Stephen's imaginatively named blog: 2018

Sri Lanka Jan/Feb 2018 (Photos below text}

Arrival.

Sri Lanka is very far from New York - about as far away as you can get without leaving the hemisphere. 35 hours of travel time, including a long stopover in Shanghai. That's not the shortest route, but it was the cheapest, and offered a chance, once again, to verify that the earth really is round, since we met up in Colombo, the next day, with our friends who did the same trip, but went eastbound, through Amsterdam. I never learned why the capital is named Colombo (Christopher never visited), or why the second biggest city is named Kandy (hardly any sweets to be found), but I'm glad that they are, since those are almost the only towns in Sri Lanka with pronounceable names, as you'll see as this journal progresses. Not only are we maximally displaced from home in space, but the 10 and a half (that's right - half) hour time difference makes us feel maximally displaced in time also.

Our arrival was not auspicious. It was pouring, and our taxi crawled the 20 miles into town from the airport in rush hour traffic, eventually taking us to the Colombo Fort district, where we learned that the hotel we had booked months before had no rooms. (Later we discovered that the hotel had no rooms because it didn't exist.) We were shunted off to a tiny hotel miles away, which became our first taste of the guesthouse system in Sri Lanka that actually makes it very easy to travel here with little advance planning. In response to a postwar tourist boom, thousands of small guesthouses have sprung up all over the country. They typically have a few rooms for guests with hotel-like amenities and are run by a resident family. Most people speak at least a little English, and many are fluent. The hosts fall over themselves to be helpful and welcoming, no doubt because they are competing with countless other helpful and welcoming guesthouse hosts. The whole system is enabled by booking.com, which lets travelers like us go online and scroll through dozens of offerings scattered throughout whatever the next town on our itinerary is. We learned not to care too much exactly where a guesthouse is in any given town since the ubiquitous, and ridiculously cheap, tuk-tuks make it trivial to get around.

The recent history of Sri Lanka is brutal and tragic, but to me it's just a tropical paridise, shimmering in the Indian ocean 7 degrees north of the equator. The 2004 tsunami killed over 30,000 people, including 1700 trapped on the same coastal train that we took several times, uneasily watching the ocean the whole way. Worse, the country was devastated by a civil war that lasted 26 years and killed 100,000 people, ending only in 2009. Tourism is only feasible now that the Tamil rebels have been utterly defeated and the country is at peace. I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know enough about these events to have an opinion. Now that I'm here, I can't even tell the Sinhalese and the Tamils apart, and while it's hard to believe there isn't any lingering tension between them, as a tourist I'm completely oblivious of it. The Tamils are Hindu and the Sinhalese are Buddhist, but the conflict was more ethnic than religious, and the two religions seem to get along fine. At the large temple complex in Kataragama we saw thousands of followers of both faiths gather for a series of rituals, most of which seem to involve incense and fire. An outsider is hard pressed to tell who's who, but I think the people lined up to smash a coconut on a sacred rock were Hindu (makes as much sense as the wine and wafer thing, no?).

Galle.

After meeting up with Fran and Jerry we left the crowded city of Colombo and took the aforementioned train down the coast to the colonial town of Galle (don't even try to pronounce it), where once again our prebooked room (at the Friendship Villa) was unavailable (this time due to vandalism perpetrated by it's previous occupants), and once again we were shunted off to another guest house. Still, we spent enough time at the Friendship Villa with F & J, where we had several excellent meals, to be befriended by the friendly hosts and to learn that, in Sri Lanka, there's such a thing as too much friendship. Apparently, the locals have learned to mine the throngs of western tourists by being nice to them, and this of course is one reason it's so pleasant to travel here, but it can get a bit overweening. I think Beth kissed enough babies to run for office. Galle Fort, the old town, is a well preserved Portuguese/Dutch/English settlement dating to the the 16th century and now filled with shops and restaurants catering to western tourists. It is surrounded by ramparts that protected (just barely) the population from the 2004 tsunami, and that also afford beautiful views of the sea.

