WRITTEN BY: IMOGEN SMITH
IMAGES: MIKE BLEWITT
I turn up in Sri Lanka at the end of January with a road bike and a bag of fresh kit, four kilos of snacks, and only two t-shirts. I am, after all, here to ride, joining gravel and endurance bikers from five continents for a training-camp-slash-media-gig where we plan to cycle the full length of the teardrop-shaped island—top to bottom—in under a week. We’ll be taking in every cultural, historical, culinary or otherwise unique experience we can pack into the itinerary along the way.
Sri Lanka lies in the Indian Ocean’s tropical waters, dwarfed by the Indian subcontinent to the northwest and with its own cultures, food, customs and beliefs. The island is about the same size as Tasmania or Switzerland, or the US state of West Virginia. It’s been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the last decade. And it’s not known for its cycling.
But I don’t really know any of that when I arrive. Fresh off the plane in the middle of the night, I gaze out the window of a minivan at crazy streets. Cars, buses and tuk-tuks circulate wildly at the base of a giant Buddha statue perched on a roundabout. There are no red lights, no lanes. No rules. It’s a riot of colour and light at midnight, and I hope it makes a bit more sense in the daytime.
IMOGEN WEARS THE ALL DAY JERSEY IN PINE AND THE ALL DAY BIB IN AUBERGINE. READ THE KIT REVIEWS HERE.
36 hours later my new international friends and I set out to ride 300 kilometres on day one. Starting at the very northern tip of the island at Jaffna, we roll out of the hotel carpark and straight into a sea of motorised colour. Tuk-tuks, hyper-decorated disco buses, cars, rigged up tractors, motorbikes, scooters, bicycles, stray dogs… and us. Everyone communicates by tooting their horns in a deafening, cheerful concerto of courtesies.
‘Is this your first time riding in Sri Lanka?’ one of the riders asks me.‘Yes,’ I say, aware that this is obvious. ‘Just don’t slow down.’ She says, shooting a gap between a disco bus and a tuk-tuk.
I dive through behind her just as the gap vanishes and swallows us up. It’s not the kind of thing I’d pull at home in Australia, but riding here is different from riding at home—here, everyone is giving way to someone. It may as well be you.
We ride through clouds of exotic smells: fish frying in coconut oil at roadside stalls, cooking fires, thick clouds of incense. We stop at roadside stalls where men with machetes decapitate coconuts and pour the juice straight into our bidons. It rains. We make it to Anuradhapura in time to hit the extravagant hotel buffet and fall into bed. The next morning we pedal out to see stupas, statues and temples rise serenely out of rice paddies and lakes, and waterbirds float overhead in the early morning cool, everything washed clean and bright after yesterday’s storms.
Over the next couple of days we make our way from the centre of Sri Lanka, hauling our bikes up a gruelling 35 kilometre climb, to Nuwara Eliya, the centre of the world’s tea production, 1,860 metres above sea level. Then we ride past terraces of tea and misty valleys onto Ella, populated with hippies and backpackers who kick back or party in this tiny hillside town. After that, we take a long day descending over 150 kilometres to Tissamaharama, the spiritual heart of the country.
We ride past elephants on the roadside, we eat the best tropical fruit we’ve ever tasted and glide over the nicest roads we’ve ever felt under our tyres. We learn of an ancient history of invention and beauty; kings who made water run uphill; riches and innovations; waves of invasion and exploitation.
Then we ask about those roads.
You see, they’re so uncannily smooth. And the bigger the road, the more deserted it is. On day six we find ourselves on a brand-new motorway, empty except for a few stray dogs and people drying rice on the perfect bitumen.
