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# The Teardrop Island
- URL: https://tombrewer.co.uk/the-teardrop-island/
- Published: 2026-03-10T03:19:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T09:31:56.000Z
- Author: Tom Brewer
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1789982889005, #Import 2026-09-21 09:29

Sri Lanka has been known by many names. *Serendib* to Arab traders navigating the Indian Ocean centuries before anyone thought to draw reliable maps of it. *Ceylon* to the British, who planted its mountains with tea and left behind railways, cricket and a complicated legacy. *The teardrop island*, to anyone who has ever looked at a globe and noticed the way it hangs below the southern tip of India like a pendant.

We were supposed to leave the UK via a connecting flight in Doha. The conflict spreading across the Middle East had other ideas, and for a few days the trip existed in a state of uncomfortable uncertainty while the routing was unpicked and reassembled. In the end, we secured a flight with SriLankan Airlines direct to Colombo. There is something fitting about arriving in a country on its own national carrier, even if that wasn’t the original plan.

Ten and a half hours is a long time to be airborne but SriLankan Airlines offered hospitality and food that put most European carriers to shame, the legroom rather less so. But you land, and the door opens, and thirty-nine degrees of Sri Lankan air removes any lingering complaints about seat pitch. Colombo announces itself immediately and feels strangely familiar. The road signs carry the colonial geometry of their British origins. Within minutes, no, seconds, of leaving the airport, our taxi driver had established where we were from and moved smoothly onto cricket, a conversation that felt less like small talk than a civic responsibility. This is, after all, a country that takes the game seriously in a way England has largely forgotten how to.

Nearly two hours south of the airport, the road delivers you to Hikkaduwa. It is everything a bustling coastal town in this part of the world promises and makes no apology for any of it. Taxis and tuk-tuks negotiate the narrow streets with frenetic excitement, their horns less a warning than a part of the local conversation. The smell of local cooking drifts from open doorways. And then the beach itself, champagne-coloured sand running down to an Indian Ocean sitting at a balmy twenty-eight degrees, glittering in the early evening light.

From Hikkaduwa the journey will open outward, and with very few fixed plans right now, Sri Lanka is a blank canvas for us. We can head South to Galle, the old Dutch fort city, its ramparts still intact above the Indian Ocean, its streets carrying five centuries of colonial history in stone and spice. Or Inland and upward into the hill country, tea estates of an almost hallucinatory green cascading down mountain flanks. Kandy and its Temple of the Tooth, a relic of the Buddha fought over and enshrined with an intensity that tells you everything about faith and power on this island. The ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the rock fortress of Sigiriya. Food that varies by region, by cook, by the contents of a morning market. And off the southern coast at Mirissa, if the season obliges, blue whales on migration, the largest animals that have ever lived.

The wildlife runs through all of it. Leopards in Yala. At Minneriya, hundreds of elephants converge on an ancient reservoir in what is simply called the Gathering, one of the largest assemblies of Asian elephants on earth. Saltwater crocodiles. Sloth bears. Some of what we hope to see exists in these numbers nowhere else, and perhaps not for much longer.

But before the island swallows us whole, we will stay a while. Hikkaduwa’s reef has been drawing divers for decades and we are here, in part, to join their number and complete our PADI Open Water and Advanced Open Water Qualifications. Growing up on the Devon coast gives you a working relationship with the sea. Diving gives you access to a different one entirely. The reef here is known for its coral, turtles, colour and an almost eerie quiet that the surface world above it knows nothing about.

Our adventure begins. Behind us, the comfortable architecture of the everyday. Ahead, an island that has been confounding expectations for two thousand years. It seems like fair exchange.

![](https://tombrewer.co.uk/content/images/2026/09/c29b6032-33bb-4dc5-982a-b48498e3b57c_4720x4720-jpeg-1.jpg)