> they talk about how much the tuktuk drivers hassle any white person trying to walk around.

That wasn't my experience when I traveled there 3 years ago, and I walked around quite a bit.

My biggest complaint was the lack of good local restaurants, even in big cities. The juice bars were pretty great though. Still miss wood apple.

Another issue was the insanely reckless driving and incessant honking. Even with the plentiful metal bars and hand straps, trying to stand on a crowded bus while they fly around mountain curves is a total body workout.

I agree. Its highly volatile, and has a huge environmental impact.

The ups and downs of tourism during the civil war illustrated it clearly. So did the impact of the Ukraine war (there used to be a lot of Russian tourists).

I was shocked by how cheap hotels had once again become when I last went back to Sri Lanka (2023)

I live on a small island in Thailand, and here, "becoming Bali" is a term that describes a place that has been over-constructed with bungalows and villas; it has become very crowded and very expensive. Most tropical islands started out as hippie places where all houses were cheap, rudimentary wooden bungalows, but then mass tourism and housing investors moved in and pushed the "original hippie population" out and replaced them with expensive villas. That is what is meant by becoming Bali. My guess for the origin of this expression is that Bali was the first place where this happened.