Category: Travel Diary

The many faces of Niruth Ashendra

I have spent this trip watching Sri Lanka from many angles, through hotel foyers and dining rooms, market stalls and crowded roads, temples, gardens and long coach rides. Visitors see the beauty quickly. The deeper story takes longer. It often arrives through conversation, trust and the people who carry a country in their daily lives.

That is what happened when I sat down with our Bunnik guide, Niruth Ashendra, known as Ash.

His story carries family sacrifice, migration, education, work, religion, politics, love and ambition. It also carries the pressure of trying to build a secure life in a country where many people work hard and still find that security sits further away than it should.

Ash comes from a modest family with two sisters, one older and one much younger. There is a 15 year age gap between him and his youngest sister. He laughs about how awkward that felt when he was a teenager, then talks with obvious affection about the joy she brought to the family.

At the centre of his story is his father. As a young man, his father went to America, worked there for several years, overstayed, saved money, returned to Sri Lanka and opened a shop. That business became the family’s engine. It paid school fees, created options and kept the household moving forward. Later, when the business was sold, Ash’s father became a tour guide himself. It gave Ash an example close to home of tourism as honest work, people work, work that could be built through effort and personality rather than privilege.

Ash speaks of his father with respect. This was a man who did what he had to do for his family. Money was limited and choices had to be made. His older sister was the academic one, so the family backed her education. His father sold what he had and sent her to Canada. She built a life there, became a citizen, studied at university and now works at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver as an international student coordinator, helping students from other countries settle in and find their feet.

Ash’s road was different.

He finished secondary school and did vocational training, qualifying as a hair stylist because his father still hoped he too might find a path overseas. Instead, he went straight into work. He landed in event management with a company handling business to business exhibitions. On paper it sounds promising. In practice, he was doing everything, marketing, administration, banking, office management and whatever else needed doing. The company had an international flavour, Indian managed, Pakistani owned, American branded, which gave him exposure to foreign visitors and a wider world. The salary, though, was pitiful. He says that in today’s terms it worked out to less than US$50 a month.

He stayed for four years, young enough to believe experience might lead somewhere better. By 2014, at around 23 or 24, he had had enough and walked away.

That was one of the hinge points in his life. He was home for months, with little money and no clear plan. He had barely travelled. He wanted movement, possibility and a future that felt larger than the one in front of him. What had appealed to him in exhibition work was the contact with foreign visitors. He liked helping people. He liked the exchange. He liked the feeling of making strangers comfortable in unfamiliar surroundings.

So he borrowed his father’s car and started driving tourists around Sri Lanka.

That was the beginning of his life in tourism.

There was no polished ladder into the profession. He says he learned on the job and that the tourists themselves were his examiners. He watched, listened, adjusted and improved. In the process, he came to know his own country more deeply. Tourism gave him a livelihood, contact with the wider world and a stronger feel for the country he was showing to others. It also offered something else that sits high on Ash’s list, the chance to earn a fair living for genuine effort.

Over time he added qualifications. He worked his way towards the highest recognised level in his field, National Tourist Guide Lecturer. He completed that in late 2024 and by early 2025 he was fully qualified. You can hear the satisfaction in that. For someone whose education was shaped by financial limits, this was a moment where experience, determination and delayed study finally came together.

His connection with Bunnik developed slowly. He had known the company since 2017 through the local Sri Lankan operator handling Bunnik tours. He had worked with Sasha Bunnik and remembered being offered a job on the spot. He did not take it then. His more formal involvement came later, partly from 2023 and fully in 2025. He also shared the story of how Bunnik became connected to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, when members of the Bunnik family came to help communities in the aftermath. That history still shapes how he speaks about them.

Then his personal story intersects with one of the hardest periods in recent Sri Lankan history.

He met his wife through Butterfly, the local destination management company that handles travel logistics and ground operations, including bookings, office coordination and tour support for visiting travellers and partner companies. They met during the post COVID economic collapse, when Sri Lanka was short of foreign reserves, fuel, medicines and certainty. Ash recalls a moment when the office generator had no fuel and work could not continue unless someone solved the problem. His future wife, who worked in accounts, knew someone with access to petrol some distance away. They got into a car, set off to collect fuel and that became the beginning of their relationship.

He speaks of her with deep admiration. She is an accountant, though from his description her work stretches well beyond that title. She handles numbers, logistics, office matters, practical problems and whatever else needs doing. She also cared for her parents through illness and loss. Her father died after complications linked to diabetes and stroke. Her mother, a teacher, had an ulcer on her tongue operated on and then suffered complications that left her partly paralysed and increasingly frail. Ash says his wife sold property, rebuilt her life around caring for her mother and carried that responsibility with determination.

