I’ll get straight to the point, I had an excellent time in Sri Lanka when sightseeing (which I’ve covered here) but this post is going to be mostly negative. My experiences working remotely around Sri Lanka were by far the most frustrating to date on my travels. While I’ve had the occasional problem elsewhere, Sri Lanka has been the only country where I consistently ran into difficulties everywhere I went. Trying to find places to work from that offered the three main things I look for – decent Wi-Fi, available power sockets and a comfortable table to work from was a constant headache and I usually had to settle for one or two of these… sometimes none!
It was possible for me to get work done around Sri Lanka but there were quite a few fails along the way. In this post, I’m going to detail the cafes/coworking spaces etc. that I tried working from in each location that I visited in the country. Hopefully this comes in handy for other digital nomads that are planning to visit. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide to working remotely in Sri Lanka, this is just an account of my experience, plus details of the good* and bad places I worked from.
*By good, in this case what I really mean is acceptable – none of them were very good!
Before starting, I should say that I didn’t get a local SIM card when in Sri Lanka. This was definitely a mistake and buying one would no doubt have reduced the problems I had working here. At the time, my view was that decent Wi-Fi was so easily accessible around Asia (providing the location was popular with tourists) that I didn’t need to spend money on a SIM card every time I changed country. This was not the case in Sri Lanka so, for anyone planning to work online while visiting, I strongly recommend getting a SIM card on arrival at the airport. I can’t personally vouch for them, but the SIM cards from Mobitel and Dialog both have positive reviews online. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering why I didn’t just buy a SIM card in one of the towns or cities I stayed in. Considering the issues I was discovering around Sri Lanka, it was pretty stupid of me not to. Anyway, moving on…
Colombo
Starting in the capital, I expected this to be the easiest place to work remotely from as there are a number of coworking spaces available. While it did indeed turn out to be the easiest place to work from, I still had very mixed experiences here. I tried working from the following places:
WeHive
Wi-Fi speed test results: 3.36 Mbps download, 3.70Mbps upload, ping 5ms, jitter 23ms, loss 0%
Website: https://www.wehive.lk/
Located about six kilometres from Colombo Fort Station, this coworking space isn’t the most conveniently located, but it was near the hostel I stayed in for a couple of nights after landing in Sri Lanka – Groove House Hostels. When I arrived, there were a few friendly locals working from the hot desks and one of them set me up on a hot desk as the manager was out at the time. When the manager arrived, he gave me a tour of the place and charged me 900 LKR for a day pass (£3.70 GBP, $4.88 USD, €4.15 EUR at the time of writing).
Despite the slow Wi-Fi speed (see above) per my test of their network, I had no issues with it for the day I was here. The work I do online is done inside a Citrix network and, if the Wi-Fi I’m using has slow speeds like WeHive’s, Citrix will usually struggle and constantly freeze (general internet browsing outside of Citrix should mostly be fine though).
There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy about WeHive but it was comfortable to work from and the environment was welcoming. This was on day 1 of my Sri Lanka trip and it turned out to be the best experience I had working remotely in the country.
London House of Coffee
Needing to do a small bit of work on my second day in Sri Lanka, I did some Googling and London House of Coffee, near my accommodation, was recommended on an article I read about cafes in Colombo that were allegedly good for working from with a laptop. Unfortunately, this was a poor recommendation and the Wi-Fi here was only fast enough for general internet browsing – once I logged into the Citrix network I work from it was practically unusable. Later that day, I was leaving Colombo for Anuradhapura so decided I would get the work done upon arrival there (more on that later).
Hatch
Wi-Fi speed test results: 3.84 Mbps download, 3.35Mbps upload, ping 33ms, jitter 15ms, loss 0%
Website: https://hatch.lk/
Fast forwarding to the end of my trip to Sri Lanka for a moment, I came back to Colombo a couple of days earlier than planned as 1) it was raining at the beaches and 2) it was a better option for me to try and get on top of some non-urgent work that I had intended to deal with while travelling around the country. Staying more centrally this time near Colombo Fort Station, I tried Hatch coworking space. Initial impressions here were positive, I was given a tour and, in addition to the standard facilities, they had a large auditorium for events, some games rooms and a café on the ground floor of the building. There was a mixture of start-ups and individual freelancers renting offices/desks in the building. A one day pass for a hot desk cost 1,200 LKR so it was more expensive than WeHive, but that was understandable given the superior location and facilities.