In Galle we went to the first of many buffet style dinners we would enjoy in Sri Lanka, but this one had the distinction of being served in the smallest restaurant I can recall ever patronizing. Fewer than a dozen or so diners are squeezed into a space about the size of my kitchen. We sat on wooden blocks instead of chairs and served ourselves from clay pots lined up against the wall. We were not issued plates, but ate off small wicker trays covered in Saran wrap. This arrangement, presumably designed for space efficiency, proved less than satisfactory, but had the redeeming feature of teaching us the value of ceramic tableware. 10,000 years of the continuous use of this technology is evidently for a reason. The meal was delicious.

Marissa.

A few years ago they discovered that non-migratory blue and sperm whales inhabit the waters off Sri Lanka's southern coast, so we headed down to the beach town of Marissa to try to see them. We signed up for a whale-watching cruise and headed out to sea with 30 or 40 other tourists. We saw 4 or 5 blue whales and a bunch of dolphins, but no sperm whales. The enormous whales were an awesome sight (at least for nature nerds like us) but the best part of the voyage was probably the Leviathan dose of schadenfruede we got from watching almost everyone else retching over the side while we munched on somosas and enjoyed the 6 foot swells. Wheeee. Next time, all you vegans, ditch the herbal remedies and take your scopalamine.

Kataragama, Yala, Undawalawe.

Next day we hired a car and driver and made our way to Kataragama, picking up Fran and Jerry along the way (they had passed on the whales and retreated to a tranquil beach resort a few towns down the coast.). There we settled into our enormous rooms at the two-room Heine nature hotel and met our guide, animal-spotter extraordinaire Banje. We got a 5 AM start on our Jeep safari into Yala National Park, arriving before dawn in order to beat the heat (which never materialized) and take advantage of the local wildlife's alleged propensity for taking a morning stroll, or slither. As it was we saw dozens of exotic animals and beautiful birds throughout the day, but not the elusive leopards. Exciting high point of the tour: being charged by an angry elephant.

Kataragama is also home to a major religious site that attracts pilgrams from all over the country. We joined the throng at dusk, since a daytime visit was disadvised owing to the scalding sand / barefoot tourist dilemma. Like all temples here, you have to leave your shoes outside, but this was a large complex of several Hindu, Buddhist and Moslem temples, connected by long, sandy avenues, unforgiving under a hot sun to our tender feet. You know you're not in Kansas anymore when you're the only westerners among a teeming crowd of Sri Lankans in white robes, dozens of red- faced monkeys, and the occasional elephant. The walls of the complex are adorned with seemingly infinite files of porcelain statues of peacocks and elephants. Fascinating as all this was, my eyes were drawn to another temple on top of a nearby mountain, Warasiti Kanda. I learned that it was accessible only by a staircase of 2000 steps, and somehow managed to cajole Beth and Jerry into going there with me the following day. The locals seem to have a penchant for building stairs up steep inclines rather than switchbacks, and I thought this would be good training for our planned assault on Adam's Peak in a week, with its 5500 steps. Unsurprisingly it was a pretty hard climb, and the view from the top was spectacular. Our plans to stop for a triumphal refreshment on the way down were thwarted by mendicant Hanuman langurs, and we had to wait until dinner time to eat anything. It was, actually, worth waiting for the great food at our strange hotel, where we were the only guests.

It was time to abandon the lowlands and head up into the Central high country, but not before another Jeep Safari, this time to Undawalawe national Park, justly renowned for its elephants. Here the herds of elephants are seconded by the herds of Jeeps bearing tourists. Apparently the elephants are so inured to the Jeeps that they barely notice us in ours, inches away. It feels like Disneyland, but it's such a thrill being among them that we didn't mind. A 2-month old baby elephant was the star of the show, kept sequestered among the protective, enormous legs of his family.

