Advertisement
Published: January 3rd 2010
David Attenborough writes of his very first experience setting foot in the tropics.......... Stepping out into the heat and humidity of a West African afternoon was like entering a heated sauna. The hedge beside the ramshackle airport was bright with the scarlet trumpets of hibiscus. Sunbirds whizzed from one to another, hovering in front of each to sip nectar, their chests flashing iridescent colours, green, purple and red. Among them I suddenly spotted, clinging to the branch but rigidly immobile, a bright green chameleon. As I took a step towards it to get a closer look, my foot trod on the grassy verge and the leaves, to my astonishment, suddenly hinged back to lie alongside the main stems. It was sensitive mimosa. All in all that little strip of ordinary hedge was a revelation of the glory and diversity of tropical nature from which I have never recovered. I read that passage on an aircraft in midair between Heathrow and Sri Lanka. It's from the book I'm reading, David Attenborough's autobiography 'Life on Air'. About an hour later walking out of Colombo airport I thought I could identify with what he was saying. We'd just spent a week back
in the UK sorting some stuff out and the contrast between the England we'd just left behind where nature is in deep winter repose to stepping out of the airport into tropical Sri Lanka was absolute. It's like someone just turned the lights back on.
In the taxi a minute from the airport the road to Kandy winds into tropical forest. And after the blank grey skies of London just a few hours earlier, suddenly seeing the luxuriant and expansive range of the colour green in the surrounding forest stung my eyes just to look at. The warm air flowing through the taxi's open windows and breathing in the thick smell of everything living and thriving reminded me in the moment of why we wanted to come back to Sri Lanka.
We stayed our first eight days here in the town of Kandy which is known as the cultural capital of Sri Lanka, probably because it is home of the 'Temple of the Tooth' which claims to house just one tooth of the one and only Buddha. We went in there once nine years ago and you can't see the tooth because it's deep inside a box that's inside
a box that's inside a box, and so on. That's how important the tooth is. Is it really there? Maybe it is, or maybe there's just a whole set of false teeth in there with bits of dried toast stuck on them. No one but the temple keepers will ever know.
We stayed at the same guesthouse we stayed at the only other time we visited Sri Lanka nine years ago 'The McLeod Inn'. Kandy is set in a valley in the hill country and the McLeod Inn sits high up on the valley side with stunning views from the balcony down to the lake below and out over the forested hills to mountains in the distance.
Having had the chance to travel and compare the two this year I can see that Sri Lanka retains much more of it's original forest than many of the countries we visited in South East Asia, like Malaysia for instance. And that that forest is more varied in it's tree and plant life, more pleasing to the eye and diverse in the bird life that lives within it.
Sat on the balcony at the McLeod Inn you're at the height of the tree
tops and within a hour or two of being sat there I'd watched monkeys stalking the rooftops of houses and hotels, blue kingfishers swooping around, sunbirds, a large lime green bird that looked a lot like a parrot that turned out to be a woodpecker taking a snooze in a nearby tree. And loads of other bird life I couldn't name flitting about. Then at dusk emerged the classic gothic vision of big black fruit bats flapping clumsily across the valley from one forest to another. Some of them are truly massive and grow up to a metre in wing span, for a moment there I thought I saw Christopher Lee and his glinting incisors float by. You wouldn't want to walk face into one in the dark, you'd be screaming yourself to sleep each night with the memory of it.
The McLeod Inn cost us about seven English pounds per night nine years ago and today it's gone up outrageously in price to a mighty nine pounds a night. An evening meal there, a very nice mix of Sri Lanka curries costs less than three pounds. Tuk tuks (three wheeler taxis) cost the same from Kandy town up
to the guesthouse as they did in 2001, about 75 pence. I think Sri Lanka is still trying to attract tourists back after the upheaval last year and the tsunami six years ago, so prices have remained cheap. Pretty soon we realised that here and now, at least in this region of Sri Lanka we could (within reason) do what we wanted while here. Lynn started off with a full one and a half hour Ayurvedic massage treatment with steam bath, and I went to a hotel for a head and shoulder massage.
