Kitulgala has got its name due to the huge Caryota urens (Sri Lankans call it kitul) population which is used to produce Kitul honey (a delicious syrup made by concentrating the sap of kitul flower by heating), jaggery (crystallized sap), kitul toddy (a liqueur made by fermenting the sap) and kitul flour made by milling the pith of the log. If you come here don’t forget to sip some kitul toddy (“Raa” in Sinhalese) and enjoy some “kitul talapa” (a delicious Sinhalese food made with kitul flour).
Do you remember the academy award winning movie “The Bridge over the River Kwai” produced on 1950s? If it’s so you might commemorate these sceneries. Concrete bases of the bridge which was built for the film set on Kelani River at Kitulgala still remain with the attraction of thousands of fans. Rafting is not the only thing you can experience in here because the Keleni Forest Reserve that has a highly diversified bird progeny is a plumy place for bird watching. Kitulgala is very famous for wild bananas, both yellow and red. These are pretty tastier than agrarian ones. You can see a lot of rubber trees but they are foreign.
Kitulgala is a wet evergreen forest. But it is hard to see all the attributes of a wet evergreen forest like Sinharaja due to human influence. Expected rainfall is too high that Kitulgala is one of the wettest places in Sri Lanka. A dry weather is expected at the beginning of the year especially in February.
Like I said before, Keleni Forest Reserve is a good place for bird watching. It’s possible to find most of the bird species live in wet zone rainforests but incomparable with the huge bird population in Sinharaja. Endemic birds like Spurfowl, Green-billed Coucal and Spot-winged Thrush are plentiful. The recently found endemic bird spacies called Serendib Scops Owl can be seen rarely in Kitulgala.
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