In 1992 we began married life in war-torn Sri Lanka – 32 years later, here’s what we found on our return

Our Return Journeys series explores the joy of a nostalgic trip back to a destination from one’s past – whether a childhood camping holiday or a formative first job abroad. This week, Lisa Markwell returns to Sri Lanka

The monk wound thin thread around and around each of our wrists until it resembled a bracelet. He deftly tied a knot. The red bands, never to be cut off, were a symbol of good luck, a way to remove negative energy – it felt like a fine way to acknowledge the start of our life together. We left the vast rock on which the Monaragala temple stood infused with happiness.

That was in 1992 and the thread has long since worn away, as have some of our memories of a month spent travelling around Sri Lanka. Those young lovers are, however, still going strong.

And now, in 2024, we’ve returned, and a monk is winding a thin thread around each of our wrists and wishing us a long and lucky life. This time the thread is white and the temple is in the jungle, near the fabled Sigiriya rock fortress. It feels good to be back.

Last time, John and I were footloose – choosing not to think what might lie ahead, in life or in Sri Lanka. In 1992, the civil war was raging and large parts of the country were out of bounds to tourists. But we didn’t really consider ourselves tourists – hell, we stayed our first night in the seamen’s mission in Colombo (walls to waist height between the rooms, then chicken wire, I seem to remember; honeymoon suite it was not).

We hired chunky Honda motorbikes and set off to the interior, armed with a letter in Sinhala from a friend’s mum to her relatives near the city of Kurunegala. On arrival, grubby and sunburnt from riding through remote tea plantations and dusty backroads, getting lost and found time and again (in the days before mobiles and sat nav), the ladies of the village took me to the well, covered me with a sari, washed me through it and replaced it effortlessly with a dry one.

‘Why are you here?’ was the most asked question while we stayed, via Mr Gamage, the village’s sole English speaker. And, ‘Why don’t you have any children?’ Scooping up as much as we could of Rani’s cashew-nut and pineapple curries, and slaking our thirst with Lion beers, we just laughed.

Our travels continued: we climbed Adam’s Peak in central Sri Lanka to see the sun rise and reveal the landscape below. We stopped in Kandy, visiting the Temple of the Tooth and taking tea at the Queen’s Hotel. Then on to surf at Arugam Bay, over on the east coast (where no one was going) – we found burned-out guest houses and a road laced with landmines. Mr Timothy, the host at Hideaway, the one remaining place to stay, warned us that monkeys would get into our room and steal from us and that he’d have to tell us when the army had swept the road and it was safe to cross to the beach.

We kept a scrapbook of our adventures, imagining we’d be back in a few years when Sri Lanka was at peace. Peace did come – at a cost – but so did terror attacks, a tsunami and financial strife. Us? We became parents, one of us got seriously ill, our own parents died and before we knew it, 30 years had passed.

For our return journey, squeezed into 12 days, we had to decide where to revisit and where to leave in the past. Arugam Bay, so potent a memory, now seems to be a tightly packed resort town (although Hideaway remains, we found out). Adam’s Peak would be too wet in June and anyway, my knees probably wouldn’t make it to the summit. And was there any family left in Kurunegala? The chances of finding Mr Gamage still alive were slim, and I don’t believe Rani’s children remember us.

But our wanderlust remains, even if rather than kickstarting a motorbike we’d be buckling into our seats in a Toyota SUV. We wanted to get the literal flavour of those curries again, and the metaphorical flavour of the people and their culture, which had been so welcoming back then.

We’d take in Kandy, Galle and some hill country, as before. But head to the area around Anuradhapura for monks, temples and wildlife, and see the sea up at Trincomalee – now a busy port city, but where my husband was chased out of town in 1992 for being reckless in the face of war.

But first, we left the airport and headed to the distinctly superior ‘stop-off’ hotel of Wallawwa in Negombo. Within a few miles we felt entirely immersed in Sri Lanka as we walked barefoot around the cool pavilions past the library and spa, washed off the aeroplane smells in a vast rainfall shower and dipped in a pool surrounded by coconut and pineapple plantations. After a fragrant coconut curry we slept in our four-poster bed like babies, as a tropical storm swirled outside.

