921/A Peradeniya Road, Kandy 20000, Sri Lanka
Tel 0094 71 6097795
lankaexcursionsholidays@gmail.com

About me,
Nuwan from Mihintale

Dear readers, I am Nuwan Chinthaka Gajanayaka and since 2003 I have been working as a tourist guide lecturer, approved by the Sri Lanka Tourist Boad (now renamed SLTDA).

Immediately after school, I started to work as a local guide in Mihintale in 1999. From then on I was fascinated by my job more and more, day by day, because I could meet guests from different parts of the world and learn more about different cultures with different mentalities and much different ideas. This motivated me to countinue this work and to be involved in the tourism sector.

When working as a guide in Mihintale, I also met travellers who decided to visit other destinations with me and asked me to arrange whole tour itineraries and accomodations. Apart from normal classic tours and beach relaxation, I always like to show unknown parts of the country and daily life in Sri Lanka, what most tourists are missing when travelling in our country. So this is how I started my work as a guide and tour operator step by step.

Still I was eager to expand my activities. Those days I started my dream project, which was to open my own guest house. So I worked hard years and years to reach that target. Now I achieved this goal and, beginning with the 2015 tourism season, I am running my first guest house in Mihintale with the help of my family and some professionals, renting very clean rooms to travellers. An educated Ayurvedic doctor will provide traditional treatments for guests who wish to stay for a longer period enjoying these facilities in my guest house. I can also arrange Buddhist meditation classes in cooperation with the renowned local monastery. Furthermore, I am now able to arrange round tours with my own new van.

But still this is not the final step. I hope to open a second guesthouse in Negombo in 2016, close to Colombo International Airport, where almost all guests arrive and depart. And I will attend management courses in Colombo to be able to run an expanding Private Limited company, too, making it a one-stop shop for all travel-related services in Sri Lanka.. But my ambition will always remain to be the original one  to allow my guests to come into contact with the country and its people and their genuine living culture, instead of seeing only the tourism industry's shows.

On this website I will keep you informed about progresses and further facilities and offers. Your own suggestiones are welcome.

In order to find additional travellers interested in the authentic culture of Sri Lanka, some former clients are helping me to develop this website. For example, they contribute images and translations. My close friend Ando Sundermann from Germany, whom I met in Minhintale in 2000, will provide regular updates of fresh content. I am thankful to all of them and to interested travellers who read the contents in order to prepare their holidays in Sri Lanka or to learn more about its amazing culture.

Yours sincerely,

Nuwan Gajanayaka

Private Sri Lanka Tour photos:

My friend Leo Moelker from the Netherlands kindly permitted to use photos of his online-fotoalbum. One of the many places we visited is the Jaffna peninsula, an interesting new destination after the end of the civil war in 2009. Have a look here...
location of Mihintale in Sri Lanka
location of the office in Kandy

    Quick Inquiry

Our ambition:

Our expertise is to allow our guests to come into contact with Sri Lankans and to experience their genuine culture, which is much more than tourist folklore.

Our personal travel advice is always fervently independent on what are attractive destinations and rewarding activities in Sri Lanka. We will not push you to travel always the same routes with always the same hotels, paying at always the same places, nor do we expect you to visit shops or shows offering us advantages for bringing them guests. We are dependent on experienced travellers satisfied with our client-oriented manners and then recommending our services or supporting us with their own ideas. We are not dependent on pushing guests to certain shops. Guests alone decide, what kind of exhibitions they like to see, for information about local products.  

We try to satisfy all tastes and budgets, usually our guests prefer simple clean guesthouse rooms, but we are perfectly well able to reserve any hotel category for you and also luxury tours can allow you to meet locals who are not engaged in the tourism industry in the first place, for examples well-educated Buddhist monks.

Our Sri Lanka Round Tours:

Our core busisness are tailor-made tours. It’s your choice: You can work out the whole itinerary with us in advance and include or exclude entrance fees or bookings of specific accommodations. Or you travel more spontaneously, deciding at each and every place how long to stay there and what’s your next destination. We can give you advice before and during the tour, we will recommend what’s worth visiting or doing though it’s perhaps not mentioned in pocket guides. But you will always have a choice and decide and shall never feel pushed.

Apart from contacts with locals and seeing or joining their activities, our special expertise are the unknown places of interest deserving the label “off-the beaten track”, those charming little destinations remaining undisturbed by tourist hurly-burly, making a Sri Lanka experience much more pleasant amd unforgettable. 

Besides chauffeured car rental, we offer motorbike tours and reserve train travels, we can even book helicopter charters.

Our Mihintale Guest House:

Our guest house in Mihintale is family-run and offering a private atmosphere. You can enjoy professional Ayurvedic treatments in a tranquil surrounding. Staying some more days or weeks in our guest house will allow you to join the life of the village community, too.

Mihintale is situated right in the middle of the northern half of the island, a perfect starting  point for excursions to heritage and wildlife sites, northern parts of the hillcountry or even beaches. A longer stay in Mihintale, the heart of the Cultural Triangle, will also allow you to choose from a variety of local activities such as meeting monks, joining ceremonies, meditation courses, visiting families, farmers' work, cooking classes, botanical studies, boat trips, hiking, birdwatching, off-road biking or simply relaxing in our garden. Most World Heritage Sites and Wilpattu, Minneriya and Kaudulla national parks are within day-trip distance. 2- or 3-day tours starting and ending in Mihintale can include highland trekking in the Knuckles Range or beach relaxation near Puttalam (Kalpitiya), Mannar, Jaffna, Trincomalee (Nilaveli) or Passikudah.