Tour to Aluthgama, Sri Lanka

Dividing Beruwala from Bentota, the lively little town of ALUTHGAMA offers a welcome dose of everyday life amidst the big resorts, and remaining refreshingly unaffected by the local package tourist trade. The main street is a colorful succession of trades: a fish market straggles up its west side, with all sorts of seafood lined up on benches supervised by machete-wielding fishmongers, while at the south end of the road, local ladies flog great piles of lurid, factory-made cloth. You will be amazed to see these things in your Sri Lanka Tours .


Aluthgama's other attraction is its good and relatively cheap selection of guest houses; these places aren’t actually c the beach, but just behind it at the edge of the beautiful lagoon at the mouth of the Bentota River  in many ways just as attractive a location as the oceanfront, especially at night, when the lights of the northern Bentota resorts twinkle prettily in the darkness across the waters. A couple of guest houses have their own boats to shuttle you quickly across the lagoon to the beach opposite, depositing you on the spit of land known as Paradise Island otherwise it’s a ten-minute walk, or a quick tuk tuk ride, to the nearest section of beach at Bentota .

J Bawa designed about 10km inland from Aluthgama, the idyllic Brief Gardens (daily 5pm Rs.325 including guided tour) comprise the former house and surrounding estate of the writer and artist Bevis Bawa, J Bawaelder brother of the architect Geoffrey Bawa - the name alludes to Bawa’s father, who purchased the land with the money raised from a successful legal brief Bevis Bawa began landscaping the five-acre gardens in I 92 and continued to work on them almost up until his death in 1992, creating a series of terraces which tumble luxuriantly down the hillside below the house. The gardens are nice for a stroll, but the main attraction is the house, a low-slung orange building stuffed with quirky artworks, some by Bawa himself: several pieces including two enter-taming aluminum sculptures and a big mural of Sri Lankan scenes) are by the Australian mist Donald Friend, who came to Brief for a week’s visit and ended up staying five and a half years. Other exhibits include old colonial furniture and a fascinating collection of photographs of the imposing Bawa himself 4he was six foot seven inches tall), both as a young man serving as a major in the British Army and as one of Sri Lanka’s leading social luminaries, posing with house guests such as Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. The return journey from Aluthgama by tuk tuk, including an hour’s waiting time, should cost Rs.400-500. Avoid visiting at weekends, when the place gets overrun.  It was a remarkable trip in my Sri Lanka Holidays .