This involved much Ayurvedic oil being massaged into my scalp that smelt a bit like vegetable oil, after it's been used to fry chips for a month. It was a very relaxing, pleasant but sticky half hour experience and at the end of the treatment my head was totally saturated with essential oils. The masseur produced some paper thin paper towels to gently pat at the oil that was seeping down my forehead, ears and neck. Clearly paper towels were not going to do the job and I suggested to him that I needed a real bath type towel to clean up properly with, but he choose
Kandy botanical gardens
this passed by on the lawns, I don't know if it was poisonous or not, but it was quite big.to ignore that request, then he patted me on the back and sent me on my way with my hair feeling totally starched and glued to my head. I think Ayurvedic oils are probably very good for the wellbeing of your scalp, but I don't want to walk around smelling like I work the deep fat fryer at McDonalds, so I went back to the guesthouse to wash it all out.
Other things we did from Kandy were visit the Botanical Gardens about a half an hour away by tuk tuk. I've been to Edinburgh and Cape Town's botanical gardens and they are really fantastic, but Sri Lanka's are the best. Started in 1825 by the British there are lots of references to things 'empire' like trees named after English kings etc. Interestingly I find Sri Lankans don't seem to be aggrieved by the knowledge that they were once colonised by the British. I might have got it wrong but people, especially older people seem comfortable or proud even with their countries historical connections to Britain. I don't think I've ever had that impression in Africa.
Sri Lankans usually want to be friendly with foreigners and they like
fruit bats sleeping
It was a hot that day, I wonder what it's like to hang upside down in a black cape from dawn til dusk in the baking sun to catch your eye and waggle their heads at you. This 'head waggle' which is an Indian subcontinent thing seems to signify much, "hello" "yes" "no" "maybe" "probably" "goodbye" and a lot of other things. In the street the inherent gesture of Manchester greeting to a person you don't really know is a nod of the head, so I nod, and they waggle back enthusiastically. Some of them waggle their faces round and round in 360 degree cycles, often accompanied with a big toothy grin. It makes me smile.
Poor as many people in Sri Lanka certainly are most people will happily smile at you without any sign of resentment that you (relatively to them) are a rich foreigner and that they are probably as poor as a church mice that have just found out they will be evicted next week, and that a new 'tax poor church mice' white paper has just been passed in parliament.
I don't know where they'd fit into my most smiley peoples of the world league table, but it's somewhere close to the top with the Khmer people of Cambodia, Salvadorans and the little people in Kuching, Borneo.
From Kandy we visited Sigiriya,
The Hotel Suisse in Kandy
A hotel in a slow fading elegance, you can stay somewhere cheaper and come use their pool for about a quid, nice bar inside from a more refined era a singular monumental rock once inhabited on it's summit by a Sri Lankan king in or around the fifth century AD. The rock was a fortress. Today there is an iron stairway that winds around the side of the rock to the top. Climbing that was exhausting in the heat and humidity for us today, god knows how they got up there in the fifth century. But they did, on the top you can see bathing pools cut into the summit, what looks like an out-sized chaise longue throne built for three, and the foundations of what was once was a two story palace. There was technology at work because they pumped up water from a lake at the bottom that has long since dried up. On the way up you can see precarious looking carved footholds on steep inclines near the top and concave lengths carved into the rock that clearly housed some type of hosing for pumping water at some point in the distant past. It's incredible really. Near the top under a rock overhang there are painted frescoes in near perfect condition of enigmatic large breasted ladies offering forth plates of fruit. I reckon that for their
day the king and his concubines probably lived a life of opulence on the summit.
On the way back to Kandy our driver stopped at a spice and medicinal garden. He told us it would be free to take the guided tour around the garden that would end with a half hour head and shoulder massage. A lot of things like this here are offered as 'free', and yet of course they're not. Here it sometimes works on a tip basis, you tip as you feel OK doing at the end of things that are offered for free. To know what to tip in situations like this I think of a number and hand over a few notes while watching the eyes of the person taking the money, you know if you've tipped satisfactorily or not. It would be sad to do otherwise.
We had a tour of the medicinal and herb gardens. To look at all the plants and bushes looked like jungle to me. But he'd stop, crush a random leaf into your hand and you smell spicy cardamom or turmeric. Give you a red berry to taste and it's coffee, a small green one its
Sigirya
Lions paws, there was once a huge stone lions head to go with them, you'd have had to walk up into the lions mouth to get to the top of Sigiriya pepper, and vanilla and so on and so on.
Sri Lankans rely heavily on natural medicinal remedies as opposed to conventional western medicines for cures to common aliments. He showed us little plants and leaves you'd walk past a million times without guessing that crushed up or mixed with other plants you can use as a cream for burns, a drink to quell chronic stomach ache, or lots of other things that require trips to the doctor's surgery back home. I think it's impressive, a way of life more in tune with the nature living and growing around them.
