Remarkable Ceylon

COLOMBO · GALLE · KANDY

Rice and Curry

The island eaten properly, in the places it is cooked.

Duration
10 Days
Party
PRIVATE · 2–6
From
US$4,080 per person
Rice and curry is not a dish, it is a table: eight or nine small preparations that are supposed to be eaten together, and which almost no restaurant abroad serves the way a Sri Lankan house does. This journey goes to the houses. It also settles, once and for all, what cinnamon tastes like when it was bark that morning.

What it is built around

  • Pettah market at six, before the heat and with someone who buys there
  • A day cooking in a Galle house with the family who lives in it
  • A cinnamon estate in the south, where the peeling is still done by hand
  • Hoppers at a roadside stand that has made nothing else for forty years
  • Dinner on a tea estate, cooked from whatever the kitchen garden gave that day

The shape of it.

An outline rather than a schedule. The days move around you once we know your flights, and nothing here is fixed.

  1. Days 1–2

    Colombo

    The markets first, because everything else makes more sense afterwards. Two nights in the city, eating in places that do one thing.

  2. Days 3–5

    The south

    Down the coast to Galle. A cooking day in a private house, a cinnamon estate, and enough beach time that it still reads as a holiday.

  3. Days 6–8

    Hill country

    Up into the tea. A working estate, a kitchen garden, and the cooler evenings that make the food taste different at altitude.

  4. Days 9–10

    Kandy, then home

    The last market, the spices you are taking back, and a slow drive to the airport.

What is included

  • Private vehicle and driver-guide throughout
  • Every cooking session and market visit, with the cook or the buyer
  • Nine nights in owner-run properties
  • Most meals, including all the ones that are the point of the trip
  • 24/7 direct line to your trip designer while you travel

Best for

People who plan holidays around what they will eat, and who would rather sit in a kitchen than at a tasting menu.

Probably not for

Fussy eaters, and anyone who cannot take chilli at all. We can moderate it, but we cannot remove it and still call it Sri Lankan.

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