The roads we’d been admiring during our long days in the saddle are actually key characters in a long and sad story, artefacts of a recent past full of tragedy and mounting challenges. It goes like this:
In 2009 the civil war between government forces and the Tamil Tigers ended, and the future looked bright. Sri Lanka was one of the world's fastest growing economies. A popular president was elected, and just when the bad times seemed to be over, things took a bad turn. Corruption, cronyism, nepotism, as well as some plain old bad decision-making saw the administration borrow heavily for extravagant infrastructure projects that did little to support further economic growth (i.e. they built a bunch of smooth roads). Billions and billions of dollars were borrowed from the Chinese, from India, and then from big banks at high interest rates. In April 2019, isolated terrorist attacks put a hole in the tourism industry, and when COVID hit, well, you can imagine. The economy entered a death spiral of hyperinflation and default, and was declared collapsed in 2021, when a bunch of riots saw the presidential palace burned and the country’s leaders resign.
MIKE WEARS THE ALL DAY JERSEY IN PINE AND THE ALL DAY CARGO BIB IN BLACK. READ THE KIT REVIEWS HERE.
Things are looking brighter now. Sri Lanka’s leadership have asked the International Monetary Fund for help, and the nation is firmly fixed on the future—and the future is tourism. Our brief is simple: Ride the Island; tell your friends. And we’re more than happy to.
Rolling down those perfect smooth roads, you wouldn’t detect a thing. Sri Lankan people are unfailingly cheerful, and in a country that’s 85% Buddhist, and where Hindus, Christians and Muslims live side-by-side, the atmosphere is overwhelmingly peaceful, welcoming and safe.
On day six, we’re ready for our final 200 kilometre run into Galle, a touristy coastal town. The bright, hot day lands us at the beach for a perfect sunset swim in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It’s hard to picture the place being devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami nineteen years ago.
Over 1,000 kilometres we’ve taken in the lowlands, the drylands, the highlands and the coast. On our final ride together we ease the bikes out into Colombo’s Sunday traffic to visit in the monuments and temples of Sri Lanka’s biggest city for selfies and farewells. I ask one of our hosts what he wants us to take home from Sri Lanka. He doesn’t hesitate: ‘The Sri Lankan smile,’ he says. ‘Sri Lankans are always smiling, even through adversity. We want tourists to go home with our smile.’
It's not difficult to do.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND IMOGEN WORE ON THE TRIP? CHECK OUT THEIR GEAR REVIEWS.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND IMOGEN WORE ON THEIR TRIP? CHECK OUT THEIR GEAR REVIEWS.
I turn up in Sri Lanka at the end of January with a road bike and a bag of fresh kit, four kilos of snacks, and only two t-shirts. I am, after all, here to ride, joining gravel and endurance bikers from five continents for a training-camp-slash-media-gig where we plan to cycle the full length of the teardrop-shaped island—top to bottom—in under a week. We’ll be taking in every cultural, historical, culinary or otherwise unique experience we can pack into the itinerary along the way.
Sri Lanka lies in the Indian Ocean’s tropical waters, dwarfed by the Indian subcontinent to the northwest and with its own cultures, food, customs and beliefs. The island is about the same size as Tasmania or Switzerland, or the US state of West Virginia. It’s been in the news for all the wrong reasons over the last decade. And it’s not known for its cycling.
But I don’t really know any of that when I arrive. Fresh off the plane in the middle of the night, I gaze out the window of a minivan at crazy streets. Cars, buses and tuk-tuks circulate wildly at the base of a giant Buddha statue perched on a roundabout. There are no red lights, no lanes. No rules. It’s a riot of colour and light at midnight, and I hope it makes a bit more sense in the daytime.
36 hours later my new international friends and I set out to ride 300 kilometres on day one. Starting at the very northern tip of the island at Jaffna, we roll out of the hotel carpark and straight into a sea of motorised colour. Tuk-tuks, hyper-decorated disco buses, cars, rigged up tractors, motorbikes, scooters, bicycles, stray dogs… and us. Everyone communicates by tooting their horns in a deafening, cheerful concerto of courtesies.
‘Is this your first time riding in Sri Lanka?’ one of the riders asks me. ‘Yes,’ I say, aware that this is obvious. ‘Just don’t slow down.’ She says, shooting a gap between a disco bus and a tuk-tuk.
