More than 15 years ago we travelled to Sri Lanka for a holiday without any preparation. We even did not bring a lonely planet, at that time our travel bible, because it was a very last minute decision.
Without any expectations we started our trip and found out that it became one of our best holidays ever. People were very, very friendly, the food was very tasty, the variety of the country really appealed to us (cultural triangle, tea plantations, beautiful beaches, etc.) and we loved the Dutch heritage buildings we saw during our trip. Years later we decided to bring our children to Sri Lanka and we again enjoyed it so much that we decided to contact some real estate agents during our trip. We spend a few days looking at heritage buildings in the province of Galle, because that was originally the idea, to renovate a heritage building. All the houses that we saw unfortunately were not well plotted on their piece of land or were very dark, difficult to enlarge, etc. So we decided to look for plots of land to build our own 'heritage building'. We immediately fell in love with a plot of land, overlooking paddy fields. That was 3 years ago and in the mean time we have built our house, integrating old building materials.
We can see ourselves as retirees seated on the veranda and spending our time watching the many beautiful birds passing by. Until that time we would like the house to be used by people all over the world.