We had a plan: John and I needed to get our driver Yate round to our way of thinking. He was the perfect guide – sensible, knowledgeable and good company. But at first our requests to stop for street food or to go off the beaten track befuddled him. I drew out my photocopied scrapbook from ’92 and showed him who we were then and what we did. We might be older, slower and heavier, I explained, but our independent spirit wasn’t completely gone. By the end he was showing us the stall where the best kiri pani (a creamy, treacly treat of buffalo curd and kithul palm syrup) could be found and indulging our appetite for taking pictures, pictures and more pictures; at one point slamming on the brakes so I could capture two wild elephants emerging from the trees on to the main road. My one regret from our previous trip was the short supply and dire quality of my photographs.

Yate dropped us off at each hotel – we covered six in 12 days – with a solicitous appeal to call him if we needed anything. We never did; Sri Lanka today has a tourism industry keen to get back to its busiest and we left each place blissed out by crisp linen and burnished wooden floors, fabulous pools and elegant gardens. And if at one or two hotels the menu veered towards western, the kitchen was always happy to make me kottu (a Sri Lankan street snack of fried-up strips of flatbread, veggies, meat and spices, with an added fried egg).

At Ulagalla, near Anuradhapura - one of the most discreetly luxurious, expansive hotels I’ve ever encountered - we shared the terrace of our stunning villa overlooking the paddy fields with a peacock, so we left him to preen while we went for a dusk drive with the hotel’s resident naturalist and wildlife expert to have tea and cake by Nachchaduwa Lake – in fact a vast reservoir, one of dozens across the centre of Sri Lanka built by ancient kings to protect farmers from summer droughts.

This was something we hadn’t seen during our youthful adventures and the pleasure of sipping tea by the water while looking out for elephants and listening to the ranger identify myriad birdsongs was – if a middle-aged pleasure – definitely a pleasure. As was eating the soft fruit that is attached to growing cashew nuts – who knew?

Ulagalla’s charming staff arranged for us to have a kamatha dinner one night, a luxe version of a traditional farmers’ feast in the centre of the paddy fields, using the hotel’s own organic produce, cooked in clay pots over an open fire. Flaming torches led us to the mud-floored space. It was spectacular, memorable and almost overwhelming – 26 dishes were placed in front of us, each containing a different savoury sensation. We were a long way from budget egg hoppers at a truck stop…

In 1992 we rushed through Kandy, barely stopping for a glance at the giant Buddha above the city. This time we settled into the elegant Kings Pavilion hotel in the hills where an infinity pool hangs over the houses below and the bustling city centre is out of earshot. Our room, with its white linen and heritage wooden furniture allowed for plenty of quiet reading and plotting, while the kitchen supplied succulent curries adapted for our heat levels. While in Kandy we witnessed traditional dancing (intoxicating) and traditional metalwork (terrifying). We had lunch at his home with Dr Jacques Soulié, who’d come over from France in 1995 to lecture at the university and just never left. Do you miss anything, I asked, as he showed me round room after room crammed with fascinating ephemera of the island. ‘Just cheese,’ he answered with a smile.

We’d been taken by our city guide Donald Skyfeather to Helga’s Folly, an extraordinary hotel – of sorts – that looked like a tropical Chelsea Hotel and had the atmosphere of a film about the Mitfords directed by Stanley Kubrick. Each hand-painted room held framed spreads from old copies of Tatler and local newspapers about the fabled Blow family – owner Helga de Silva Blow Perera, too weary to come and say hello, spoke to me at length about her astonishing life in British society and Sri Lankan hospitality by phone from her room to the lobby. Every now and then a bat swooped past my face. Now this was somewhere we wished we’d been in 1992, when glamorous expats propped up the bar.