At one point though during his talk the man was showing us his display of Ayurvedic remedies and I had one sticky bottle in each hand with labels saying one was a treatment for diabetes, and the other for high blood pressure. Looking at the bottles I thought to myself "can it be really be this simple? that effective treatments for conditions like those can come out of bottles with homemade labels on them?" I've got no idea if they work or not, but maybe they do. If they do work then why don't we generally know more about Ayurveda
Sigirya
Frescoes under a cliff overhang half way up, how did they get up there to paint them in the 5th century? or alternative medicine in the west. Maybe because the pharmaceutical industry that is the fourth biggest industry in the world would prefer that people keep on buying their pills?"
A week after arriving in Sri Lanka our English friend Claire who's teaching in Cambodia flew out to meet us in Kandy. At about this time the weather that had been a bit cool some nights turned cold and brought with it rain which was getting heavier the day we set off to the Hill country. The Hill country is famous for it's tea estates, tea leaves for the big UK supermarket brands come from here and have done so since Thomas Lipton (Lipton's tea) came here during the days of the empire when Sri Lanka was called Ceylon.
Clearly in a country like Sri Lanka the people (mostly Tamil women) who pick the leaves won't be paid well, but I was surprised when a guesthouse owner told me that often they earn just one dollar a day. To get that dollar they have to pick so many kilos of tea leaves per day. It looks like hot, boring work that is not going to be very good for your
Frescoes at Sigirya
breasts designed by Jordan back.
Tea bushes don't grow so high and planted as they are over every visible inch of hillside they give the country a rolling man made appearance. Like a screen saver on computer. Or it's as though the hills covered in the lineal patterns of tea bushes with pathways in between are the worlds biggest maze built for people two feet tall. Unfortunately the light up in the hills was poor because of the rain and mist so I didn't get the photo of the view I wanted.
After just one rainy night in the Hill country we decided to head down to the beaches on the south coast where the weather was bound to be an improvement, and it was. The South coast is where the better beaches in Sri Lanka are, beaches are popular places and accordingly prices for just about everything went up on the South coast. Probably more so with it being Christmas and New Year.
Christmas day we went to a fish and salad barbecue on the beach at the Ganesh Gardens Cabanas and afterwards with some friends we'd met back up the beach to where there was a party.
We seemed
Frescoes at Sigirya
the lady on the left has African not Sri Lankan features, there were trade routes between Asia and Africa way back. to be the only group of foreigners at the party, the rest of the people were Sri Lankan men and most of them were already on the dance floor getting down and crazzzy. They had a DJ and for the first hour or so he was blasting out the usual techno house type anthems you hear in beach bars all over this planet, and which I can't abide. The party on the dance floor was clearly rocking and after a while the DJ changed switched to some kind of mad Sri Lanka techno, a very strange sequence of repetitive beats and vocals that from where I was sat sounded fairly mental.
But we were busy, engrossed chatting with our new friends and drinking the local gin and a nice Sri Lankan rum-like alcohol made from coconuts called Arrack, every 10 minutes or so one Sri Lankan or another would come up and try to persuade us to get on the dancefloor.
(Sri Lankans don't really bother with measures, they pour in inches, normally about two inches in a glass which looks like the equivalent of about 5 or 6 shots from optics in a pub or bar back home. on top of Sigirya
Abandoned by the ancients, but still obviously a swimming pool Also Sri Lankans don't mind if you buy your own bottle of spirits from a shop and drink it in their establishment, just so long as you use mixers from behind their bar, I might try that in a Manchester pub) 😊 ......yeah right.
Ultimately the Sri Lankans were just too irresistible and they succeeded in getting us up on the dancefloor, and here's the thing, it was absolutely great! I don't know how it works, or why it works, but the energy and enthusiasm of the Sri Lankans seems to fit their mad music and it was all very infectious, you have to join in.
They weren't really dancing as such, it was more a sort of hearty bouncing up and down with a few John Travolta moves thrown in. A big sweating man in a white robe with a bald head and a pot belly, looking a bit like the Buddah himself, seemed keen seek us all out one by one and give everyone a spin and a hug, fantastic.
I woke up on Boxing day morning and lay in bed looking out past the veranda at the thatch of palm trees in front of our cabana.
I took a few moments to try and imagine the approaching roar of and the sudden sight of a wall of sea water high as a building bursting through the trees, because that's what would have happened had I been lay there at 10am on Boxing day morning 6 years earlier when the tsunami hit.
