Your guide is a Sri Lankan who knows the island well and is fluent in Chinese. The guide travels with you from place to place, explaining the culture, history and landmarks in front of you, answering questions as they come up, and translating for you so that exchanges with the people you meet along the way are easy and unhurried.
A connection that goes back centuries
Chinese travellers have been writing about this island for a very long time. The monk Faxian lived in Anuradhapura in the early fifth century and left one of the earliest foreign accounts of Sri Lanka. A thousand years later the fleets of Admiral Zheng He called at Ceylon, and the trilingual stone inscription set up at Galle in 1409 records his offerings; one of its three texts is in Chinese, and the slab is now held in the Colombo National Museum. Standing in front of it, or among the stupas Faxian once walked between, is a different experience when the person explaining it is speaking Chinese with you rather than through a second language.
What your guide does
- Explains what you are looking at in Chinese, at your own pace — the brick stupas of Anuradhapura, the water gardens and frescoes at Sigiriya, the carved moonstones of Polonnaruwa.
- Translates for you in markets, shops and small towns, where the people around you are speaking Sinhala, Tamil and some English.
- Goes through temple etiquette before you enter: shoes and hats removed, shoulders and knees covered, where photographs are welcome and where they are not, and how offerings are made at the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.
- Turns a roadside conversation with a tea plucker, a fisherman or a stall holder into a real exchange rather than a wave and a smile.
- Helps with the practical questions that come up in the course of a day — what is in a dish, how hot a curry is likely to be, what a sign says, how to ask for something politely.
Book the guide for as many days as your trip needs, from a single day up to four weeks, choosing the number of days when you book. Tell us your itinerary — the route, the sites, whether you are following the coast or heading into the hills — so that the guide who joins you can be matched to it.
