Last One in's a... Beach bum? Culture vulture? Intrepid adventurer? On Sri Lanka’s south coast, you can be all three. By Jeremy Lazell published on Sunday 21st September 2008 in The Sunday Times travel guide.

If you’ve read this far, chances are you love a beach holiday. Deck-chairs and daiquiris, suntans and seaweed wraps, they’re your thing. Not mine. Two or three days is heaven, but a whole week? I don’t care how Padi the dive school is or how Espa the treatment rooms are, I want more than a burnt nose and happy chakras. Beaches and pools, fine, but I also need sights, sounds, smells - and I’m not talking Piz Buin factor 30. I’ll take the tan, but give me some travel while I’m there, please.

Step forward southern Sri Lanka, and the 70-mile stretch between Galle and Tangalle. It’s not all gorgeous, with some bits - even Taprobane Island, Sri Lanka’s answer to Branson’s Necker, and darling of a thousand glossy travel magazines - too close to the road to pass my muster.

Here and there, though, in pockets of private, palm-fringed paradise, it has everything you could want from a beach escape. “Lusciously magnificent” is how Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, described it a century ago, when he was district administrator: “trembling on the verge of vulgarity”.

You can get all that in the Maldives or Mauritius, though, so why Sri Lanka’s south? Two words, travel fans, and they’re not piña colada. They’re Galle fort. Surrounded by ancient sea walls at the southern tip of Galle town, with about 500 houses, a lighthouse, a mosque, a pair of ancient churches and the ghosts of nearly 700 years of Arab traders and European invaders, it’s a dusty, heart-stopping antique, the sort of treasure you find hidden in your grandmother’s attic next to Zanzibar and Darjeeling.

Read the complete article at the Times Online