautifully-restored Galle

Just a few years ago, the decay was visible in the Portuguese and Dutch buildings in the Galle fort. After sunset the fort and the town became as empty as Kandy at 8 pm. Yesterday, I noticed a different energy and a different vibe to the southern Sri Lankan town.

The once-decayed buildings are whitewashed with a fresh coat of paint, the streets have been newly-repaved, classical street lights don the lanes and a series of new and elegant boutiques line the fort. If there's one thing the authorities could do, it's to close some of the streets to vehicular traffic.

No camera could have done justice to the crimson red sunset we saw yesterday, a day where the sun was playing hide and seek and the cool Indian Ocean breeze made us forget that were in a tropical island close to the equator. 

The faces of Sri Lanka

People-watching is one of my favourite activities in Colombo. This is a city where I can easily blend in the crowd. Where I can be an outsider who looks like an insider and just calmly observe people with batting an eyelid.

Sri Lankans are very beautiful people and their faces reveal the fact that their ancestors mixed with all visitors (and invaders) to the island. You spot some hardcore Tamil-looking and Bengali-looking people but a vast majority seem to be mixed race and have an interesting set of features. Yesterday while walking through the market of Nugegoda, I spotted many Portuguese faces, some Malay faces, an odd Dutch face and a few Malayali faces (many Keralites migrated here and assimilated with the Sinhalese in the 19th century).

It would be very interesting to map the ancestry of people here.

Turkey's Aegean Coast and the Greek Isles

I visited Turkey in the spring of 2014 and absolutely loved the country and its beautiful and hospitable people. I could easily blend in with the locals in Istanbul and enjoyed the sights, sounds and cuisine of the city.

My favourite part of the country is the Aegean Coast. The villages around Izmir and Kushadashi are breathtakingly beautiful, and the people, the most liberal and secular in all of Turkey. This is the land of delicious olives, ancient historic sites like Ephesus and natural wonders like Pamukkale.

During my trip, I actually crossed the Aegean and spent a few hours in Samos in Greece. The island seemed economically depressed and the faces were far more glum than the smiles I saw on the Turkish mainland.

I would have never imagined that a year later, this beautiful coast would become a den of human smuggling. It breaks my heart to read about people dying in the Aegean while undertaking the dangerous crossing to Greece, in search of a better life in Europe.

The influx of migrants (yes they lose the right to be called refugees when they leave Turkey) has destroyed the tourism industry of the Greek islands. I doubt that this influx will stop as long as human smugglers make fortunes out of desperate immigrants.

The Russian artist who put Bali on the world map

Walter Spies, a primitivist painter, who was born and raised in Moscow, is a celebrated figure in the artists’ haven of Ubud and is credited with attracting Western cultural figures to Balinese art and culture in the 1930s.

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5 offbeat winter destinations in Russia for Indians

Of late, I have been hearing from a lot of intrepid Indian travellers that they’ve had their fair share of Moscow and St. Petersburg.The two cities are no longer considered exotic enough for those with wanderlust, but this is not a problem.  Russia is by far the largest country in the world and there is so much more to the country than its most famous cities.

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Interesting Buddhist sites in Moscow

Whether you're a practitioner of Theravada, Zen, Mahayana or even "European" Buddhism, Moscow has a place for you. Read my article on Buddhist sites in Moscow here.

An article about my first winter in Russia

Before moving to the Russian Far East in 2003, I had experienced snow, both in the United States as a child and as an adult when I trekked in the Himalayas in India and Nepal. However those experiences could not possibly prepare me for my first winter in Sakhalin.

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