Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka

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It's been three weeks since my last blog entry, and for three good reasons.

One is that we have been in Sri Lanka, and the computers in internet cafes tend to be so old that you need to press 'rewind' when you've finished with it. The next is that we haven't stayed anywhere long enough to sit down and write a blog entry. And the third is that Sri Lanka is just too beautiful to want to spend any time other than the bare minimum sitting inside an internet cafe swearing at an implausibly slow internet connection.

Ah Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka. It's wonderful in every way. There wasn't a single day that wasn't a pleasure. Whilst India is best described as seductive or majestic, I'm finding it difficult to choose a word that best describes Sri Lanka; lovely might be a good one, but it sounds too unsubstantial, and doesn't describe the beauty of the country; beautiful may work, but it's overused and therefore loses some of it's sincerity. The thing I remember most about Sri Lanka is the greenness of the country, and the beauty of the countryside and the coastline, and vilages, towns, and cities.

We spent our time moving around the central part of Sri Lanka, and then the south coast. We visited Nogombo, Kandy, Sigaria, Nuwara Eliya, and Ella, before moving onto Mirissa, Unawatuna, and Hikkaduwa along the south coast. We used buses, tuk tuks, trains, vans, and taxis. The only place we visited that we didn't like was Nuwara Eliya. And Unawatuna as well I'd say, although to a lesser extent.

If you are fortunate enough to have the budget to stay in one of the old renovated colonial houses that sit in the midst of the tea plantations in Nuwara Eliya, it's a great visit. If, however, you are like me and James, and you are on a strict guesthouse budget, you will find yourself in one of the modest guesthouses on the edge of town, in the suburban leafy streets. And if you stupidly arrive in the middle of a full moon festival, you find yourself priced out of the modest guesthouses, as they hike their prices in anticipation of the rush of Sri Lankan holidaygoers, and you end up in the middle of the town.

I won't spend much time on the misery that is the Nuwara Eliya town centre, but suffice to say it's a place not worth the visit. Take the gridline frame and roundabout-strewn roads of Milton Keynes, mix it with the delapidation and concrete depression of Staines, and then add a good number of dogs, cows, and beggars and you have the general idea. We were travelling at the time with a Scottish rugby playing biologist called Merrin, and she had decided to stay in the grandiose colonial mansion closest to the town. We met her for dinner there, which was an interesting affair.

We were told to wear our best clothes and shoes, as the hotel adhered to strict colonial-era dress guidelines for the grand dining room and bars. I had a dress, but no shoes, so I had to wear tights and my converse boots, and cover up my front with a scarf James had bought. James had a shirt, but no trousers, so he had to wear his jeans and walking boots. Despite our best efforts, I arrived at the front gates leading up the house looking like a teenager anticipating the beginning of a Nirvana gig, and James was quickly ushered into the 'clothes room', where a tie and jacket reminiscent of Rising Damp's Rigsby at a night out at The Grange were despatched to him. We couldn't overcome the obstacle our footwear presented, however, and we were asked to eat in the 'casual' dining room. Needless to say, the decor was also casual in comparison to the ballroom where the other guests were eating. It was a good night though, with a five course meal for $25, and some nice Californian wine.

Unawatuna is a place that was obviously once very beautiful. Now, as planning restrictions of building 100 metres from the seafront have been hideously ignored, and more tour package holidaygoers are being shepherded there, it's not somewhere we wanted to stay for too long. You could hear the inmistakeable sound of many an English accent drift across the beach, as men talked about who they had kicked the fuck out of the weekend before in Blackpool, and women conversed about the finer points of rum cocktails.

Aside from that, the mosquitos there seemed to have been taking steriods, and were impossible to escape, and we stayed in a strange room built onto the side of a house. We were seduced by the 800 Rupee a night charge for the room. Amongst the miriad unpleasant oddities it provided us, we were woken at 7am each morning by the husband and wife rapping on the windows in order to give us tea, whether we wanted it or not, and kept awake at night by a pack of crazed dogs, who faught with vicious fericity with each other outside our window, and howled insanely at the moon inbetween bouts. Apparently this influx of testosterone didn't subside in the daytime, and my leg was humped within an inch of it's life while I tried to go for a morning run on the second day. My pleas for the owner to remove it only prompted him to rouse his entire family to come to the front of the house and laugh uncontrollably at me, while I tried to disentangle the excited dog from my person, only for it to come straight back for more, until one of them took pity on me and dragged it into the house.

Kandy is a wonderful city. It's built around a huge artificial lake. The construction of Kandy Lake was completed in 1807. It was a deeply unpopular project, especially with those workers who were forcibly employed to construct it, as it served no practical purpose. Those who initially resisted were impaled to stakes at the designated site of the lake, and it is said that their remains are still there. And the RMT thinks it has problems. Sri Lanka has the widest variety of animals, insects, and birds I have ever known. In Kandy alone, we saw turtles, giant monitor lizards, and hundreds of giant bats hanging from the trees around the lake, making a huge screeching din. They were easily as big as eagles when we saw them flying at night. We also watched an awesome electrical storm from our hotel balcony one evening, which went on for hours, and with no rain at all.

From Kandy, we set out with a guide called Suresh, and his minibus, to spend three days in and around Sigaria. We explored the acient second capital city of Polonnaruwa. We visited an important Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka; a series of caves in which enormous golden statues of the sleeping Buddha reside amidst brightly painted walls and ceilings. We visited Sigiriya, a giant rock peak where King Kashayapa build his citadel. It is apparently now a world heritage site and declared as world's eighth wonder. The $25 entrance fee wasn't as wonderful though, so we climbed a nearby rock plateau of the same height, to get the same beautiful views of the jungle terrain stretching out to the horizon in all directions.

