by Lars Sorensen of Ecolodge Member Tree
Tops Farm Being individual travellers, members of ECOCLUB would find that Sri Lanka has an ideal infrastructure for travelling on your own - it's relatively inexpensive to hire a van and easy to move around by train or public bus. Taking the train from 'lowland' Colombo to Kandy in the mountains you get the most spectacular views of paddy fields and village life.
Sticking to the subject of Sri Lanka's nature I'd like to tell about the
following example of the benefit of using eco tourism as an economic base
for nature conservation. A beautiful remote protected south coast beach named Rekawa attracts 5
species of marine turtles including the biggest one; the leatherback turtle.
I have personally seen up to 8 turtles lying eggs in a few hours. Sometimes
there are even more. The conservation of these highly endangered species was
initially supported by foreign project donations and very good ideas of 'in
situ' conservation, i.e., assist the turtles in doing things their natural
way - but protect the female turtles from being butchered on the beach, the
eggs from being collected and sold as cheap village food (priced like an egg
from a hen sold in local shops), or from dogs and wild animals. The project
was implemented in cooperation with the local extremely poor fishermen who
were employed by the project to watch 12 hours every night. So far so good. In Sri Lanka you can stay at ECOCLUB 's two ecolodge members: Tree Tops Farm and Ranweli Holliday Village.
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Within short distances it is possible to visit seven 'World Heritage
Sites'. Five of the sites are compressed in the so-called 'cultural triangle'
where you find Buddha statues, ancient cities, dagobas, royal palaces,
monasteries and wall paintings representing various phases of Sri Lanka's unparalleled
2,300 years of Theravada Buddhist history. The foundation of
Theravada Buddhism, The Pali Canon, was for centuries transmitted orally
between generations and first time written down 2000 years ago by monks in
the monastery of Aluvihara near Matale. The young Buddhist kingdoms of Sri
Lanka were contemporaries of - and had contacts with the civilisations of Greece and Rome.
Today's living Buddhist culture is rooted
in this long history; an example is the holy Bo Tree planted three centuries
B.C. in the ancient capital Anuradhapura. This tree (maybe the oldest in the
world?) - which according to ancient Buddhists texts is a sapling of the
tree in Bodhgaya, India, under which the Buddha attained Nirvana - is still
today a most important object of worship.
A natural 'World Heritage site' is the green and eternally humid
Sinharaja Rainforest, full of huge trees supporting several endemic bird
species of Sri Lanka. Sinharaja is a great place for trekking and a
prominent representative of Sri Lanka's amazing biodiversity, said to be the
richest in Asia (compared to the size of the island, 65,000 sq. km.). The
constantly surprising variation of Sri Lanka's flora and fauna within few
kms is related to the combination of two different monsoon periods and a
landscape consisting of lowland, mountains, dry zones, and wet zones. A
considerable part of the country, 15% - is declared as national parks while
even more areas are somehow protected or just uninhabited forests.
When I came back to Rekawa beach a windy dark night last year (as the only
visitor the whole evening), the project and funding had stopped. No way
these people could make a living from sharing the fee donated by an odd
tourist passing by. The local community still strictly followed the project
idea and wrote all turtle observations down in a book. They had no money but
didn't sell the eggs. Almost starving but fortunately the lagoon was full of
proteins - prawns, the staple food together with rice. This experience
convinced me of the advantage of eco tourism vs. unreliable project funding.
Combining nature conservation and the business of tourism can be a more
secure way of income generation and protection of endangered animals and eco
systems. The ''turtle beach' of Rekawa is really a recommended experience.
