In the bar of the Hotel Suisse, perched above the lake in Kandy (pictured), high up in Sri Lanka’s Hill Country, a driver touting for business smiles to reassure me that the British ‘left us many good things’. Trains, roads, the English language. And cricket, I remind him, ‘Oh yes, sir, cricket.’ I wonder what he says to French or Australian tourists.
The Hotel Suisse was used as Louis Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command headquarters in the second world war; these days it has something of the feel of an old-fashioned and slightly eccentric English prep school.
If the Hill Country is not quite the last redoubt of Sri Lanka’s British past, it remains the district in which it is most palpable. For instance at Nuwara Eliya, at nearly 6,000ft, Sri Lanka’s highest settlement, the hotels are named Windsor, Glendower, the Hill Club and so on.
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