Luxury eco holidays to Sri Lanka

Roughly half the size of England yet packed with a whole continent’s worth of temples and ruins, wildlife reserves and luxury beach resorts, Sri Lanka is a beautiful, bite-sized island offering a world of diverse escapes. Young or old, family or couple, beach-bound or culture-vulture – whatever your holiday bent, Sri Lanka’s got the lot.

Better still, what Sri Lanka also has is a smattering of elegant colonial hotels, boutique lodges, and stylish eco-lodges – often at a relative snip, making it a joy for us to design fantastic itineraries in Sri Lanka that don’t cost the earth.

Hidden away in the forests near the tea plantations of Sri Lanka’s tropical south, two lodges typify this new breed of quirky, breath-taking boutique lodges. The first, Boulder Garden, has just 10 suites, two of them actually located in natural caves cleaving the rockface at the back of the lodge. The second, Rainforest Edge, lies just two or three miles south of Boulder Garden as the Blue Magpie flies, perched on a hilltop overlooking Sinharaja rainforest. Both superb bases for caving and abseiling, mountain bike tours and rainforest hikes, the lodges are also so achingly peaceful and indulgent you could just plump for the pool, happily hiding out against a backdrop of hanging forest busy with birdcall.

Speaking of immersing yourself in Sri Lanka’s fabulous forest parks and soaking up the sounds of the bush, how about an African-style, luxury, tented safari? Set up on the edge of Uda Walawe National Park one hour inland from the beach-fringed south coast, this is a brilliant base for 4x4 safaris into the park with its thriving populations of elephants and waterfowl.

Nor do you have to scrimp on luxuries to enjoy Sri Lanka’s quirky lodges. Offering four-star indulgence on the edge of Sri Lanka’s most famous national park, Chaaya Wild Yala has exquisite jungle and beach chalets, offering a superb base for exploring the national park, home to Asia’s highest concentrations of leopard, as well as elephants and crocodiles, sloth bears and over 200 species of birds. Similarly, 200 miles north of Yala Wild, its sister resort, Chaaya Village, is a 27-acre lakeside sanctuary blending into the forests below Sigiriya’s Lion Rock, providing a blissfully peaceful base for daytrips to the stunning sites of the surrounding Cultural Triangle.

But perhaps the most remarkable of Sri Lanka’s boutique eco-lodges is The Mudhouse, a beautiful, back-to-Eden collection of wattle-and-daub thatched cottages smuggled away in the coastal forests of Puttalam – no electricity, just the magic of candle and lantern light by night, plus lagoon trips and temple tours by day. Magical, utterly memorable, The Mudhouse is a stunning escape – but whichever of Sri Lanka’s boutique eco-lodges you choose, we’re confident you’ll have a holiday to remember.