Maybe I just haven’t visited the correct countries.

But I have never been anywhere, outside eastern Europe, where the assumption is so overwhelming that any Western tourist must be a German.

From the first few minutes of our first encounter with a Sri Lankan citizen, on our way out of the airport, we were asked, “Are you Germans?”

It has gone on without stop. Any local resident with sufficient English to pose the question has asked, “Are you German?”

(And it makes sense to ask in English because the language is widely taught here, and most Germans who travel speak more than a little English.)

Clearly, lots of Sri Lankans connected to the tourism industry have decided that anyone who looks like a European is very likely to be a German. It must come from personal experience.

Germans certainly love to travel, and often “the more exotic, the better.” They even have a word for it that has been appropriated by the English language — wanderlust.

We certainly have seen plenty of Germans. In the restaurants, chatting in the tourist havens, staying in our own hotel. Well, actually, every Westerner in this hotel since we arrived has been German. Except us.

Something about Sri Lanka must be particularly appealing to Germans, as opposed to the French or the English, other Europeans who have lots of citizens with enough money to travel.

I would guess that No. 1 is climate; Sri Lanka is warm all of the time and sunny much of the time, and Germany certainly is not. Also, Sri Lanka is closer to Frankfurt (at 10.5 hours flying time) than are most other tropical destinations. No. 2 might be the beaches; Germans also have a reputation for liking to lay out in the sun. And No. 3 is … it’s a budget destination. Germans seem to have invented the concept of the youth hostel, so they like a bargain, when traveling.

Certainly, Germans make up a significant fraction of all tourists in places like Turkey and Greece, and even Egypt.

But they are not so numerous there as to prompt cabbies and hoteliers to assume that anyone who appears to be a Westerner is, naturlich, from Deutschland.