『Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka』のカバーアート

Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

著者： The Ceylon Press
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 A small island encircled by oceans, Sri Lanka is a well-kept secret. The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books aim to make its complicated story more accessible.Copyright 2025 The Ceylon Press
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  • The Jungle Hotel

    The Jungle Hotel
    2025/06/30
    Encounters at the Jungle Hotel explores The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and is dedicated to Otto, our first senior director whose gorgeous, joyful life was all too short in length but never short, even now, in inspiration. Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind the scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course with a welcome. And a thanks, for coming our way, for most of the readers of this booklet will no doubt be our guests. Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon. To have made it this far, your car will have managed our driveway of buffalo high grasses and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords. We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random – is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, still less a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope. Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth we got here in the first place. Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country; nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet. The hotel sits, belly button like, in the middle of 25-acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves; and rarer trees. Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired members of the Household Calvary. But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera Pass, which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers - fortified by the Kandyan king’s army - rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment to much later, little happened. In the jungle that is. Elsewhere America declared itself independent, the Holy Roman Empire got itself dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection crippled the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes. Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate; and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors. Later, we arrived on a holiday; and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion – which was, of course, to buy it. The estate, the buildings were lovely; and only needed some love back. The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar ...
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    35 分
  • Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors

    Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors
    2025/06/30
    Welcome to Inside Kandy, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book. This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press. Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating Kandy and its hinterland, it is also dedicated to Harindra and Deepthi Dunuwille, two people who exemplify the best, most subtle and kindest side of the city within which they live.Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why. Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s true and real soul. Its heart. This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record in having withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning. But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea. No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods shipped by the colonists from the island – but given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was big. Very big. And, and the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.” As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out, a Sinhalese citadel, offering its shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important. It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that could be bettered by donkeys. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians. Nor is it mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few - though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous, discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed full of ancient flags and wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. And then there is the very Sir Lanka approach to specialised products. Every so often as you travel the island you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an ...
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    1 時間 9 分
  • A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

    A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera
    2025/06/30
    Welcome to The Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book. This Audo Book is written by David Swarbrick and is published in 2025 and is copyrighted 2025 The Ceylon Press. Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating Galagedera and its hinterland, it is also dedicated to Chinta, marvellous, calm and caring, who worked for many years at the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel; whose smile could transform the bleakest of days and whose death came far before its proper time. And we start with a little bit of retail theory – which will take you down the one of the world’s busiest high streets. And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands. Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out , where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace and returned to Colombo and defeat. Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalization and changing consumer habits have made only the most modest of footprints. Within the next 30 years this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk tuk is like time traveling in Tardis. Once upon as time, your village looked a little like this. The tour may may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no change of breaking for martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter. Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail park. Galagedera high street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and business on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road. At almost any time of the day it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks. Pause and watch. People talk. They pause and gossip, trade news, they know one another. In amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fish mongers, and butchers, wood carvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, are a wide range of businesses and services. LEFT OUT OF THE GATES and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country. Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant death. It runs parallel with paid-for private health care with its faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system that is supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching collages and a bespoke government ministry., Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and around 20 who are admitted to its wards, cared for by around 5 doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care and maternity care are all provided for, but the more complicated cases and conditions are referred to the main state hospital in Kandy. This includes – on average – 10 snake bites it encounters annually but not the scorpion bites which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts. Next up is the village’s central bus station which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala all through the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide and a short walk away from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide. Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: real looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric. Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School. Founded in 1906 this is the only girls school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on. The village’s main school, ...
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    51 分

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