13 | Colombo Food Trail, Pettah Market & Design Quarter
Colombo rewards a day planned around appetite and architecture. The morning starts in Pettah, where the old bazaar still sorts itself by trade and the candy-striped Red Mosque of 1909 rises above the crowds. Then a food trail across the city: string hoppers with kiri hodi for breakfast, lamprais – the Dutch Burgher parcel of rice and curries baked in a banana leaf – for lunch, and kottu chopped on a hot griddle to a rhythm you hear before you see it. The afternoon turns to Geoffrey Bawa, the father of tropical modernism: his Seema Malaka meditation pavilion floating on Beira Lake, his former office reborn as the Gallery Cafe, and, by appointment, Number 11, the house he shaped for four decades. The day ends on Galle Face Green at dusk, with isso vade fried at the carts.