Every flick of the leopard’s tail and canine-flashing yawn is met with a flutter of camera shutters. Vying for the best view of the nonchalant feline are tourists packed into seven jeeps.

The leopard, seemingly fully aware that he’s at the top of the food chain, seems to be enjoying the attention. After 20 minutes, he stands up and, just like a domestic tabby, stretches, yawns and then wanders off into the thorny scrub jungle of Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park.

The jeeps move on in search of elephants, crocodiles and buffalo. And, even better, crocodiles munching on buffalo.

The Sri Lankan leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) is a subspecies endemic to the Asian country. Yala National Park has what is thought to be the highest density of leopards in the word, despite them being classified as endangered. In recent times, it’s the tourists who have been scarcer.

In May 2008, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) advice read: ‘We advise against all travel to Yala National Park and the areas around it following a number of serious security incidents in the park in October and November 2007 and attacks in January 2008 close to the park.’

Advice for the rest of the country, especially the north and east, was even more inauspicious, warning of a high threat of terrorist attacks from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – known to everyone as the ‘Tamil Tigers’.

By the time I arrived in Sri Lanka in October 2009, the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had announced the conflict between the government and a Tamil faction seeking an independent state was over, after the Tamil Tigers’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed on 18 May.

Before long, the FCO had retracted its warning about travelling to Trincomalee in the Tamil region of the north east and Yala National Park on the south coast. Sri Lanka’s most visited tourist attraction was open again.

On a hot, humid evening, after a successful day watching leopards and crocodiles eating buffalo, I have a candid chat with Ranjith Katugampala, the general manager of the Yala Village Hotel.

‘Until August 2007, this hotel was booked out by [mostly British] tourists. Then in September they closed the park after some terrorist problems,’ he says.

The LTTE had skipped around the east coast and landed on the beach near Yala National Park, killing villagers and setting up home in the 100,000-hectare reserve, thus gaining a foothold in an area largely untouched by violence. But the manager’s problems were short lived; by August 2009 the lodge was 60 per cent full. Crucially, many chefs and hotel professionals have returned from abroad, and the wildlife does not seem to have been significantly affected. And nor was it during the 2004 tsunami.

On the beach that day, my driver recalls seeing buffalo and leopards sprinting away from the sea some 20 minutes before the waves hit. ‘I thought it was an LTTE helicopter attack at first,’ he says. ‘Then I thought the world was ending.’ For 16 of his colleagues and 31 tourists it was.

Despite these natural and man-made disasters, Katugampala (who climbed up a tree to escape being swept away by the tsunami), like most others in the tourism industry, is confident. ‘Everyone had a hard time and people lost jobs, but now the travel ban has been lifted, we are doing well again.’

‘It is looking good now,’ he says. ‘Our bookings for 2010 were almost back to normal.’ But, also like others, he doesn’t deny it will be tough to attract tourists back in numbers.

After I cleared immigration at Bandaranaike International Airport, a sign greeted me: ‘Just arrived in the land of —– miracles’, the penultimate word covered in a patch of paper sellotaped to the poster. We later learned that the president himself had demanded the word ‘small’ be covered up on all tourism literature. ‘It’s more than a small miracle,’ he argued, allegedly. He was right.

The marvellous story of this tear-shaped, some say pear-shaped, island, linked by a thread of limestone shoals to India, is replete with myths of kings and concubines and legends of medieval merchants finding such a vast wealth of spices and gems that the Sanskrit word for Sri Lanka, Swarnadip, became the word ‘serendipity’.

Colonial forces, recognising the natural resources of Ceylon, as it was called until 1972, and the deep port of Trincomalee, described by British Admiral Horatio Nelson as ‘the finest harbour in the world’, began a succession of Portuguese, Dutch and then British rule in the late 18th century.

One British castaway, Robert Knox, captured by the king in 1659, spent the next 19 years in exile and wrote of the island: ‘Its soil is rich beyond description; its forests abound with timber; its mountains are believed to contain mineral treasures of the most valuable kind; and, it is certain, that no country in the world can rival the fragrance of its cinnamon, and the beauty of its ivory.’

