This travel and pilgrimage guidebook is meant primarily for Buddhists or those interested in Buddhism who wish to explore Sri Lanka’s rich cultural and spiritual heritage. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the island, the author weaves together archaeological findings, art history and the stories and legends of the Buddhist tradition to bring to life thirty-three places of religious significance.

No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As The New York Times once noted, “he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd.” Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation’s story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today. His travels reveal the country as never before. Beginning in the exuberant capital, Colombo (“a hint of anarchy everywhere”), he ventures out in all directions: to the dry zones where the island’s 5,800 wild elephants congregate around ancient reservoirs; through cinnamon country with its Portuguese forts; to the “Bible Belt” of Buddhism—the tsunami-ravaged southeast coast; then up into the great green highlands (“the garden in the sky”) and Kandy, the country’s eccentric, aristocratic Shangri-la. Along the way, a wild and often desperate history takes shape, a tale of great colonies (Arab, Portuguese, British, and Dutch) and of the cultural divisions that still divide this society. Before long, we’re in Jaffna and the Vanni, crucibles of the recent conflict. These areas—the hottest, driest, and least hospitable—have been utterly devastated by war and are only now struggling to their feet. But this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres—and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That’s to say nothing of the island’s beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth. Here is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future—a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish—all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page.

This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

In the fifth century Kasyapa I acquires his throne by murdering his father, who he plasters up alive into a wall. Unable to redeem himself with his people for this crime he abandons his capital and flees deep into the inhospitable forests of central Sri Lanka. There, in an area dominated by a massive black column of rock, he builds himself a new capital. At the center of his new city is the royal citadel, a terrestrial paradise of colorful gardens, pavilions and ponds. The once dark and foreboding rock he transforms to appear like a huge dazzling white cloud. Around its girth, like a giant colorful cummerbund, he paints an exquisite tapestry depicting celestial nymphs. Then on an escarpment half way up this sheer rock he then builds a colossal gatehouse in the form of a fearsome sphinx-like lion giving his lair it name, Sigiriya-Lion Mountain. There on its summit, hidden from view, he lives in splendid isolation tormented by fear and guilt. His city thrives for less than fourteen year. Then as quickly as it appears it disappears, abandoned, and quickly forgotten; relegated to an obscure footnote in history. This is the story of Kashyapa and his masterpiece-Sigiriya as it has never been told before.

Complemented by easy-to use, reliable maps, helpful recommendations, authoritative background information, and up-to-date coverage of things to see and do, these popular travel guides cover in detail countries, regions, and cities around the world for travelers of every budget, along with extensive itineraries, maps with cross-referencing to the text, "Top 10" and "Top 5" lists, and other practical features.