In Conversation with Katharina Raaben from Uga Ulagalla

She appears on my Zoom screen in her office, surrounded by posters and prints of the natural world. Through the window on her left, the Sri Lankan countryside is clearly visible as it sprawls away as far as the eye can see. Katharina grew up in Germany, was head buyer for a retailer there before she was bitten by the travel bug and shelled out for ‘the most expensive holiday of my life’ to the Galapagos. It was there that she realised that she wanted to travel differently, to be part of the places she experienced, rather than just an observer. Her annual leave trips began to be centred around volunteering – anti-poaching in Zululand, wild dog research throughout Africa to name just a couple – and, eventually, she handed in her notice and set about planning a year of travel and guiding.

That was 10 years ago. During that period, Katharina met a Sri Lankan, married him, moved to the island, lived in the Cloud Forest – ‘my Jurassic Park’ – and immersed herself utterly in the local culture. When the pandemic hit, she decided she wanted full time employment and, luckily, Ulagalla cropped up. Which brings us to the present day. If it sounds like a bit of whirlwind, that’s because it is. As I’m speaking with her, it seems as though Katharina has seen more in a decade than most people do in a lifetime, and her enthusiasm for her home and for her place of work is infectious.

Ulagalla is a small, 25-villa hotel tucked away in the Sri Lankan countryside. It’s remarkably spacious and open, given how few villas there are, and landscaped areas give way to an abundance of natural vegetation, endemic species galore and the rolling paddy fields that have been worked for thousands of years in this part of the world. As Head Naturalist, Katharina overlooks all of the activities at the hotel, from nature walks, kayaking, horse riding, national park and cultural visits. The thing is, though, she’s keen to stress that these aren’t just activities, they’re experiences. One of her first projects on joining Ulagalla was to set about a wholesale change in how their activities were run. Guests who stay at the hotel now can expect an experience deeply embedded in the local culture and tradition, something that isn’t really possible in the bigger hotels.

The scenic drive, she tells me, is a perfect example of her vision of travel. Guests are driven out of the hotel and plunge straight into the heart of real Sri Lanka. They see the sowers and the harvesters in the paddy fields, the 2000-year-old irrigation tanks that supply them – and have done since the kings reigned over these parts – the ecosystems that have developed around the tanks, before finishing with a sundowner that only Ulagalla guests can experience.

The other thing they might see, if they’re lucky, is an elephant. In fact, they might see a few. It was when Katharina and her team were searching for the best spots to which to take guests that they stumbled across – yes, stumbled across – a previously unknown elephant population, starting literally outside the hotel’s gates. No one knew this herd existed because they live outside of a national park area but there is work and research to be done around them.

That’s where the Elephant Research Centre comes in, now in its third year and beginning to establish real patterns of behaviour in the data. This isn’t just a nice to have for Katharina, though; this work really matters. Wild Sri Lankan elephants are often a cause of conflict with village communities, damaging crops, trampling people and, in return, being killed themselves – 176 people were killed last year across the island, as well as 476 elephants. In fact, the first elephant Katharina and her team ever tracked was shot last year. It took 5 months and an enormous number of tears before he was back in the wild but, thankfully, he’s up and running again now.