Ella.

The mountain town of Ella could serve as a counterexample for third world towns hoping to improve themselves through tourism. Rampant overdevelopment has overwhelmed what little infrastructure there is, to the point that the best way to walk the mile from the train station to our hotel was along the railroad tracks, the roads being in such poor condition. The parallel road to the hotel is a one-lane, two way, dirt track girdling a steep hillside on which dozens of new guesthouses cling precariously. Fortunately, none of them slid into the abyss during our stay. The white-knuckle tuk-tuk ride to get there was worth it, though: It was a lovely guesthouse with fabulous views, run by an Australian family. Breakfasts were served on a veranda looking across a deep, green valley with a waterfall cascading down the far side. Hiking in the surrounding mountains and tea plantations was appropriately rewarding, as was the curry buffet at the restaurant next door.

By this time we had noticed a pattern in table service here: the dishes and pottery are of a very high quality, no matter how modest the establishment, but the cutlery is barely better than disposables, usually made from thin metal that reminds one of heavy duty aluminum foil. Also, napkins are in very short supply. Our working hypothesis is that this is because the locals eat with their hands and don't need no stinking forks or napkins. One day, under the tutelage of one of our guides, we tried to emulate them, but it's not as easy as you'd think. There's no problem getting the food from the plate into your mouth. The problem is that when we get food on our hands we have an irresistible urge to wipe it off and we quickly go through whatever minimal napkins are provided, unconsciously cleaning our hands between bites. The locals, on the other hand, don't worry about such things and just wash their hands at the end of the meal. It was a bridge too far.

A note on Sri Lankan cuisine, independent of how you eat it. There are three main dishes: Curry, curry and curry. Oh, and rice. You might think this would get boring, but it hasn't, yet. It's so tasty we all took a cooking class to learn how to make it. The secret appears to be to use lots of fresh spices and to grind them up with a mortar and pestle the size of a washing machine. There's chicken curry, fish curry, and 5 or 6 kinds of vegetable curry. If you want anything else there's Pizza hut. Well, That's not quite true: there are a few luxury hotels catering strictly to western tourists, and some of these have superb food that goes beyond the local fare, but maybe that doesn't count as Sri Lankan cuisine. We went to two such places worth noting. We had the lunch buffet at a strikingly beautiful hotel designed by local hero architect Geoffrey Bawa. The food matched the views. And we had a dinner buffet at a sprawling resort on the beach where I felt obligated to photograph some of the dishes in anticipation of the future need of a memory aid to help juice up the experience of eating lesser south Asian food in America.

Hapatule.

We planned to take the train to our next destination, Hapatule, but a strike shut down the line so we hired a car and driver. The trains are essentially free, but it's easy and cheap to hire a car or a tuk tuk. Driving here is like nowhere else I know. First, you have the dogs - thousands of them. They're all about the same size - maybe 25 pounds or so, and they all seem to like to sleep on the roads that, thus, are littered with sleeping dogs. On back roads, where vehicles come by every minute or two, a dog will reluctantly stand up and move to the side of the road just in time to let the vehicle pass, then lazily return to his spot in the middle of the road. They must each do this hundreds of times a day. Why they don't just settle in a few feet off the road remains one of those mysteries of the Far East. The system seems to work pretty well, but not perfectly. One sees, occasionally, the odd three-legged dog. The dogs add a layer of interest to any road trip, but the real thrill of motoring here is due to the Sri Lankan passing lane. Sri Lankan drivers excel at passing. The mix of vehicles - bicycles, motorcycles, cars, vans, tuk-tuks (millions of tuk-tuks) all insist on each going at his own chosen speed and all have zero patience for driving behind a slower vehicle. Thus you spend most of your time passing or being passed. We seemed to always get the most maniacal tuk-tuk drivers on the road. They don't wait for a clear lane on the opposite side to pass: they just create their own center lane and rely on the other cars to make a space for them. This is all the more nerve wracking for American tourists, not used to driving on the left. Roads that seem barely wide enough to support two-way traffic all seem to have a virtual third lane that pops in and out of existence as needed, like virtual particles in the quantum vacuum state. Somehow we survived.

