- Sri Lanka is going through the worst economic crisis on record.
- Grocery store shelves are empty, medicines are running out, and people are waiting hours for gasoline.
- Even so, tourists keep coming — and locals have been encouraging it, too.
Maumita Sarkar flew from India to Sri Lanka in mid-April. She arrived during the Sinhala New Year, traditionally a time of renewal and celebration: homes are cleaned, ceremonies are held and firecrackers are set off. But by April, Sri Lankans were taking to the streets to protest soaring prices, food and gas shortages and a life they could no longer sustain.
Against the backdrop of growing discontent in the country, Sarkar considered her travel options. The blogger spoke to the Sri Lankan embassy, a friend who had recently returned from the country, and some local travel agencies. They both assured her that, as she put it, “everything is fine”.
She decided to continue her journey.
“As soon as I landed there, it seemed normal to have so many foreigners at the airport,” Sacca told Insider.
“While the media kept reporting all the protests, I saw nothing but a few people in Colombo,” Sarkar said of her impressions of the Sri Lankan capital. “The whole place is peaceful.”
For the next 10 days, she traveled across the country, traveling by train through Sri Lanka’s lush landscapes, enjoying sunsets in the beach town of Mirissa, and walking among mangrove wetlands and sacred temples.
Tourists continue to flock to Sri Lanka even as the country buckles under the weight of its worst-ever economic crisis. While photos from the capital showed the burnt husks of cars and buses tipping into the lake, international tourists continued to fly in, hoping to take advantage of a market for cheap tourism still in post-pandemic recovery mode.
In April, the Sri Lankan rupee hit a record low; food, medicine and gas supplies were in short supply; and the country was experiencing rolling blackouts. On May 10, the government ordered troops to shoot anyone they saw vandalizing property.
Still, tourists keep coming.
country in crisis
Sri Lanka’s relationship with tourism has been one of tumultuous symbiosis in recent years.
The island nation on the southeastern tip of India has a population of 22 million. With its white-sand beaches, temple ruins and tea plantations, it attracts travelers seeking adventure, spirituality and off the beaten path.
Tourism in the country has been on a steady upward trend for as long as a decade, with international tourist arrivals reaching 2.5 million in 2018, according to the World Bank. In 2019, before the pandemic, tourism accounted for 12% of Sri Lanka’s GDP.
But on Easter Sunday in April 2019, more than 250 people were killed in a coordinated attack by suicide bombers across the country. The number of international tourists arriving in the country fell by 70% immediately after the attack. Arrivals fell to 2 million in 2019 before plummeting to just over 500,000 in 2020 as the pandemic swept the world, according to the World Bank.
Sanjaya Sri Chandra Kumara, a native of Sri Lanka, started out as a tuk-tuk driver and is now a tour operator who dominates numerous tours in the country leading position.
“When I started working in 2017, tourism was a good job and it was my only income,” he told Insider. “There is money everywhere in Sri Lanka. We have a good life.”
“In 2019 after the terrorist attacks, the tourism industry has been destroyed again, but people all over the world want to help Sri Lanka, so people want to visit,” Kumara added.
Authorities’ interactions with tourists is a testament to the country’s dependence on tourism, which remains in the current crisis.
“Occasionally there will be police presence and barricades. We were stopped once,” Clair Louise Todd, a Briton who is currently on a month-long trip to Sri Lanka, told Insider. “The police were very friendly and even happy to take pictures.”
Now, with many countries around the world reopening their borders and reaping the economic benefits of welcoming tourists back, Sri Lanka is facing a new crisis. Foreign exchange reserves hit record lows, the country was on the verge of bankruptcy, and an economic crisis turned into a political crisis. The country’s leaders have declared a state of emergency twice since early April. Sri Lanka is also facing a food crisis, with less food being imported and domestically grown due to a fertilization ban.
Thousands of people took to the streets to protest. The death toll rose to five and 190 others were injured as the protests deepened and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned on May 9. On 14 May, newly elected prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told the BBC he would ensure families get three meals a day – but also said the crisis would change before it got better worse. Three days later, he said the country was at its last day of gasoline.
“This has been building for years,” said travel analyst Gary Bowerman, who runs a weekly podcast called “The Southeast Asia Travel Show.” “It’s the perfect storm post-COVID-19. Sri Lanka hasn’t had any foreign exchange reserves for three or four years. There was an explosion in the year before COVID, which hit the tourism industry, which is a big source of foreign exchange, very hard. exchange in Sri Lanka.”
Bowerman emphasized that government mismanagement was at the root of the problem: “It’s been debt mismanagement for decades.”