As with WeHive, the Wi-Fi speeds per my test of the network were poor but my first day here was mostly fine – there were some moments where the Wi-Fi froze but they never lasted long. I came back to Hatch the following day (my last full day in Sri Lanka) and the Wi-Fi was far less reliable this time – for large chunks of the day I couldn’t do anything as the Citrix network that I work inside was freezing for long periods of time. So much for getting that work done.
Accommodation – Groove House Hostels and Star Anise Boutique Capsules
In most countries I visit, I usually do some work from my accommodation and rarely have problems doing this. I couldn’t work in either of these hostels as their Wi-Fi networks were simply too slow and struggled even with general internet browsing.
Overall, my experience of working remotely from Colombo wasn’t great, but there are several other coworking spaces in the city which I didn’t try – I may well have had a better time in some of these.
Anuradhapura
Moving on from Colombo and onto the sacred city of Anuradhapura, I got to my accommodation, Kingfisher Family Guest & Hostel, and soon learned from the owner that he had cancelled their internet contract. Brilliant, just what I wanted to hear after being unable to get some work done earlier that day in Colombo! The owner told me that following the terrorist attacks in April 2019, he had barely received any guests so he stopped the contract to save money. My problems suddenly seemed very trivial.
Anyway, I explained to the owner that I needed to do some work online, asked if he knew anywhere suitable in town and he suggested I try a nearby restaurant called Casserole. Armed with my laptop, I headed off to Casserole for dinner. One of the waiters looked at me a bit funny (I think he was just surprised) when I got the laptop out after ordering but there was a short piece of work that I needed to get done. The restaurant wasn’t really suitable to work from – Wi-Fi was slow and I don’t think there were pocket sockets near any of the tables, but it allowed me get what I needed done while eating and having a couple of beers.
The next day, after I had finished exploring the sites in and around Anuradhapura, I had some spare time so tried to find somewhere else to get internet access. This wasn’t successful – Anuradhapura is a small city and doesn’t have much in the way of cafes etc. I didn’t have to work, but I did at least need to check emails and book accommodation for the next town. I stopped in a coffee shop called Banana Café, but they didn’t have any Wi-Fi to go with my coffee. By the time I left Banana Café, it was the evening and I decided to return to Casserole for dinner on my second (and final) night here. As an alternative, the Pizza Hut in Anuradhapura apparently has reasonable Wi-Fi, but I didn’t go there.
Sigiriya
After Anuradhapura, I took a bus to Dambulla, then another bus to Sigiriya, a small town that attracts visitors mainly due to the enormous Sigiriya Rock (tip: hiking up the smaller Pidurangula Rock nearby is more fun and offers a great view of its big brother). After arriving, I had planned to spend the afternoon working. I had been sitting on some work for a few days due to difficulties in Colombo and Anuradhapura. The work in question wasn’t urgent, but I’d have preferred to keep on top of it as, if I didn’t, it would eventually become urgent. Imagine my delight, when I got to Sigiriya and found out there had been a power cut affecting the whole town. Better still, the maintenance company wouldn’t arrive to fix it until 5pm – so much for getting anything done!
Once power was restored I did some work from my accommodation, Yoho Walawwa Home Stay, but it really wasn’t ideal. Wi-Fi was slow and I was constantly bothered by mosquitoes (the only comfortable spots to work from were a couple of tables outside). I didn’t have anything urgent to do so I soon gave up with work and enjoyed the evening with some of the other guests and the owner.
Cute Café
Wi-Fi speed test results: 49.5 Mbps download, 2.48Mbps upload, ping 35ms, jitter 14ms, loss 0%
The next day, after an awesome sunrise hike up Pidurangala Rock followed by the main Sigiriya Rock hike, I was pleasantly surprised to find a place called Cute Café in Sigiriya. It had what I had been craving for days – good coffee and decent Wi-Fi! I wouldn’t want to work in this café all day, as the tables were uncomfortably low for laptop use, but it was fine for a couple of hours and there was a power socket so I could keep the laptop fully charged (its battery lasts close to ten hours anyway, but I’d rather not drain it all the time). I visited here again the following day after a trip to the Polonnaruwa Ruins.