Sri Lanka used to be Ceylon, and to me Ceylon means tea. Under British rule Ceylon (the size of South Carolina) was the world's leading producer of tea, exporting more, even, than China (the size of America). The industry has shrunk, but the central highlands are still adorned with miles of tea plantations, and they are delightful to hike through. The town of Hapatule is right in the thick of it. One route took us up to "Lipton's seat," the perch from which the great man used to survey his extensive domain. Check out the pic of Beth snuggling up to his effigy. While in the area, we took the near-obligatory tour of a tea factory, learned more than we wanted to know about how tea is harvested (by hand) and prepared, and attended a tea tasting. None of which changed my view that tea is a rather boring libation, hardly worth all that hoopla in the nineteenth century.

Dalhousie.

All of our hiking up to now was just in preparation for the big one - the pilgrimage route up Adam's Peak. The trains were back in service so we caught the scenic route from Hapatule to Hatton (ok, that one's pronounceable too) and made our way to Nallathanniya and then Dalhousie, where the thousand-meter high stairway begins. Every article you read about this trek tells you to start at 2 AM, so as to reach the summit temple before dawn, in time to see the sunrise. A lifetime of hiking has taught me that sunrises are highly overrated, so, resisting the unrelenting social pressure, I resolved to wait until 4:00. Why not 9:00 or 10:00, or some other human hour, you may well ask. It certainly wasn't the by-now discredited admonitions to avoid hiking in the heat of the day (there is no heat of the day in the highlands). No, it was the chance to climb a mountain at night on a well-lit path, supplied with tea shops all along the route, accompanied by Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims. You can't do that in Yosemite. Avoiding the 2 AM departure also avoided all the western tourists, the only people who are dumb enough to slavishly follow the guidebooks, and allowed us an uncrowded hike in the company of Sri Lankans. People of all ages do this hike, and some of them are an inspiration - the very young and the very old all determined to make it to the top. The most impressive were the many slight, young men, carrying heavy loads up to supply the shops. We saw guys with cases of coke cans that must have been half their weight. Still, that didn't make it any easier for us, carrying almost nothing. 5500 steps is a lot of steps. It took us about three and a half grueling hours, the first two in darkness, the rest in brilliant sunshine. But it was well worth it. I'd rate it one of the great hikes in the world, and that's without any of the religious motivation that enhances the experience for many of the people who do it.

The Buddhists here seem more pious to me than in other Buddhist counties I've visited. Our first clue of this was when our driver, early in a long drive, parked in front of a Buddhist temple, got out of the car and prayed for 5 minutes while we remained, somewhat bewildered, in the back seat. He then put some money into a donation box, got back in the car and continued the drive without explanation. Our second clue was when we heard several references to Lord Buddha, rather than the Buddha. All theology is nonsense, but all theology is not the same nonsense. I never like hearing a god referred to as a Lord. It smacks of medieval feudalism; someone to be obeyed, rather than admired. And when all the people around you start obeying a god, it's time to renew your passport. In the museum of Buddhism in Kandy, they tell a story about the birth of Siddhartha (the future Buddha) that was new to me, and, frankly depressing. Seems he was born from his mother's side, rather than her vagina (i.e., asexually), and his birth was prophesied by a wise man. Sound familiar? This seemed to fly in the face of the basic Buddha legends I've heard dozens of times in my travels, the gist of which is that this rich guy, sequestered from the brutish world by his his helicopter parents, has the rose colored glasses ripped from his face when he chances to leave home and sees the ubiquitous misery in the world, and so renounces his cushy, superficial life and resolves to discover the true, universal path to happiness. After several false starts he succeeds. Of course there's a lot of supernatural mumbo jumbo along the way, but the kernel of the tale is that he's just a man, and through intelligence, perseverance and self sacrifice, he finds enlightenment. Now, I know it's a fool's errand to parse through the various fairy tales that underlie religions, but as fairy tales go, I rather liked this one. The Kandy museum sort of ruined it for me. Who cares about his lifetime achievements if he was just another supernatural being destined from birth to ascend to godhood? I sure hope this is just the revisionism of a local sect and doesn't represent the foul underbelly of all of Buddhism.

