Ideas for 2021 — Sri Lanka’s beautiful south

Combining a stay at a luxury new jungle hotel with a vintage-car tour of Galle and seeing the sights of Colombo

The air was full of chatter. “Ey-ow, ey-ow, ey-ow,” the peacocks called all day, sounding like insistent cats. Dragonflies buzzed about. White-brown fantails chirruped and flicked their perfectly pleated tails in the trees. A brilliant turquoise kingfisher dipped in and out of a pond. Crickets and the cuckoo bird took up the performance when the sun went down.

The week before last I was in Sri Lanka and the trip already feels like something from a different age, although the memory of the warmth, the light, the beauty and, yes, the sounds of the island will sustain me through the coming weeks and months of enforced non-travel.