“I was there without even noticing”
But you probably wouldn’t know the seriousness of the situation by looking at the Facebook group where travelers exchange tips.
One of them is called “Sri Lanka Travel & Sightseeing” and has 47,000 followers. The page is constantly lit with comments from people trying to figure out if they should visit Sri Lanka at the moment, looking for rides outside the airport, and seeking advice on getting gas in the fuel-starved country.
“I’m thinking of buying tickets for June 20-30 this week. I read on the internet that the country has no electricity and a curfew. The prime minister resigned today,” wrote a woman from Turkey on May 10 “Can tourists currently in the country provide information in this regard?”
“Is it possible to get from one city to another (by Uber) because of the shortage of gasoline?” a French member of the group asked on May 17.
Comments on the issues are filled with travelers echoing their own advice, along with the names of gas stations and convenience stores where they’ve had success filling up. Consistently, tourists and locals alike encourage people to keep visiting.
“I was there without even noticing. I had a fantastic three weeks,” one woman wrote on May 11 in response to another user’s question about the protests and safety. “There are protests, but once you leave Colombo, you’re in a holiday bubble.”
series of disconnects
The story of travel and life in Sri Lanka now reads like a series of disconnects. Tourists describe a different reality than locals; some locals say they don’t see the version of life portrayed in the media.
The disconnect may be due in part to geography, said travel analyst Bowerman. “Sri Lanka is very small and the protests do seem to be confined to the capital, Colombo. Tourists tend to leave Colombo and don’t stay there very long.”
“If you were going to one of the resorts in the south of the country, you probably wouldn’t notice it,” he added, referring to the shortages and power outages.
Caroline Crowder, an American who lives in Singapore and works in education technology, booked a flight to Sri Lanka in January. While her visit ended before the protests began, she said she experienced fuel and food shortages even then.
“Every place I’ve eaten at has had something crossed off the menu that they can’t serve because they can’t import the food,” Crowder told Insider. “A good Japanese restaurant in the Galle Face mall, except for the chicken , they have neither wine nor meat.”
Since then, things have only gotten worse.
Blogger Sakar left the country in May. “The only change I had to make in the itinerary was to take the shortest route to optimize fuel use,” Sarkar said of her trip.
Like Sacca, the Briton who described the police presence, Clair Louise Todd, researched the trip before completing it. Todd and her partner arrived in Sri Lanka on May 10 to find protests, hotel burning and looting: “We were so shocked, we were stopped by protesters in Negombo on our way to our first hotel Four times.”
The couple hired a tuk tuk for the entire trip. While gas pipelines can stretch for kilometers, Todd said locals have been helping them. In downtown Dambulla, the owner of a closed garage used his car to fill them up; elsewhere, they bought five liters of petrol from a local with spare oil.
“Another time, there was a small amount in a closed garage, so they made us top it up,” Todd said. “Within minutes, hundreds of people started queuing as they saw us fill up. The store owner closed the doors again and told everyone, ‘There’s no fuel.'”
Authorities urge travelers to reconsider their plans
The US embassy has been posting demonstration alerts on its website since early April. It issued a level 3 “reconsider travel” warning in mid-April due to fuel and medicine shortages. Countries including the UK, Ireland and New Zealand advised against non-essential travel to Sri Lanka as of mid-May.
“If you’re a tourist and you’re thinking, ‘Well, I can help the country, I can bring my dollars,’ there’s some truth to that, but there’s also some danger,” Bowerman said.
“From a tourism perspective, you have a lot to think about and it’s definitely going to get worse,” he added.
Some travelers said they were changing their plans. A woman from Greece in a Sri Lankan Facebook group told Insider that she is leaning toward canceling her late-May flight reservations, with some Facebook commenters advising travelers to cancel or postpone their trips.
Meanwhile, multiple Sri Lankans have described the state of crisis in their lives – but that hasn’t stopped them from welcoming tourists.
For some, this is practical.
Kumara, a tuk-tuk driver, said letting tourists sit in his car was one of the only ways he could get gas or get through the roads blocked by protesters: “When I had tourists in my car, they gave me the chance, Everywhere in Sri Lanka – but only when tourists ride in my car. If I go alone, they won’t give me a chance.”
Others see tourism as a way out of the country’s economic crisis.
Sachintha Lakpriya, a Sri Lankan who describes himself as a full-time traveler, said he waited up to six hours at gas stations: “In some cases, despite long queues, sometimes I ended up at a station where there was no petrol or fuel. case go home.”
Even so, Lakpriya said he was “really happy” to see tourists in Sri Lanka now: “Currently we are facing a problem of insufficient foreign exchange reserves, and tourism will help us refinance.”
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