Intrepid Journeys - Sri Lanka (Shane Cortese)

Television (Full Length Episode) – 2008

In this Intrepid Journey, actor Shane Cortese makes a last-minute decision and finds himself in the southernmost country of South Asia. The Sri Lankan military presence is striking in the cities, and the search for a lost phone is less optimistic than finding a needle in a haystack. Cortese spends his birthday tramping through tea plantations, drinking tea with the locals. His fear of snakes is challenged when he handles a big python at a homeopathic snake bite treatment centre. Cortese's highlights are the elephants — he gets up close to them in the wild, and volunteers at an elephant orphanage.

...from the moment we left the airport, there seems to be a really strong military presence. Now they're all standing on the side of the road with submachine guns and everything like that. And quite honestly I think you're gonna have to take my word for it, because we're not allowed to film them.
– Shane Cortese in Colombo, at the start of the episode