Before leaving Sigiriya, I was going to do a little work early in the morning at my accommodation but the internet was down – it turned out that the owner had forgotten to pay the bill and wouldn’t be able to rectify this for a few hours. As you can probably tell by now, I was having one problem after another in Sri Lanka!
Kandy
Moving on to Kandy, I found the city to be quite disappointing but I have fond memories of the café I found to work from.
Café Secret Alley
Can you see why I enjoyed it here? In addition to the extremely satisfying brownie shake, they had some tasty brunch/lunch options, comfortable tables by power sockets and Wi-Fi which was fine most of the time. I need to caveat this by saying that the Wi-Fi was almost unworkable for me for a period. This was around lunchtime when the café got busy – see the results of my second speed test below (my understanding of these is limited, but high ping and high jitter numbers = very bad).
Wi-Fi speed test results:
Test 1 – 35.3 Mbps download, 4.44 Mbps upload, ping 30ms, jitter 14ms, loss 0.5%
Test 2 – 6.01 Mbps download, 1.95 Mbps upload, ping 239ms, jitter 470ms, loss 1%
Around the centre of Kandy there are a number of other cafes but, after looking at them online, I wasn’t confident any of the alternatives would be a decent option for work so I stuck with Café Secret Alley for a second afternoon in Kandy. This was following a morning visit to a unusual looking temple called Ambuluwawa, which is located in a small town called Gampola.
Nuwara Eliya
Next, I enjoyed an amazing train ride along the Kandy to Ella line, disembarked at Nanu Oya then took the short bus from here to Nuawara Eliya, gateway to the next attraction I wanted to see in Sri Lanka – Horton Plains National Park.
I did very little work while here but the hostel I stayed in, Promax Villa, had better Wi-Fi than I expected (download 32.4 Mbps, upload 3.58 Mbps). Of the places I had stayed in up to this point in Sri Lanka, this had by far the best Wi-Fi. Having said that, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend staying here. The caretaker who runs the hostel managed to upset a number of guests (from 4-5 separate bookings, not the same group) at different times and for different reasons. The non-English speaking family that owned the hostel seemed genuinely warm, but this guy was an arsehole.
I didn’t need or try to work anywhere else in Nuwara Eliya and I think options are limited, but there is a place called Coffee Bar at The Grand Hotel which has favourable reviews online, describing it as having fast Wi-Fi and being suitable to sit in with a laptop.
Ella
After Nuwara Eliya, it was time to enjoy the rest of the train ride along the Kandy to Ella route. Arriving in Ella, it soon became obvious that the town was very popular with visitors to Sri Lanka. The many cafes and restaurants along the main road, which were clearly aimed at foreigners, indicated to me that I would have more options to work from than I’d had since leaving Colombo. Again, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive guide but these are the places I tried:
Bunk Station Hostel
Wi-Fi speed test results: 69.2 Mbps download, 47.7Mbps upload, ping 8ms, jitter 1ms, loss 0%
My accommodation in Ella – the overall standard of hostels I stayed in around Sri Lanka was low but this was quite good. The Wi-Fi was fast although the only comfortable spots to sit with a laptop (some tables upstairs on the balcony) were not close to any power sockets.
While I was working from the hostel balcony, these guys came dancing past the path outside. No idea what was going on, but it livened things up!
Art Café Umbrella (closed)
I got some work done here one afternoon but, according to Google, it’s permanently closed now so there’s no point in me covering this.
Coffee Break Time
When I was in Ella, this was called Starbest and sported a green logo. It has since been renamed to Coffee Break Time but the friendly owner remains the same. Situated just off the main road, I worked from here twice. Some of the tables were near power sockets and the internet connection, which was actually a hotspot from the owners mobile, worked fine for the most part although it crashed a few times and he needed to restart it each time. The coffee in here was good and, while the café was very basic, it felt more personal than some of the touristy places nearby.
Café Chill
Overpriced and overrated, this is the most well-known place to eat/drink in Ella and it fills up with visitors every day (at least it did before coronavirus happened). To be fair, it is nice to sit down and chill in with friends over some drinks. However, the food is disappointing and the Wi-Fi network struggles to cope with the volume of customers. In quiet periods, it might be fine to work from here but my one attempt was unsuccessful.
