On the 20th anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean (2004), we speak to those on the ground in Sri Lanka at the time – about the devastation caused, the country’s efforts to rebuild, and their views on tourism in Sri Lanka today, as its popularity soars.
Twenty years ago today, at around 9am on Boxing Day morning in Sri Lanka, Kumari Kulatunga was on the phone to her children’s nanny, discussing plans to go to the beach. It was a holiday, so her children were free from school and other obligations. As Kumari and her nanny were making arrangements to meet, the phone line cut. Annoyed at the lapse in communication, Kumari continued with her day, hoping that the line would reconnect soon.
“If the telephone call didn’t get cut, I think my children would be gone,” she says. Millions weren’t so lucky.
Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. Photo Credit: MediaJet
30,000 people died, 150,000 lost their main source of income, and more than a million were displaced in Sri Lanka alone, while combined deaths across 14 countries – Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand and Yemen – reached at least 225,000 and the effects travelled as far as Australia too, with no injuries or deaths reported.
In their book, Tsunami, The World’s Greatest Wave, James Goff and Walter Dudley call this ‘the world’s worst disaster of the 21st century,’ writing that ‘it had been well over 100 years since a major tsunami had struck the Indian Ocean, an event lost from living memory.’
“People hadn’t heard about tsunamis at that time – nobody knew what was happening,” Kumari recalls. In fact, she tells us, “a lot of people had stopped by the beach to have a picnic breakfast that morning,” and that “when the sea first receded about half a kilometre, there were fish jumping up and down and people were running towards the sea, to see what was happening.”
Kumari, and all of Sri Lanka would later learn that a 9.1-magnitude earthquake had struck some 750 miles away, off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra, causing the now-infamous tsunami that devastated parts of Sri Lanka, alongside 13 other Indian Ocean adjacent countries.
Six months prior, in June 2004, Sam Clark and Tom Armstrong, co-founders of Experience Travel Group had just set up their business – aiming to show tourists to Sri Lanka a different side to the country by highlighting “off the beaten track and interesting, adventurous places.” Having spent six months (June 2004 – November 2004) driving around the south coast on a motorbike, with a small office nearby, Experience Travel Group set up headquarters near Colombo in early December 2004 and were beginning to invite test clients to try their trips in the country.
Experience Travel Group’s original office on the south coast of Sri Lanka, post-tsunami
Their first two guests were on Sri Lanka’s south coast the morning the tsunami hit. Springing into action, Tom sped towards the devastation, he “drove down there on his motorbike, and he ferried the two people and our chauffeur guide out that same evening,” Sam tells us.
At around 10am on the same Boxing Day morning, Pippa Farrugia was making her descent into Colombo, coming to the end of a 10-hour flight from London. Landing an hour after the tsunami had hit, to “general confusion in the airport,” she and her partner decided to fly straight out again, to Laos. But for Pippa, a doctor by profession, this didn’t feel right and she returned to Sri Lanka a day later to assist in any way she could.
Teaming up with Sam, Tom and other members of Experience Travel Group, who were friends of friends, Pippa joined a team that leapt into action. Experience Travel Group put out an appeal to family and friends to donate towards supplies, and drove backwards and forwards from Colombo to the disaster-struck Sri Lankan coast distributing supplies, while Pippa administered treatments where she could. “We could be very nimble and quick,” Sam tells us, “we had an ability to get things done on the ground with the team that we’d built – us and Sri Lankans.”
Montessori nursery school rebuilt post-tsunami, funded by the UK travel industry via PATA.
They supported a woman teaching people to swim, as well as a UK travel industry initiative rebuilding Montessori nursery school, which had been damaged. The team also “assisted on a huge project” with an “incredibly dynamic” Sri Lankan woman who was working “to replace local women’s livelihoods,” Sam remembers. Many women, whose husbands were the main breadwinner – fishermen, for example – had lost not only their husbands and homes that day, but also their family’s livelihood.
The ‘incredibly dynamic’ woman was Kumari Kulatunga, who recalls that “people came from all over the world. They just showed up at the door, asking, ‘What can I do to help?’” and, on the opposite side of those interactions, Sam tells us he recalls that on meeting Kumari, he and his team asked “What do you need?” And so, a sequence of events fell into place on the ground: clearing debris, assisting with wounds, providing first aid.
Along with accounts of the horrific state of devastation she found bodies in, Kumari also tells us that while working through the debris – houses, schools, churches, people – she took twenty nuns, who had nowhere to go, to her house, and that “within a week, I had 200 children who needed help; they’d either lost one or both parents; I had to eventually start an NGO.”
Kumari and her NGO, Healing Hands, sponsored over 200 children until the time they left school – and the legacy of Kumari’s work back in 2004 endures today; just recently she attended an event where a young woman approached her asking, “Auntie, do you remember me?” The girl was one of the 200 children Kumari had sponsored, and today is a librarian at the Law Library in Colombo, the biggest courthouse in the country.