Polonnaruwa.

Sri Lanka has a written history going back thousands of years. Long before it was colonized by European powers, it was conquered by a series of south Asian invaders and usurpers, one side effect of which is that the capital city bounced around a lot over the centuries. Unfortunately Sri Lankan Kings had a nasty habit of destroying their predecessors's palaces and setting up shop elsewhere, so there isn't as much archeological evidence of this history as you'd like, but there's still plenty. Thus a given archeological site tends to represent a fairly short time period, unlike, say, Rome, where thousands of years of occupancy can be seen represented by extant structures in a small area. For example, Anadappurawa in the north was founded by king Panduksbhaya in the 4th century BCE and reached its architectural height in the second century BCE, and it is from that era that most of the ruins to be seen there date. But I couldn't tell you much about them since we didn't go there (our friends Fran and Jerry did - you could ask them). We went instead to Polonnaruwa, which reached it's zenith in the 12th century CE, during the reign of King Parakramabahu. The ruins to be seen from this period are spread out over a few square km and we rented bicycles so as to be able to see most of them in a single day. It's not Angkor Wat, but it's pretty impressive. There are several beautifully preserved colossal stone Buddhas that looked like they were carved last week, instead of a thousand years ago. Many of the major buildings have largely crumbled, but several enormous stupas are still intact. There is a well-preserved circular building called the Vatadage that looks like something out of ancient Rome, and a cathedral-like structure that houses another enormous Buddha, this one in high relief. I noticed one wall that emulated Inca stonemasonry, with perfectly fitted large stones of various shapes, so precisely carved as to need no mortar. Spending a day among the ruins may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I get off on wandering around them and trying to imagine what it was like to be there when it was up and running.

Srl Lanka is a third world country with third world prices, except for the designated tourist sites, like Polonnaruwa, which are administered by the government and charge first world prices. The urge to gouge foreign tourists is apparently too strong to resist, and on some level you can't blame them, but it begins to get you down after a while. They are shameless about posting different prices for citizens and foreigners. This is a game everyone can play, and it makes the world a meaner, poorer place. Just today the Metropolitan Museum of Art started charging non-New Yorkers a $25 admission fee. It's still free for locals, but it was heretofore free for everyone. It is all of a piece with Trumpism; the privitization of what ought to be public.

Sigiriya.

Paying $30 to spend a day seeing Polonnaruwa was no obstacle, but the same fee for the the much smaller Sigiriya gave us pause. However, that fee was only a minor consideration compared to the real deterrent there: wasps. Apparently thousands of them inhabit the site, and the same government that collects millions from visitors can't find the wherewithal to remove the nests, although they (the government, not the wasps) have built a shelter half way up, into which you can flee if a swarm should attack. Waspophobe that I am, I decided that Sigiriya was an attraction I could skip, even if it is one of the highlights of the country. But over the course of several weeks we met travelers who had been there recently and none of them saw any wasps, so we decided to chance it. Glad we did. Sigiriya is a 200m monolith of volcanic origin that served as a palace and fortress about 1500 years ago. A certain king Kasyapa needed a secure site for his capital after overthrowing his father in Anadappurawa and fighting off his brother, the rightful heir. The ruins on the summit are reminiscent of Machu Picchu, and the place must have been impregnable. As is par for the course in this country, you access the top by climbing countless steps. In a niche partway up there are frescoes of voluptuous women, a refreshing break from a hard climb. They think these are just a small remnant of what were once many more; a heartbreaking loss. An enormous stone lion, now mostly lost, guarded the entrance to the ascent, up a sheer cliff. Only the truck-sized front paws remain, flanking the grand staircase to the top. It's quite a site.

