Over mojitos, Dallas Martenstyn, the man who claims to have “created the Kalpitiya destination” was telling me his story. “No one came here for 30 years because of the war,” he said. “People in Colombo didn’t know where Kalpitiya was.”
Traditional colorful fishing boats in Mirissa harbour
Behind us, flickering under the flames of paraffin candles, was the place he established in 2009: Bar Reef Resort, the first of what is now a sprinkling of small hotels on this stretch of seafront. As a holidaying experience, its stucco-walled cabanas are understated but embellished with boutique touches. The infinity pool is surrounded by loungers made from age-worn railway sleepers; the beachside shower is fed through a whale’s enormous skull. Walk along the beach past the hotel and you’d hardly know it was there.
Yet the question of how much longer this marooned atmosphere might endure is subject to whims far beyond Dallas’s control. The prospect of bigger, brasher newcomers has cast a shadow over this part of Sri Lanka.
First mooted as long ago as 2003, the Integrated Tourism Resort Project outlined the government’s ambition to coax tourists to Kalpitiya’s overlooked coast. The first piece of the jigsaw – the initial chalets belonging to the five-star Dutch Bay Resort – opened in 2013, but the plan includes concessions for much more.
Concentrated around 14 islands off the peninsula’s tip, the Sri Lankan government’s blueprint includes 17 hotels with 5,000 rooms and all manner of amusements: shopping centres, entertainment complexes – the whole package-tourism circus. Collectively, it represents the biggest tourism development plan in the country’s history.
But behind government talk of jobs and progress lurk controversies. Earlier this year, human rights groups reported that tourism construction projects were leading to environmental destruction, and were restricting local access to the sea. Amid court challenges from dispossessed families, investor interest waned. Several building projects have stalled indefinitely.
A low-key brand of tourism is thriving
And while Kalpitiya waits to see if the bulldozers will begin their work in earnest, the low-key brand of tourism championed by Dallas is thriving.
As my second day on the peninsula drew to a close, its tourism potential was already clear. First, there had been those dolphins, the ocean full of the spinners that I’d seen that morning. Then there was the beach, an endless strip of sand empty but for the lines of turbaned fishermen hauling in their nets, and an incongruous row of wind turbines chopping lazily in the haze.
Before my chat with Dallas, I had taken a bike ride out on to the new road that transects the peninsula from south to north. At the 20km post, the road swung east to skirt the lagoon, a jade-coloured expanse of water, the near shore clawed by mangroves.
My plan had been to ride six miles north to the Catholic shrine of St Anne’s – but it proved impossible to get that far, so often was I waved down by locals eager to say hello. Among some palm trees, a shirtless carpenter insisted on shimmying up a trunk to fetch me a coconut. Two hundred yards further, on a chalky bank of the lagoon, fishermen beckoned me over to show off the fistfuls of prawns they’d just trawled from the shallows.
At one village, I came across 20 or so children playing cricket in a clearing. Promptly, I was handed the ball and instructed to bowl.
The batsman, a slight teenager with arms like twigs, ruthlessly blasted my first three deliveries back over my head. But the fourth took a lucky bounce off a divot and landed improbably on middle-stump, provoking jubilation from my team-mates, who ran up for high-fives. We played until dusk.
There is something uplifting about a place that is yet to lose its curiosity about outsiders, and as I rode back for my drink with Dallas I couldn’t help but wonder whether the region would still be like this 10 years from now.
As Kalpitiya’s 80,000-strong population grows, there is a pressing need for the local economy to diversify. In the lagoon, home to dugongs and rare pink dolphins, fish stocks are already being depleted. But the government’s master plan for the peninsula also seemed emblematic of that depressing global story, where the temptation to capitalise on tourism potential comes to jeopardise the very riches that make it so alluring.
“Our ambition was always to create something here that is unlike anything else that Sri Lanka has to offer,” Dallas enthused. “What we have here is something different.”
The next morning, I took Kalpitiya’s most souped-up tuk-tuk – “newly serviced”, beamed the driver – and headed north past acres of old prawn fisheries, a lattice of embankments and palm wickerwork, the smell of fish and salt thick in the air.
Down a sandy lane from the village of Kandakuliya, on the main peninsula’s northern shore, we skidded to a halt at the gate of Kitesurfing Lanka (KSL), one of several kitesurf camps on the peninsula, here to exploit the same trade-winds that turn Alankuda’s wind turbines.
Several kitesurf camps exist on the peninsula
發表於 2015-9-26 22:13
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