Eleven mud huts, a working village and yoga in an open-sided shala. Why Ulpotha, Sri Lanka's original yoga retreat, has kept its guests for thirty years.
Past Kurunegala, the tarmac gives way, and the road turns to red earth. By the time the car stops, the light is going, a villager has taken your bag from the boot, and someone is offering you a glass of juice. Your shoes come off at this point and, for most of the next fortnight, stay off (except for flip-flops for bathroom trips in the night)
If you have spent any time looking for a yoga retreat in Sri Lanka, Ulpotha may not be what you pictured. You swim in a lake rather than a pool, and the closest thing to a reception desk is the ambalama, where everyone eats. It is a village in the jungle at the foot of the Galgiriyawa mountains, about three hours north of Colombo, and it has been taking in guests since 1997.
A village that happened to take guests
Gilly
A group of friends found Ulpotha as an abandoned coconut estate, gone wild after decades of neglect. Tennekoon, a farmer with a philosopher's turn of mind, showed them how the land had once been worked; over the following years, they replanted the paddy fields, repaired the old irrigation tanks, and brought the village back to life. Guests came because friends told friends. The yoga teachers came after that. Nearly thirty years on, the order of things hasn't changed. The village comes first, and you share it with the people who live and work there for a week or two at a time. What your days look like
You sleep in one of eleven mud huts, built by hand from wattle and daub and open to the jungle on every side. Each evening, someone lowers the mosquito net over your bed. The huts have no electricity, so lanterns light the paths after dark, and you walk back from dinner by torch, with the frogs in full voice.
Mornings start with the birds. Yoga is held most days, usually twice, in an open-sided shala with a teak floor, and you go when you feel like it. Meals are vegetarian, much of it grown a few minutes' walk away, cooked in clay pots over wood fires and eaten with your fingers on the floor of the ambalama, the pavilion at the centre of the village. In the afternoons, people swim in the lake, cycle to the next village, get an Ayurvedic treatment, or sleep.
Villagers picking Ayurvedic plants from the garden
Why people keep coming back
Ulpotha has never spent much on marketing, and yet The Observer called it "the best yoga retreat in the world" and a writer for Condé Nast Traveller described it as "one of my favourite places on earth". Most guests arrive on a friend's recommendation, and many return year after year.
When they talk about it afterwards, they rarely mention a particular class. They talk about the buffalo in the paddy fields at dawn, the villagers sweeping the red-earth paths before the heat comes up, and long evenings in the ambalama by lamplight with people who were strangers a week before.
Small, and staying that way
With room for around twenty guests, Ulpotha is kept small on purpose. It opens for two seasons a year, from mid-November to the end of March and from June to mid-August, and closes in between so the land and the village can get on with their own lives. Retreats run Sunday to Sunday in two-week blocks, each led by a visiting teacher, with a minimum stay of a week.
It suits people who are happy barefoot, curious about how a village lived before electricity, and in no particular hurry. It suits solo travellers, many of them women coming alone for the first time, and people who have practised yoga for decades alongside others who have never been to a class. It is harder going if you need air conditioning, a strong signal or a smooth path underfoot, and Ulpotha has never pretended otherwise.
The retreats calendar shows which teacher is leading each fortnight, and the huts and Ayurveda pages fill in the rest. The team answers questions on WhatsApp and at bookings@ulpotha.com.
