Sri Lanka Tour Analysis

Sri Lanka is an island located in the Indian Ocean with a population of 22 million inhabitants. Unlike some other industrialized countries, Sri Lanka is without the tradition of tourism (Spencer, 2014). Early travel was principally a religious undertaking to the historical shrines and travel was strictly domestic and very limited. It was only during the British Colonial era that tourism found its first expression in Sri Lanka (SLAAED, 1994). Luxurious rest houses and hotels were constructed during this period to cater mainly to the English visitors. Soon after, there was recognition of the rich heritage and indigenous culture that Sri Lanka contained and by the mid-1980’s Sri Lanka had embarked on a course of having its sacred and historic

There are many similarities between the tourism described by Walsh in Ankarana and the tourism in Sri Lanka. For example, in his discussion on tourism, he describes how various perspectives are interested in Madagascar’s tourist industry, including the government which promotes its (Walsh, 2012). He further adds that for the tour operators and workers in tourism, it is a business and they are not concerned with any negative effects on the local people or environment (Walsh, 2012). This is very similar to the situation in Sri Lanka where the government supports elephant riding while those who suffer (the elephants) and the voices of protesters are ignored. Another similarity between Ankarana and Sri Lanka is that tourists tour largely because they can, which reminds us of the fundamental economic differences between (rich) tourists and (poor) locals (Walsh, 2012). Furthermore, Walsh describes the paradox of how tourists place great value both in ‘real’ sapphires and ‘exotic’ wildlife that share the quality of being “commodities that embody ‘naturalness’” while at the same time they are fairly common (Walsh, 2012, p.84). This resonates with the notion of elephants in Sri Lanka being both “unique and irreproducible” while being “fairly generic and interchangeable” (Walsh, 2012, p.92). In other words, one elephant or one sapphire is as good as another, so it is the cultural sensibility of experiencing a ‘natural wonder’ that makes the experience worth having for