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Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

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 A small island encircled by oceans, Sri Lanka is a mystery to many - a well-kept secret. The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books aim to make its complicated story more accessible.Copyright 2025 The Ceylon Press
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  • Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors

    Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors
    Jun 30 2025
    Welcome to Inside Kandy, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book. This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press. Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating Kandy and its hinterland, it is also dedicated to Harindra and Deepthi Dunuwille, two people who exemplify the best, most subtle and kindest side of the city within which they live.Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why. Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s true and real soul. Its heart. This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record in having withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning. But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea. No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods shipped by the colonists from the island – but given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was big. Very big. And, and the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.” As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out, a Sinhalese citadel, offering its shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important. It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that could be bettered by donkeys. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians. Nor is it mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few - though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous, discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed full of ancient flags and wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. And then there is the very Sir Lanka approach to specialised products. Every so often as you travel the island you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an ...
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    1 h y 9 m
  • A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

    A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera
    Jun 30 2025
    Welcome to The Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book. This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press. Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating Galagedera and its hinterland, it is also dedicated to Chinta, marvellous, calm and caring, who worked for many years at the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel; whose smile could transform the bleakest of days and whose death came far before its proper time. And we start with a little bit of retail theory – which will take you down the one of the world’s busiest high streets. And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands. Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out , where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace and returned to Colombo and defeat. Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalization and changing consumer habits have made only the most modest of footprints. Within the next 30 years this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk tuk is like time traveling in Tardis. Once upon as time, your village looked a little like this. The tour may may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no change of breaking for martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter. Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail park. Galagedera high street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and business on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road. At almost any time of the day it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks. Pause and watch. People talk. They pause and gossip, trade news, they know one another. In amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fish mongers, and butchers, wood carvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, are a wide range of businesses and services. LEFT OUT OF THE GATES and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country. Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant death. It runs parallel with paid-for private health care with its faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system that is supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching collages and a bespoke government ministry., Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and around 20 who are admitted to its wards, cared for by around 5 doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care and maternity care are all provided for, but the more complicated cases and conditions are referred to the main state hospital in Kandy. This includes – on average – 10 snake bites it encounters annually but not the scorpion bites which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts. Next up is the village’s central bus station which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala all through the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide and a short walk away from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide. Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: real looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric. Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School. Founded in 1906 this is the only girls school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on. The village’s main school, ...
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    51 m
  • A Garden Companion To The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel

    A Garden Companion To The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel
    Jun 29 2025
    Welcome to A Garden Companion To The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel , a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book. This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press. Although the book is given over to exploring the feral gardens set in the jungle north of Kandy at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, it is dedicated to John and Judith Holcroft, purveyors of more temperate and better ordered gardens in distant Oxfordshire. “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees. For it was gardens, not love, occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, its regimented perfection even stretched out into a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well mannered. Of course, it helped that they were tended by armies of gardeners, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said. Later when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses albeit with green bits. Over the years I tested this theory: in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner; on Bayswater balconies, Welsh seaside cottages, Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle. We had bought, incautious and without any help whatsoever from Excel, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. Its 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765; and until the civil war the estate stretched over 100 acres with 3 working elephants. When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around. Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed. So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice. Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites. Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly slowly our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created 4 different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets. Of these 4 walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments. This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height making it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species. Layard’s parakeet is an easy one to spot for it has a long light blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness of sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub. Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: The Alexandrine parakeet is similar to the rose-ringed parakeet – only much larger. It’s a bit of a city ...
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    42 m
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