Sri Lanka is a place like no other. A country from the past, where tradition is celebrated and honored, but technology has also found its way in to their culture. Bathed in warm light and covered in dust. Strangely slower than the western pace, fascinating on the variety of smells and ardent burning addictive flavors. To wander around Sri Lanka, besides being an underestimated quest with birdy songs, loud buses and the constant sound of waves as a soundtrack at the coast, is pretty mind-blowing and what the whole Indian experience should be all about. It is also a change on the preconception that a person can have on the Sri Lankan society: People that are peacefully rising from the ashes of a long war, poor but hard working.

 

South of Sri Lanka, specifically between Matara and Galle, is where tourism shines at its brightest and Sri Lankans surrender to what for them I assume feels seductive and fantastic. For the inner-peace seekers, new hippies, surfers, lonely adventurers. An edgy wild paradise like fantasy world loaded with infinite possibilities is presented. And they keep coming back. I photographed mainly this part of the Island and then travelled to the northern city Kilinochchi, where the war fought their biggest battles and also where it finished. Unnecessary to say that it has nothing to do with the south. Dry and in land, the results of the war are no longer visible on the main roads, except for the considerable amounts of orphans and ruins that remained.

 

This is a first travel and a documentary work from the perspective of an outsider that wants to understand how the consequences of what is was one of the most violent wars in our century affected this country.