![]() ![]() Galle was front and centre in the post-2009 tourist boom, heaving with visitors all year round, with a transformative facelift of its crumbling buildings and soaring property prices. Once on the Southern Expressway, there were striking differences from pre-pandemic times: roadside billboards were naked, reduced to their iron frames, denuded of advertising shops and small tourist hotels and eateries were shuttered and boarded up. A score of porters stood idle around luggage conveyor belts – one sign of chronic overstaffing in Sri Lanka’s public sector. I arrived at Katunayake airport in late April. From 2015 to 2018, I was an economic-policy adviser to the government. After an almost three-decade absence, I returned to Sri Lanka in my forties and spent a decade travelling its length and breadth to write a travel memoir. ![]() Colombo is my hometown, where I spent most of my childhood. I had watched Sri Lanka’s latest catastrophe unfold from the safety and comfort of Singapore, not having been to the country for two years due to the pandemic. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night ![]()
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