Sri Lanka, Slow Travel vs Fast Travel

My fiancée and I left our house in Brasil January 3rd. In the first few weeks of 2025 we've been to:

🇧🇷 Brasil

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇺🇸 USA

🇹🇷 Turkey

🇹🇭 Thailand

🇸🇬 Singapore

🇵🇭 Philippines

🇯🇵 Japan

🇰🇷 South Korea

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka

It was snowing in Japan (great country btw!), and we missed summer so we said hey let's plan 1 week in the heat at a beach somewhere on the way to Africa.

Opened Google maps and thought hey what a bout Sri Lanka?

Neither of us knew much about it but a quick search showed beaches, trees, and tropics, and we found a coworking / coliving called Outpost that looked cool, right on the beach in a town called Weligama.

We booked 1 week, to "settle down a bit and focus on work and organization".

Now it's been almost 3 weeks. 😅

About Sri Lanka

Sweet flag!

Sri Lanka is an island country off the coast of India. I read A Short History of Sri Lanka before arriving. Good read, a key takeaway is the location - historically coveted because international shipping routes.

Sinhala and Tamil are the native languages, but most people we've interacted with speak English. Buddism is the primary religion.

Colonized by Portugues in the 1500's, then Dutch, then English, then negotiated independence in the 1940's.

Bigtime tea producers. Ceylon tea is grown in the highlands, and exported worldwide. Fun fact this is the same tea used for Thai Tea, the delicious orange iced milk tea drink you get in Thailand.

It's a much bigger island than I thought it would be. Huge, doesn't feel like an island actually. We've been really digging the routine here... work + beach + chill, so actually barely traveled outside of the beach area we're staying, other than the 3 hour train ride from the city.

Good food if you like Indian food: curry, roti, and kottu are the local classics. Then lots of smoothie bowls, granola bowls, avocado toast type dishes at the cafes and western restaurants, like you see at places like Bali.

A big bummer here is the garbage, the most trash on the ground I've seen anywhere in the world. It's common to be walking then come across piles of garbage, and seeing random scattered litter is a daily occurence. Would be great to see the people take more pride in nature and their land, it really is beautiful. Maybe starts with government education and organization.

We stayed the whole time at Outpost, awesome spot! This reminded me of how much I love coworking spaces, meeting new people, and having community (yoga on the rooftop, Tuesday nomad dinners, Thursday movie night 🍿). I could easily stay here 3 months, but we have so much world to see still!

Nice people, and super trusting. I rented a guitar from a guy at a music shop for 2 weeks and he didn't even ask for a deposit or phone number. He was cool and we had some good convo. Felt like small town vibes where you just trust people. I like that.

We bought a football and brought some Brazilian culture to the beach, playing altinha, inviting people in. I always like to take a minute to recognize what country everyone is from, when hanging out in a group traveling. We had Brazil, USA, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Netherlands on our first day kicking altinha at the beach.

Fast Travel

Jumping to different countries every few days is intense, yet exciting, lots of experiences and pictures, but also exhausting.

Our trip has been mostly completely spontaneous, so we don't book anything in advance. This means that each new country visited is research for hotel, flights, visa requirements, neighborhoods to stay in, places to check out, logistics, language. Fun stuff yes! But also makes you realize how nice it is to just stay put in a place you know and chill for a bit... at least a couple weeks.

Slow Travel

Is niiiiice, this has been my preferred method, what I've mostly done the past 10 years. Pick a place and stay there for months, or years. I've had my 1-2 week getaways of course but I love picking a spot, getting to know people, talking with locals, learning the language, exploring and immersing in the culture.

It's nice to mix it up. It was cool hitting 9 countries in the first month of travel but maaaaaan was it nice to get a routine going here in Sri Lanka. Time to sleep 9 hours, wake up and have a nice capuccino, a few hours of concentrated deep work, a swim in the pool, catch some waves at the ocean, yoga on the rooftop breathing in the sea air, time to relax, have conversations with other travelers, and time to just chill on the balcony and read, occasionally glancing up at the ocean and thinking about life.

The world tour continues!

Tuesday we're flying to Dubai for 5 days then Egypt for probably a few days, then who knows. Back to intense travel and site seeing. All good though, I'm feeling refreshed and caught up on biz. Ready for some adventures.