After many years of extraordinary circumstances – an almost 30-year civil war which came to an end in 2006, the 2004 tsunami, two local insurrections, the pandemic, the 2019 Easter Sunday hotel bombings, plus economic problems – Sri Lanka has had an altogether better 2024. Reuters reports that the country ‘hopes to earn $3 billion from two million tourist arrivals’ in 2024, which is ‘on par with 2019’. There’s a new president, too; Anura Kumara Dissanayake was elected after mass – but peaceful – protests across the country (protests that Kumari took her children to, further highlighting her ‘incredibly dynamic’ woman status in 2024, at the age of 65).
Jetwing Vil Uyana hotel. Photo Credit: Jetwing Travels
“We’ve had lots of challenges,” Shiromal Cooray, Chairman & Managing Director of Jetwing Travels agrees. “It’s been one thing after the other,” she says, “you know, we kind of resurface, and then we are pushed down again.” But Shiromal has a positive outlook for tourism in 2024 and beyond, “in 2024, we will have the same numbers that we had in 2018, before the Easter Bombing. 2018 was our best year, and I think we are going to get [to the same numbers] this year, so we are back to where we were.”
2024 was also the year that the country’s first long-distance hiking route, The Pekoe Trail, fully opened to visitors, offering those keen to see the country from a different perspective an incredible 300 kilometres of trail to hike.
The trail is opening up new sources of revenue to local men and women, as Thushni De Silva, consultant to The Pekoe Trail Organisation, formerly with Experience Travel Group, reveals, “the trail goes through areas that were, by design, during colonial periods, meant to cut communities off; they didn’t want [the people living there] to see the general standard of living and the disparity between their worlds and the outside world.” But now, she says, thanks to The Pekoe Trail, “there are new opportunities that are opening up.”
Sam Clark and Thushni de Silva on Sri Lanka’s Pekoe Trail
“People are seeing that they can have homestays, they can have little eateries.” On top of this, Thushni has seen global tour operators training women – whose furthest aspirations previously could have been “to work in the office of a tea factory, or as domestic help overseas” – to become trail guides. It makes sense that they do, Thushni explains, “considering these trails are going through their backyards; these people have a lifetime of experience, and knowledge better than any other guide who comes from outside.”
The Pekoe Trail is also improving the standard of living for local women, “they’ve got new opportunities that are paying them a suitable amount of money, while maintaining their respect, and keeping them close to their families,” Thushni states, adding that as a result, these women are becoming “a beacon of aspiration for other girls growing up.”
In Sri Lanka this is important. Shiromal reveals that “only about eight per cent of our workforce in tourism are females.” She attributes this to “cultural norms,” but adds that “it’s changing now, and hopefully in the next decade, we should have more women coming in,” adding that she believes “women are more empathetic; they have a lot of skills that are good for tourism.”
Thushni agrees, “I love the fact that there’s so many female naturalists now, because that’s not something I first saw in this industry. And I don’t know why it has to be a male-centred thing; appreciation of nature should be okay for everyone, correct?”
In fact, female representation within the Sri Lankan travel industry is so important to Thushni that she, along with a team of other women, has recently set up a company, Women In Travel (WIT) Collective, to support and highlight women working within Sri Lanka’s tourism sector. Describing WIT Collective as a “coming together to help women in the industry,” Thushni says it’s needed because “we’re trying to change the narrative,” and “we want to support women with skills to go as far up the ladder as they want.” The WIT Collective launched on 27 September 2024 – International Tourism Day.
And things are changing in Sri Lanka; just this month the country’s first ever female-only run hotel, Amba Yaalu by Thema Collection, has opened at Kandalama Reservoir. It’s fully managed and staffed by women, from the general manager to the chef – a truly pioneering approach to hospitality in a country whose travel industry is, traditionally, so heavily influenced by men.
Likewise, Experience Travel Group has just launched a two-week itinerary designed to showcase women-led initiatives and hotels (Amba Yaalu is one of the hotels that guests will stay in, alongside Why House owned by Henrietta Cottam). Along the way you’ll also explore the Pilikuttuwa Cave Temple with a local female archaeologist, and hike The Pekoe Trail – with Thushni.
“Right now we are still rebuilding after the bankruptcy situation we were in,” concludes Shiromal. “We need to rebuild, and I think tourism has a huge role to play because most of the foreign currency that is generated [through tourism] stays in the country – there’s a lot of opportunity for the dollar or the rupee to permeate to every level in society. As a result, I think it’s an exciting time.”
Speaking to female representation in the Sri Lankan tourism industry, Thushni shares that she “would like for women to realise that there’s space for so many people doing so many different things,” concluding that she’d “like to see more participation in the field, as well as more representation at the top.”
This is something that she, Shiromal, and the teams at both Experience Travel Group and Amba Yaalu are spearheading – by working towards greater inclusion, but also by embodying and being the beacon of representation that the next generation of Sri Lankan women can look to for inspiration.
Lead image: Kahandamodara Beach, Sri Lanka
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