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COLOMBO -- As water gushes down the cascading Ravana Falls in the quaint Sri Lankan town of Ella, my heart soars. Watching an epic come to life is nothing short of surreal.
Every Indian household has a copy of the Ramayana story, thought to date to the 7th-century BC, in which Sri Lanka plays a key role. Legend has it that Ravana kidnapped Princess Sita, wife of Lord Rama, a revered Indian deity, and hid her behind this very waterfall.
Nowadays, Ravana Falls forms part of the heavily promoted Ramayana trail. Up to 2019, around 250,000 Indian tourists visited Sri Lanka every year to see locations mentioned in the epic, making India the island nation's largest tourism market. But Indians and other international visitors stopped traveling to Sri Lanka in the wake of a series of terrorist bombings in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic, political instability in Colombo and the worst economic crisis since independence from the U.K. in 1948.
The decline of the tourism industry dealt a severe economic blow to Sri Lanka, which depends heavily on international visitors for foreign exchange. In 2022, just 719,913 foreigners visited the island, compared with 2,333,796 in 2018, the last full year before the collapse.
Now, many of Sri Lanka's 22 million people are heaving a collective sigh of relief this year as tourism shows strong signs of recovery, with 767,913 arrivals in the seven months to July 2023, generating revenues of $1.09 billion, according to the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau (SLTPB). A further boost to forecasts for about 1.55 million arrivals over the full year could come from a free visa scheme announced in late October for citizens of India, China, Russia, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
For many in the tourism industry the last few years have been tough. "I had to sell five out of my seven tourist vehicles," says Sarath Karunarathna, who runs a travel business based in Kalalpitya, a village in the Pasyala area. "Paying their maintenance and insurance was proving to be expensive, and without a job, me and my family had to rely on my savings to survive."
This year has been different, forcing Karunarathna to work overtime as business picks up fast. Taking a short break from coordinating a 14-day road trip across Sri Lanka for 26 tourists from Poland, he says he is thrilled by the recovery.
Nationally, the big idea dominating the island's tourism business is sustainability, building on the United Nations World Tourism Organization's award of its Sustainable Tourism Destination tag in 2015.
"The Sri Lankan government has begun encouraging tourism stakeholders to adopt more sustainable practices," says Chalana Perera, founder of Retrace Hospitality, which partners with investors, property developers and operators to rethink and revitalize the hospitality industry.
"Workshops are being conducted across the island to reach tourism businesses and entrepreneurs at the grassroots level," says Perera, adding that to reinvent itself, Sri Lanka must focus on regenerating degraded and threatened ecosystems, and supporting local communities.
The poster child for this approach is the Pekoe Trail, a 300-kilometer walking route linking scenic and historical attractions in the Central Highlands region, established by the island's Tourism Resilience Project (TRP) with funding from the European Union and the United States Agency for International Development.
"TRP is a three-year initiative that is designed to help build the future of a sustainable, innovative and resilient tourism ecosystem in Sri Lanka," says Shehan Ramanayake, project director for the TRP in Colombo.
The TRP is also trying to help communities in the island's Uva and Central provinces to realize their long-term tourism potential by encouraging micro, small and midsize enterprises and providing workforce training. Supporting sustainable private sector business investment will drive innovation and product development in tourism, making it more competitive and resilient to shocks, Ramanayake says.
Malik Fernando, chair of the Sri Lanka Tourism Alliance, set up by more than 3,000 businesses in 2019, says that a full recovery in the industry will take years, in part because of the shortcomings of government policy. "Tourism promotion is the responsibility of a government agency, rather than a professional outfit. Due to [the agency's] inefficiency the industry is still suffering, particularly with low rates [for hotel rooms]," Fernando says.
Karunarathna agrees, stressing the need for infrastructure development, including a more efficient airport where passengers do not have to wait hours for their luggage. Tourists are also surprised by the lack of nightlife in Sri Lanka, he says, calling for efforts to establish a more buoyant environment.
The sustainability approach adopted by the island also implies a focus on luxury and high-value travelers, rather than low-cost mass tourism, and effective efforts to exploit niche markets such as arts festivals and international cultural events, says Sri Lankan writer and filmmaker Nayomi Apsara.
In a major development, Galle Literary Festival, last held in 2019 in the centuries-old Galle Fort in Galle -- a UNESCO World Heritage Site -- will be relaunched in 2024 in partnership with the SLTPB. Apsara, who will be one of the speakers at the festival, says she is confident that the festival will infuse new life into Sri Lanka's literary tourism scene.
"By hosting the [Galle Literary Festival], Sri Lanka positions itself as a literary and cultural destination on the world stage. The festival can indeed be seen as a significant representation of the country's identity in global literary tourism. How wonderful it would be to capture the attention of international media for unique and captivating reasons," she adds.
Festival director Giselle Harding says the event is "fully supportive of Sri Lanka's shift towards niche tourism, which focuses not only on numbers but on targeted visitors and helps the impact of tourism to reach a grassroots level."
On the sidelines of the literary festival, Gourmet Galle will provide a 12-week program of culinary events from the beginning of January to the end of March. "We have invited 12 international chefs from all over the world to host two dinners and a master class in different boutique venues across the south coast of Sri Lanka, curating menu's using fresh, local ingredients," says Harding.
The country is also exploring marine tourism in its most unique form -- shipwreck diving. The wreck of the British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, sunk by Japanese aircraft in 1942 and listed as one of the top 100 scuba dives in the world by the National Shipwreck Database of Sri Lanka, lies in the Indian Ocean off the eastern city of Batticaloa. A further 150 wrecks lie along the island's coastline, potentially providing the basis for a wreck diving industry that could be worth up to the 400 million pounds ($495 million) a year, according to the database.
Official efforts to concentrate on sustainable tourism are intended in part to avoid over-exploitation of the island's resources of the kind that has led to controversy around resorts in Thailand and the Philippines, where a number of beaches and islands have had to be closed to allow local environments to recover.
However, damage has already occurred in key national parks, cultural sites, coastal resorts and mountain towns in Sri Lanka, according to Perera. "The government must adopt a 'less is more' mindset, in which quality is prioritized over quantity, and where regulation around construction of new hotels, coastal and national park encroachment, visitor capacity and exploitation of natural resources and wildlife [and a] minimum wage for tourism sector professionals, must be developed and consistently, strictly enforced," he says.
Tourism officials insist that protecting the island's environment need not conflict with the need to rebuild the industry. "Sri Lanka is a very special tourism destination as it offers a continent's worth of attractions in a compact island," says Fernando. "It offers an authentic, unspoiled experience which is relatively rare [in contrast] with the overdevelopment of tourism in many countries."
Source: https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Life/Sri-Lanka-aims-to-transform-tourism
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