Sigiriya peak has a twin, Pidurangala, a couple of km away. We climbed that one too. It lacks a fortress, but has a reclining Buddha and a great view of its confrere. The top is a bare, granite dome that you can only reach by scrambling through a steep and narrow array of boulders. The path is not crowded, but there are plenty of locals around to lend a hand navigating through it. In fact, the Sri Lankans we've met have been almost uniformly pleasant to us and seemingly happy to offer help if asked. Many seem eager to show the place off, especially to Americans, who are rarely seen here. Lots of Aussies and Brits, but hardly any Americans: we met none in a month. The ignorance is mutual. I stopped answering the inevitable question of where I'm from with "New York". Too many times they'd never heard of it.

Kandy.

Kandy, in the center of the island, is the city that held out the longest against the Europeans, but finally succumbed to the British in the 19th century. It figures prominently in the mythology of the country, being the repository of one of the Buddha's teeth (I kid you not). The tooth had a long and storied journey from northern India to its final repository in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy. No doubt it was on the same flight that brought Mary Magdalene to France, Mohammed to Jerusalem and Jesus to New York to meet with Joseph Smith. Curiously, you can't see the tooth in its eponymous temple, as it is hidden away in a Stupa. What you can see are thousands of barefoot supplicants roaming the grounds, lighting candles and listening to speeches (sermons?). I have no idea what the speakers were saying, but such gatherings seem symptomatic of the sort of Buddhism practiced here, in contrast to the more private worship I've seen elsewhere. Much as I love ancient dentistry, my favorite find in Kandy was the botanical garden in nearby Peradeniya. Hidden among the giant coconuts and Royal Palm allées there live 24,000 fruit bats. During the day they hang by their feet from the branches, looking, from a distance, like cassava melons. Are they called fruit bats because they eat fruit or because they look like fruit? Every so often one of them lazily spreads its 5-foot wings, declaring its animal nature.

Bentota.

After all that exploration, hiking and culture, we decided we deserved a vacation on the beach, so we caught a train to Aluthgama, on the western coast, and then got a tuk tuk to our hotel in Bentota - a splurge for Sri Lanka at $50/night. Our original plan had been the Maldives, a beautiful archipelago a short flight away, but that's a Moslem country, with separate beaches for locals and normal people (called bikini beaches), a practice that was just sufficiently off-putting to keep us away. As it was we got a tiny taste of Moslem beach culture in Bentota, where we saw a family (presumably) of 4 women encased head to toe in black burkas with a man (their husband?) frolicking in the hot sun, on the very beach where I took a flight in an ultra-light. The stark contrast between the 21st century high-tech airplane, representing unbridled freedom of the open sky and sea, and the constrained, cloistered figures from the 7th century did not go unnoticed. This was my first time in an ultra-light. The flight, skimming only a few hundred feet above the beach was more beautiful than I was prepared for, and it was lent an extra frisson by the requirement to wear a life jacket. Before that last-minute adjustment it hadn't occurred to me that we might crash into the ocean. I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the harness trying to figure out how to disengage myself and swim free of the plane before it sank. Of course they never crash - they wing is a built-in parachute.

This stretch of coast is the main beach resort area of Sri Lanka, and it goes on for miles of tropical splendor, but is surprisingly uncrowded, with just enough tourist activity here and there to supply you with a bite to eat or a shaded lounge chair if you need it. The Indian ocean is bathtub warm; there are colorful fish in the shallows, not to mention the occasional sea turtle; our comfortable room had a balcony overlooking the swimming pool and good AC. I could have stayed another week, but it was time to return to winter, and a real time zone.