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“Hedge fund guys were already touring by helicopter, offering $10 million for 100
acres. . . . I must have gotten a call a week, or email, from a big tourist industry, wanting
land for investment. Prices are going up by the day,” she said. “I'm so nervous about what
this will mean for the east and north of Sri Lanka. There is so little infrastructure, and if
we aren't careful, we'll reinvent ourselves in the worst way.”
The government had already issued “offering[s] of land for tourism development” for
projects in Kuchchaveli, territory that had been held by the rebels in the northeast for
more than two decades. The government was selling property along the coast in a new
“tourism zone” that included some of the island's most beautiful unspoiled beaches,
which had been off-limits throughout the war.
That is the new lightning-fast cycle: war, revolution, peace, tourism, often overlapping.
The phenomenon of tourists caught in crossfire is no longer rare. From Egypt to the Phil-
ippines, tourists have been shot at and killed in uprisings. Sometimes they are the targets.
In Bali, terrorists specifically bombed a tourist hangout in 2005 and killed 202 people. In
Thailand, rebels seized the Bangkok airport in 2008 and shut down tourism at the height
of the season to force a change in government.
Now, governments understand tourism is part of the equation during and after an up-
heaval. In Sri Lanka the government is encouraging deals to bring back tourists and create
new wealth.
Cooray, the chairman of Jetwing, invited me to his home in the exclusive Lake Gardens
district of Colombo. Built near the sea, the home is filled with Sri Lankan art and handi-
crafts and surrounded with a garden of native plants. Over dinner of exquisite home-style
Sri Lankan cooking with his wife Dharshi and his young sons, Cooray told me: “You can't
understand the relief in May when the war ended. Without victory, we would have been
finished.”
No one knew when the war would end, he said, whether their country could survive,
whether their businesses would collapse, whether their families could get by. Where tour-
ism had once been the top moneymaker, employing the most people in the country, it had
slipped to third place, behind the garment industry and remittances sent back home by
Sri Lankans working abroad as common laborers. “The hunger for money . . . just to stay
alive. Tourism had suffered for thirty years. Some people were begging.”
Cooray was the rare optimist. “Tourism should be the major industry for our postcon-
flict recovery. It's in our blood. It helps everyone on the island.”
To his mind, Sri Lanka now had a rare opportunity to redesign tourism. Because of
the war, Sri Lanka had been spared the worst aspects of the global tourism boom of the
previous decades. The coasts were not marred by high-rise cement hotels, the mangrove
coasts and rainforests were largely intact, and the souvenir shops were filled with local han-
dicrafts, not imitations made in China. By skipping that era Sri Lanka might be able to
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