We caught a train – leaving Yate to follow by car – armed with a boxed breakfast from the Kings Pavilion, and quickly traded crustless cheese sandwiches for the fiery rotis of our carriage companions, who were hitting the karaoke (and the whisky) hard at 9am, ready for a day at the beach. This felt more like the old us, we decided, as we swung from the open carriage doorways to gaze at the landscape speeding past. We left the train at Hatton in the hill country and the gang zoomed onwards; Yate took us up, up through tea plantations to Camellia Hills – a hotel so beautiful, isolated and serene it would have been wasted on kids.

With just five rooms, this was a place to leave your door unlocked and to walk around barefoot. A well-stocked bar and library meant fixing a GnT and leafing through a volume on the country’s history while lounging on the extensive terrace was actively encouraged. Below lay neatly tended tea plants and further still the huge Castlereagh lake/reservoir. A faint but persistent beat of traditional music drifted across the water to us. That evening, dining outdoors on a beautifully presented thali of different vegetables, we asked the staff what the music was – a festival at a remote Hindu temple.

The next morning, up early to catch the sunrise, the music still played. Eventually, after coconut rotis and a dip in the pool, we decided to investigate. Oh for our Hondas to get round the long, long road around the reservoir. Then the hotel’s naturalist volunteered to accompany us across by canoe – a local fisherman ferrying folk back and forth to the temple accepted a few rupees and John’s baseball cap as payment, and threw in the removal of two leeches that had rapidly attached themselves between my toes. That’ll teach me for wearing the same Birkenstocks as back in the ’90s.

Even then, a supposedly unshockable couple might have gasped at the festival – a man with hooks embedded in his bare back hoisted up above a crowd; fathers walking across burning coals holding their infant sons; teenage boys whirling around to the music, lungis hitched up to avoid the mud.

But if we were open-mouthed, so were they. ‘Why are you here?’ they might have been saying if we could hear them above the music. Nevertheless, we all danced and took selfies and smiled a lot.

The frenzied celebrations at the temple were in stark contrast to the quiet reflection on offer at both the ancient city of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, where the ruins of vast monasteries and stupas (burial domes) stretch for miles. Yate’s carefully packed parasols and water-bottle holders were essential as we explored the footprints of the spaces where student monks would eat, sleep, study and pray.

Knowing us well by now, he stopped on the last stretch of our journey at an unassuming patch of road inland and took us through the trees to a perilous-looking metal footbridge over a broad expanse of fast-flowing water. ‘This is where they filmed The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ he explained. The things you miss when you’re bombing around on a bike, with just a crappy guidebook and no internet…

And on to Galle, for a restful last couple of days in a town whose lighthouse and old fort area epitomise the charm of Sri Lanka for many. We gorged ourselves on vegetable rotis, joining a queue for a stall near the ramparts, and watched the couples shyly eating ice cream together as the sun set.

Galle has become a little bit tropical Hampstead, with a flurry of curated antique vendors, galleries selling framed vintage railway posters and a posh perfume shop, but with its 17th- and 18th-century Dutch architecture and crashing seas, has lost none of its appeal. Yate had the night off and was slightly perturbed, if not surprised, to hear on our last morning that we had caught the local bus, lurching under the weight of too many passengers, into town from our serene seaside hotel, KK Beach. We were lucky enough to have one last day of serenity strolling between the hotel’s garden, with its long pool and waiters always ready with a cocktail or fruit plate, and the white sand beach stretching for miles. I’ll admit I bought one of the KK Collection bath robes (SO touristy!) because its crisp striped cotton would be both a reminder of the holiday and far more stylish than the one I possessed at home.

In 1992 we came back to Britain with a box of dry goods from the Kurunegala Bullawella family for the London Bullawellas. This time, we brought back ingredients for ourselves, to make cashew-nut curries and curd dressed with coconut treacle; lotus-plant seeds as a rice alternative and enough spices to last a while. If we’re going back again – and I hope we do – it’ll have to be with a much shorter gap, maybe even before the white thread around my wrist wears out.

Unforgettable Travel Company offers private tours of Sri Lanka from £2,900 per person, including breakfasts, half- or full-board meals in remote lodge or national park accommodation, transport and guides (flights not included); unforgettabletravel.com