I dive through behind her just as the gap vanishes and swallows us up. It’s not the kind of thing I’d pull at home in Australia, but riding here is different from riding at home—here, everyone is giving way to someone. It may as well be you.
We ride through clouds of exotic smells: fish frying in coconut oil at roadside stalls, cooking fires, thick clouds of incense. We stop at roadside stalls where men with machetes decapitate coconuts and pour the juice straight into our bidons. It rains. We make it to Anuradhapura in time to hit the extravagant hotel buffet and fall into bed. The next morning we pedal out to see stupas, statues and temples rise serenely out of rice paddies and lakes, and waterbirds float overhead in the early morning cool, everything washed clean and bright after yesterday’s storms.
Over the next couple of days we make our way from the centre of Sri Lanka, hauling our bikes up a gruelling 35 kilometre climb, to Nuwara Eliya, the centre of the world’s tea production, 1,860 metres above sea level. Then we ride past terraces of tea and misty valleys onto Ella, populated with hippies and backpackers who kick back or party in this tiny hillside town. After that, we take a long day descending over 150 kilometres to Tissamaharama, the spiritual heart of the country.
We ride past elephants on the roadside, we eat the best tropical fruit we’ve ever tasted and glide over the nicest roads we’ve ever felt under our tyres. We learn of an ancient history of invention and beauty; kings who made water run uphill; riches and innovations; waves of invasion and exploitation.
Then we ask about those roads...
You see, they’re so uncannily smooth. And the bigger the road, the more deserted it is. On day six we find ourselves on a brand-new motorway, empty except for a few stray dogs and people drying rice on the perfect bitumen.
The roads we’d been admiring during our long days in the saddle are actually key characters in a long and sad story, artefacts of a recent past full of tragedy and mounting challenges. It goes like this:
In 2009 the civil war between government forces and the Tamil Tigers ended, and the future looked bright. Sri Lanka was one of the world's fastest growing economies. A popular president was elected, and just when the bad times seemed to be over, things took a bad turn. Corruption, cronyism, nepotism, as well as some plain old bad decision-making saw the administration borrow heavily for extravagant infrastructure projects that did little to support further economic growth (i.e. they built a bunch of smooth roads). Billions and billions of dollars were borrowed from the Chinese, from India, and then from big banks at high interest rates. In April 2019, isolated terrorist attacks put a hole in the tourism industry, and when COVID hit, well, you can imagine. The economy entered a death spiral of hyperinflation and default, and was declared collapsed in 2021, when a bunch of riots saw the presidential palace burned and the country’s leaders resign.
Things are looking brighter now. Sri Lanka’s leadership have asked the International Monetary Fund for help, and the nation is firmly fixed on the future—and the future is tourism. Our brief is simple: Ride the Island; tell your friends. And we’re more than happy to.
Rolling down those perfect smooth roads, you wouldn’t detect a thing. Sri Lankan people are unfailingly cheerful, and in a country that’s 85% Buddhist, and where Hindus, Christians and Muslims live side-by-side, the atmosphere is overwhelmingly peaceful, welcoming and safe.
On day six, we’re ready for our final 200 kilometre run into Galle, a touristy coastal town. The bright, hot day lands us at the beach for a perfect sunset swim in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. It’s hard to picture the place being devastated by the Boxing Day tsunami nineteen years ago.
Over 1,000 kilometres we’ve taken in the lowlands, the drylands, the highlands and the coast. On our final ride together we ease the bikes out into Colombo’s Sunday traffic to visit in the monuments and temples of Sri Lanka’s biggest city for selfies and farewells. I ask one of our hosts what he wants us to take home from Sri Lanka. He doesn’t hesitate: ‘The Sri Lankan smile,’ he says. ‘Sri Lankans are always smiling, even through adversity. We want tourists to go home with our smile.’
It's not difficult to do.
WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT WHAT MIKE AND IMOGEN WORE ON THE TRIP? CHECK OUT THEIR GEAR REVIEWS.