Overall, I found Ella to be okay to work from. It wasn’t great, but I didn’t have much trouble here and there were some other options on the main road that may also have been good enough.
Udawalawe & Tangalle
I’m covering these next two locations on my trip very briefly, since these were both one night stays and I attempted no work in either of them.
Udawalawe is a small town by Udawalawe National Park, with the main attraction being the elephant safaris. I didn’t try to work in Udawalawe but, based on Google and a brief wander around the small town, I don’t think I’d have had many (or any) options aside from the guesthouse I stayed in.
Tangalle is a small beach town and I also didn’t try to work here. However, the internet in my guesthouse, Viraj’s Garden, managed surprisingly well when I watched some live TV online there. I suspect I’d have managed to get work done in the guesthouse if I had anything urgent to do, although there wasn’t anywhere comfortable to sit with a laptop.
Mirissa
Another beach town, Mirissa was at the start of two days of heavy flooding, which begun during my bus journey there from Tangalle. I was originally hoping to stay longer here but cut this to one night due to the weather, which I knew in advance might be bad due to the time of year. The heavy rain damaged the telephone line at my accommodation so the Wi-Fi was broken when I arrived. This was the fourth separate reason I had come across for the internet being unavailable in a place I stayed at in Sri Lanka, not to mention that it was usually crap in the accommodation it did work in. Arghhhhhh!
That evening, I went for dinner with a Dutch couple who I’d met earlier in this trip and had also arrived that day in Mirissa to pouring rain. The restaurant had working Wi-Fi so I quickly checked emails on my phone while we ate. There wasn’t anything I needed to deal with that night, but there was one small bit of work that I needed to do the next day. The following morning I went into town, when there was a break in the rain, to do said piece of work. I was going to a place called Aloha Coffee Gallery, which looked online like a good cafe to work from, but the road was so heavily flooded that I stopped at a place I saw on the way called Buds & Beans. Wi-Fi was poor here to the point that I couldn’t do anything and the heavy rain had started up again so I gave up, got a tuk-tuk back to the guesthouse and decided to deal with it when I arrived in Galle, my next destination.
Galle
A familiar feeling by now, I got to my accommodation in Galle and the Wi-Fi was too poor for me to do any work. Still, it was only raining lightly in Galle and, after Googling for somewhere with fast internet, I came across a recommendation for a restaurant called Pedlar’s Inn within Galle Old Town, the city’s main attraction. As expected, this was an overpriced restaurant in a prime tourist spot but I didn’t care – its Wi-Fi was fine and I really needed to get that one little bit of work done! The Wi-Fi in here was accessed with vouchers so, after ordering lunch, they gave me a code for 300MB of data. I was worried they wouldn’t give me another voucher when this ran out, but the staff did without asking me to order anything else and I was able to get the work done, then relax and enjoy the Old Town. I wouldn’t really recommend Pedlar’s Inn as a suitable place to work, but it came in very handy for me that afternoon when faced with a severe lack of options. For reference, the Wi-Fi speed test I ran reported 33.9 Mbps download, 4.75 Mbps upload, 19ms ping, 27ms jitter and 0% loss.
Looking online, there didn’t appear to be any suitable places to work from in Galle but, in any case, I had done what I needed to and was only spending one night there before heading back to Colombo.
End of the trip
After Sri Lanka I was off to Singapore and, while the former is a far more exciting destination, it was a relief to get that super-fast Singaporean Wi-Fi. There was a fairly large piece of non-urgent work that I intended to do as and when I had time around my month in Sri Lanka but, despite a few attempts at making progress, the various problems I encountered resulted in me barely getting anywhere with it. Fortunately, the person this job was for was on holiday until a few days after I left Sri Lanka, so I knew there was no pressure for me to deal with it until I got to Singapore. Had the work been more pressing, I would have been left with no choice but to scrap some of my sightseeing plans around the country.
As I said at the start of the post, I strongly recommend getting a SIM card if you need to work while travelling around Sri Lanka. I found a few suitable places to work from but they were average at best. Luckily, I didn’t have that much work to get done while in the country so these headaches didn’t overshadow what was otherwise a great trip around Sri Lanka!
[…] If you plan to work remotely while in Sri Lanka, add extra time as needed to this itinerary and check out my post on the ‘joys’ I had working online […]