Galle

On the south western coast of Sri Lanka, at pretty much the place where the great tsunami hit hardest, lies the former Dutch canton of Galle. It's a gruelling, bumpy, dirty drive in jostling traffic all the way down the coast from Colombo, but it's worth the trip to see the well-preserved and restored Dutch Fort and spend a couple of days wandering along the beautiful southern coast. As a million backpackers will testify, Galle and the villages on the coast around it can offer perfectly acceptable accommodation at between $25 and $50 a night. But we had to be different, didn't we? We had to stay in a 'boutique hotel'. Even today, the words make me do a suspicious double take.

Galle itself is an interesting place. The enclosed area of the Fort proper today contains a couple of truly boutique hotels: the excellent Galle Fort Hotel and the daft Amangalla. The latter will set you back around $800 a night and simply isn't value. It also sits oddly in a country where people are still living in shacks and community schools are open air affairs. It also contains a sizeable Muslim community and a number of nicely redone houses, many of which have been retailed by the owners of the Galle Fort Hotel, who are buying up, rebuilding and selling houses as fast as they can.

As far as doing a bit of tourism goes, Galle is actually pretty limited. Once you get past the Fort, the buddhist Dhavadha on the hill built by the Japanese and the black Catholic church, you're starting to struggle. There's the former home of Martin Wickramasinghe, which is really only of interest to Sri Lankans, and then there's a tea plantation that doesn't make tea (a deeply suspicious experience altogether), a spice garden that doesn't grow spices (another odd one) and we found an old, dirty Buddhist monk (a driver-led scam) as well as an old, beautiful Buddhist temple (by ourselves - we'd ditched the driver by then). And that's pretty much it.

So be warned. Book a three or four day stay, max, at Galle and then move on, unless you're happy to sit on a beach and drink beer for your week or two.