We also visited five caves of Buddhas, where you run the mile-long gauntlet, barefoot, of monkeys and hawkers, and tea plantations, where farmers sleep above their fields in makeshift tree houses out of the reach of marauding elephants. We spent the second night teaching Suresh card games, and getting drunk on Arrack in our guesthouse. The seven or so staff found the opportunity to teach us card tricks and feed us more Arrack irresistable, and we got very drunk and learnt some new tricks. James has since attempted a few of them on other Sri Lankans, but I think some practice is needed.

The highlight was on the third day, when we drove for hours deep into the tea plantations, and spent the hottest hours of the afternoon swimming in an area of a river where waterfalls had created a deep, quiet natual pool. There were no other people there aside from a few local children who, as usual, found the startling white colour of my legs hilarious. We tried to swim up into the waterfalls, but the currents were too strong, and they carried you back down into the pool when you gave up. It was a thing of real natural beauty, and the selfish part of me hopes it doesn't become too famous.

We spent a lot of time on the road in the three days, and during that time I noticed the huge numbers of stray dogs. They are everywhere, in numbers so large that I would guess that they outnumbered people in some places. They are generally good natured and nice animals, but the state of them is appalling. They are all suffering from some stage of mange, and vary from constant stratching and biting to complete baldness, with red bleeding skin. They all need other vetinary care of some sort, and they are wretched.

The other think I noticed, particularly the further north we went, was the presence of the armed forces. The conflict with the Tamil Tigers is well known (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2405347.stm), and it was well felt in the northern most parts that we reached, although there was no hint of it along the coast. We were stopped regularly by army checkpoints whilst in the minibus with Suresh, although our presence as tourists meant we weren't searched. Sri Lankans on buses all had to get off at these checkpoints and give the soldiers their identification and have their bags searched. Posters recruiting for the army are all alng the roads, and we passed innumerable barracks for different arms of the forces, including military police, the air force, and several types of batallion and rank.

People of all ethnic backgrounds in Sri Lanka are tired of the conflict. The government is stirring up positive feeling with the recent gain on the Tamils, and the promise of an inevitable victory and end to the fighting. But the precarious state of the economy is fast becoming a significat problem, and the government is relying on the good news on the conflict to mask the looming economical gloom. At some point I think, the elation will turn to frustration, as the country's money crisis is not dealt with effectively.

In Ella, a small leafy village in the middle of the tea plantations, we were taught by some local boys who owned a bar how to play carrom. It's a great game, a bit like playing pool with your fingers, and we played it for quite some time, along with a couple of litres of Arrack (the bar owners called it an Arrack Attack), some noodles and other food, and a few bottles of beer. By the time we'd finished, the bar owner was so drunk he forgot to give us our bill, and we were so drunk, we didn't realise that we hadn't paid until we were half way to the coast the next morning. The last thing I remember of the night is a group of us trying to play cricket on the main road at 2am.

The six hour bus journey to the coast was the worst of my life. There were no available seats, and we could either stand while the bus hurled itself headlong into oncoming traffic and around corners at a pace that can only be described as 'suicidal', or sit at the feet of a woman near the front of the bus and endure the cramps in your legs and arse. I opted for a bit of both. It was miserable, and I fell off at out stop dehydrated, dazed, and feeling very sorry for myself.

After that night, and a couple of other 'issues' we had had while drunk (including a hilarious incident in India, where James went a bit mental, and Merrin tried to punch him in the face), me and James decided on a 'safety word'. If either of us said 'avocado' at any point in the evening, the other had to retire to bed, no questions asked, and would be updated in the morning on the reasons for the safety word being deployed.

We spent a fair amount of time on the coast, and my beachwear provided James with considerable amusement. First was my bikini. It's a white one, which you'd probably think wasn't a good choice of colour in the first place for someone of my alarming complexion. To make things worse, the bottoms had been sun bleached to a strange yellow colour at some point in India, making it look like i had pissed myself. In the absence of any bikini shops anywhere, I had to go out in a pair of black knickers. Then there were my beach shorts and t-shirt. I had two pairs of loose knee length shorts made up in Kovalam, in India, with some amusingly gaudy flowery material. Previously, in Kumily, I had bought a yellow t-shirt with an elephant and the name of the national park we visited on the front of it. Separately, the top and bottoms were aceptable. When worn together, I resembled a washed up beachbum. On top of that, whilst we were in Unawatuna, a dog ate mine and James' flip flops whilst we were eating dinner one evening. I was compensated with a pair of Barbie pink flip flops, complete with plastic pink hearts dangling from them, which completed my beach emsemble perfectly, making me look like a complete moron.

We spent Christmas Eve and Day in Hikkaduwa. It's a great beach, although I preffered the serenity and natural beauty of Mirissa, where we saw hundreds of small white crabs on the sand after dark, and a turtle laying her eggs on the beach one night. We had great plans for Christmas Day, including a litre of Arrack, a bottle of champagne if we could find one in one of the government wine shops, and a seafood banquet. Then we made the mistake of going out on Christmas Eve. After several Arracks, we were both too innebriated to remember to say avocado to each other, and we both suitably disgraced ourselves. We were drinking with a beautiful Italian model called Mimi, who quietly updated James on some of his personal carnage the next day whilst we nursed our hangovers in our santa hats on the sand. I wasn't so fortunate though, and for the next two days, I was approached by locals who were laughing and pointing at me, and then taking great delight in explaining loudly to me my actions over the course of the previous evening. James found this amusing enough, but managed to fully humiliate me by telling a randy old Australian with a big white beard my whereabouts on the beach. I had apparently been sitting on his knee for much of the early evening, playing with his beard.

While in Sri Lanka, I fought my way through A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. It's a really good read, and I'd recommend it, although be prepared to read all chapters at least twice.

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