The first stop on my tour of Sri Lanka began with a precarious climb up to a fantastical place with an unparalleled view of this rich domain: Sigiriya, or Lion Rock. As the centrepiece of the so-called Cultural Triangle in the centre of the island, Sigiriya is one of seven Unesco World Heritage Sites in Sri Lanka.

Through head-high lion claws carved at the base of the rock, a rickety iron staircase climbs around the overhangs and rocky undulations to a flat 1.6 hectare summit. Walls are decorated with remarkable fifth century frescoes of voluptuous, scantily clad ‘heavenly maidens’.

On top are the remains of a palace, carved out during the reign of King Kashyapa I between AD 495-477. The king buried his father alive and killed his brother, who was heir.

Looking down from up here, Sri Lanka flourishes all around. It is the country’s very own Shangri-La. No wonder King Kashyapa hardly ever left (although that might have something to do with the 500 concubines he kept on the rock). And from this height, it is impossible to imagine any conflict.

Yet, driving later that day to Trincomalee in the north east, until recently a no-go area, the high military presence is testament to a time of troubles.

The frequency of sand-bagged roadblocks increase to every 100 metres as we approach the city and I spot the motto ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’, painted on a wall. The city of Trincomalee, which also lends its name to the district, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tigers.

On the way to the Hindu temple, said to have been a sacred Hindu shrine for more than 2,500 years, my guide tries to explain the origins of the conflict.

The majority of the country’s 20 million population (73 per cent) are Buddhist Sinhalese, thought to have arrived from north-west India around 500BC.

The mostly Hindu Tamil minority (around 18 per cent) arrived from southern India in the 13th century. Over the next few centuries, some Tamils wanted to create their own independent state.

The power struggle between the two groups varied from high level politicking to jungle warfare and, finally, full-scale conflict in the 1980s.

Government soldiers, fingers on the triggers of AK-47s, watch as Tamil Hindus climb up to the temple to receive a blessing and tie a ribbon around a tree in hope. They stop and look out on the Bay of Bengal as a fishing trawler pulls in far below the temple to make an offering.

I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the food markets of ‘Trinco’. They haven’t seen tourists here for years and the locals are keen to chat. The Tamils, favoured government officials of the British, retain the influence of the 133 years of British rule as much as the Sinhalese.

Market sellers stop to talk cricket in heavily accented, but grammatically correct English, smattered with 19th-century idioms. A slight wobble of the head finishes every exchange.

After a long drive over the cold and misty highlands, dominated by tea plantations, my trip finishes in Galle (pronounced ‘Gaul’) in the southeastern corner of the country. It is very different to Trincomalee. Tourism may have faltered here, but it has been the quickest to bounce back.

Five star hotels, such as Galle Fort Hotel, Amangalla and The Sun House, attract sun-seekers and honeymooners looking for luxury at competitive rates. It is also the country’s cultural centre, with a literary festival held in 2010 that attracted authors such as Ian Rankin and Antony Beevor.

The main attraction in Galle is the fortified old colonial city. I sit on the wall to eat kadala, a fiery mix of chickpeas, chillies, curry leaves, onions and coconut, eaten from a newspaper cone. The locals milling around smile knowingly as my eyes water.

The full moon shines in the sky, lighting the city walls. A full moon means Poya day, a Buddhist holiday. Children play cricket on the greens, while teenagers leap from a height of 20 metres into impossibly narrow pools among the rocks. The ubiquitous tuk tuks zoom around ox-pulled carts. A cream Morris Minor drives past, headlights illuminating the lighthouse. Then a sudden warm rain shower scatters the crowds.

As the sun rises early on my last morning in Galle, I wander down to the beach where Sri Lanka’s famous stilt fishermen go about catching their lunch. They smack the rough Indian Ocean with fishing rods, occasionally hooking a nibbler.

A couple of bleary-eyed tourists snap photos at this ancient fishing method. It is as tenacious as it is traditional. The ever-positive Sri Lankans appear to have overcome terrible obstacles to protect this beautiful island and share it with visitors, and they continue to do so, but it will take more than serendipity.