This part of the interview says a great deal about women’s labour in Sri Lanka. Paid work. Family care. Domestic responsibility. Emotional management. Ash sees it clearly in his wife’s life and tries, in his own household, to carry more than many men might. He has taken on sweeping, balconies, bathrooms and part of the cleaning because he can see how much she already does. Even so, she still feels culturally compelled to cook for him and do more. The respect given to women inside the family is genuine. The expectation placed on them is genuine too.

Ash’s wife also gave his life shape and direction. During the financial crisis and its aftermath, he still felt professionally unfinished. He wanted to complete his qualifications properly. In 2023 he stepped back and returned to study, finishing the National Tourist Guide Lecturer course in 2024. She backed him through that period. Her salary was modest. Her responsibilities were huge. Even so, she supported him emotionally and financially. He describes her as the pillar in his life. That support changed the way he saw his future. He decided he wanted to marry her.

The wedding tells its own story. They had little money. He had no appetite for a grand display. She wanted a beautiful day. So they built one the way many families do, through effort, goodwill and help from the people around them. The wedding took place at her home. Friends, relatives and office staff helped create it. There was a dress, a gown and the people they loved. They married in May 2025.

Ash’s family background also opens a window into Sri Lanka’s religious life. His mother is Buddhist. His father is Anglican. They eloped. Ash followed his mother’s faith, partly because she was the one managing the day to day labour of raising the children, cooking, organising school and taking them to temple. At the same time he attended an Anglican school. He grew up moving between traditions, which seems to have left him comfortable with complexity. His wife is Catholic, so that pattern continues in a new form.

The material reality of life in Sri Lanka runs underneath all of this. Ash and his wife rent a small apartment south of Colombo in an area that is affordable rather than desirable. It sits inside a three storey house, landlord downstairs, landlord’s son upstairs, the couple in the middle. Housing, he says, is one of the country’s biggest pressures. His parents moved 18 times because they were always renting. He grew up in 14 of those houses and now counts this as the 15th home of his own life.

That detail says more than any broad statement about housing stress. Constant movement shapes a person. It shapes what security means. It shapes aspiration. Ash is 35. He says he only paid off his first vehicle, a scooter, last year. In Sri Lanka, a house and a vehicle are practical assets, status markers and signs of adulthood all at once. He feels the gap between the life he wants and the life he can currently afford.

That is one reason Australia appeals to him. He likes Australians. He finds them easygoing and friendly. He says Australians tend to ask about animals, culture, food and local spirits. He also sees Australia as a place where ordinary people can get ahead more easily. He imagines used vehicles being more affordable. He imagines the supermarkets. He laughs about wanting to walk through a giant Australian supermarket, though what sits underneath that is clear enough. He wants to see what life looks like when basic services are dependable, goods are plentiful and everyday planning carries less strain.

At the same time, he is clear eyed about Sri Lanka’s challenges. When I asked what changes he would most like to see, he went straight to education and housing. Sri Lanka may have high literacy, and that is one of its great strengths, yet higher education still sits out of reach for many. Ash still wants a bachelor’s degree, in tourism or perhaps archaeology, which has become a growing interest. Even the more affordable course he has in mind would cost about 400,000 rupees over three years. That is a significant burden.

He also points to the wider economy. One of Sri Lanka’s major sources of income comes from citizens working overseas, particularly in the Middle East, and sending money home. Garments are another major employer. In his account, lives inside that industry vary sharply. Designers and pattern makers can do well. Factory workers face a much harder road. For men, the dream jobs often sit in sales, marketing, banking and insurance, sectors associated with status, better income, access to loans and the visible signs of success.

He also speaks with affection about Sri Lanka and with clarity about what is wrong. He loves its beauty, wildlife, culture and people. He also sees what holds the country back, corruption, housing pressure, the cost of education, the weight carried by women, the strain on young couples.

He and his wife have chosen to hold off on children because the sums do not work. He mentioned a relative’s private hospital bill for childbirth, 1.2 million rupees. That figure says a great deal about why younger people pause. He links this to Sri Lanka’s falling birth rate. He and his wife live around work rosters, long absences and brief windows at home. When he is away guiding for 15 days, he gets about four days at home before heading off again. They speak every morning and every night. The marriage runs on commitment, care and phone calls across distance.

His long term hope is to build something more secure. He would like to run his own travel agency one day, shape his own schedule and spend more time at home. There is ambition in that, along with a very ordinary human desire for a life that feels settled.

Travel writing can easily become a collection of impressions, a temple here, a buffet there, a few adjectives about beauty and colour. Ash reminded me that the deeper story sits inside the people who carry a country every day. Through him I saw Sri Lanka through family choices, work, migration, class pressure, gender expectations, political anger and hope.

One guide cannot stand in for a whole nation.

One guide can reveal a great deal.

Ash gave me Sri Lanka in human form.