The Ganesh Gardens Cabanas we stayed at had a scrap book of photos showing how their place looked before and after the tsunami. And a clipping from a local newspaper with a story from someone who was staying there that day. He describes being on his way to breakfast when he turned to see a wave as 'high as the roof' coming towards him. He was washed into the mangroves about 80 metres inland where he managed to hold on to a tree branch which saved his life. After the water subsided it took someone from the village to come with a set of ladders to rescue him out of the tree, which illustrates just how high the water level was, even inland some.
We remembered the Ganesh Gardens from our trip here in 2001. I spoke with the boss about how he got
Lynn taking medicine with the guy at the herb gardens
All the plants outside look like nondescript jungle plants to me, but they are all used for medicinal purposes started again and he told me he got a loan from the bank to rebuild the place from scratch. He's done a good job, it's nice to see someone doing well considering there was nothing left of his place just a few years ago. 35,000 people died in the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. It's heartbreaking to talk to the poorer people, the fishermen, talking about homes and boats being washed right away, yet they still have to carry on.
The beaches west of Tangalle get progressively more busy and commercialized the closer they are to the capital and the airport. Next we went to Mirissa about 50kms west of west of Tangalle but it didn't really work out there. We ended up in a windowless mosquito infested dungeon of a room with stains on the bed sheets and a minging shower for three days. The owners couldn't quite seem to rustle up a mosquito net without holes in it. Mirissa itself was ok although the beach could have been cleaner. Leaving Tangalle where we'd come from a clean room and uninterrupted wide open spaces on a beautiful beach to the three day experience in Mirissa felt a bit like
getting out of a rolls royce and getting into a mini. Me and Lynn decided to go back to Tangalle and The Ganesh Gardens.
Back at the Ganesh Gardens they threw a new years eve party. We came down for the barbecue in the evening and saw that they'd shifted all the furniture out of the restaurant so that it could be used as a dancefloor and arranged the tables and chairs down on the sand next to the sea. The staff had draped strings of sparkly lights up and down all the palm and fir trees around the place. There was a bonfire lit and a few fire crackers going off. The DJ for the first few hours at least was playing his own nice cool ambient mixes. We sat down at a table a few metres away from the waters edge, there was a cloudless sky and a full moon, it was all very agreeable. They'd got the ambiance just right. In the morning there was nothing to show that 200 odd people had been partying half of the night, the staff had stayed up all night to clean the place up. A nice touch.
Unseasonally
rice terraces
rural Sri Lanka for Sri Lanka it had rained hard while we were in Mirissa during one or two afternoons and sometimes in the evenings. Back in Tangalle the weather seemed to even out into what I would think of as the perfect weather. Hazy skies with spells of warm sunshine so it's not too hot and a strong breeze blowing in from the Indian ocean (you're jealous, but thats ok😊) We spent the last eight days of our time here walking the beach or lying in the hammocks strung between the trees at the Ganesh Gardens reading and drinking lots of tea, with the breeze hissing through the trees and the palms and watching the fussy return each evening of flocks of bright green parakeets. It was a nice way to end our trip.
The End
I liked it most on this trip when we binned the plan and did things instinctively, spontaneous decisions made in the moment. Arizona, California, Cambodia and Caribbean Belize were all destinations I never ever thought we'd visit that went from an idea to reality within 48 hours. To have the freedom to wake up in one country and say over a coffee "Hey,
what do you think about going to this place?" to the next day actually stepping out of the airport there, with all the different sights and sounds and everything else. It's something.
By happy coincidence those decsions we did make on the spur of the moment always seemed to be the right ones. In California, Arizona, and Belize we had a lot of the best experiences and definitely the most fun. And albeit for very different reasons than having fun the most challenging and yet positive experiences in Cambodia.
A month ago with the end of the trip looming me and Lynn were sat in Cape Town drinking white wine and reminiscing about all the people, places and experiences of the past year. Not just the good things but also some of the depressing, shocking and even alarming things we'd seen. We talked about having had to rearrange thoughts and opinions on places after going to them and finding out that long held preconceptions were in fact, wrong. And about all the characters we'd met along the way who's paths we'd never have crossed in normal life. And finally about what else could we have done with the
Helga's folly guesthouse
It's folly if you don't ask the price before you start ordering drinks same amount of money that we would have enjoyed as much? And there is nothing, you can't really put a price on life experiences.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.251s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 12; qc: 46; dbt: 0.1723s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
