Knocked Off My Feet in Serendip

In 1999 I visited Sri Lanka along with Bali, Lombak and Hong Kong (which I will discuss in later posts). Sri Lanka was engaged in a civil war at the time, but it was pretty much confined to the north of the island. Also, I had already successfully experienced Northern Ireland during its time of troubles, and San Sebastian during its Basque bombings, and as a result, felt I could safely find my way around Sri Lanka. My previous travels had taught me that the headlines for many woebegone places usually obscured a normal everyday life that was no more dangerous than home.

The Romans knew the island of Sri Lanka as Serendivis, (yes, the Romans knew that the island that is now Sri Lanka existed and, in fact, traded emeralds and gold for  silk and spices provided by both the island and India), the Arabs called it Serandib, and the Persians revised this to Serendip, the word from which we have derived the word “serendipity”. This would imply that the island has always been home to a lucky realm. This, of course, was usually not the case, and certainly wasn’t during the time I visited. The streets of Colombo were filled with armed military, the economy had crashed, and there was very little money left for reliable infrastructure or for most of the the usual comforts of modern life.

When I flew into the Colombo airport at night I noticed that on the ground I could see hardly any street or house lights anywhere.

A car and driver were waiting for me when I landed. I found this to be very curious because I hadn’t asked for any ground transport. The driver spoke excellent English and promised to guide and drive me around the country. This was an unwelcome offer. I felt very uncomfortable with such a “minder”. I was traveling on a budget and doubted I could afford such “help”. I also find my best pictures and most unique experiences by walking around and taking public transport. Enlisting a guide would make for a very boring trip. Finally, I’m a rather quiet person and would find it exhausting to keep up a running conversation with someone who was trying to entertain and cultivate me. I would much rather just look out whatever window I’m sitting next to and say nothing. That, of course, would be very rude of me with such a guide.

I can’t say for sure who procured a driver/guide for me, but one of my staff in my New York City office was married to a Sri Lankan woman whose family was involved in Sri Lankan politics. I believe that she emigrated to the US when her father was assassinated, but that a brother and nephew remained in the country. (My memory is a little vague about these details). When I returned to the US I never confirmed that the staff person or his wife had anything to do with my unexpected driver because I ditched the driver as soon as we arrived in Colombo from the airport and was embarrassed to discuss it with people who probably had good intentions. I lied and told the driver that I had already booked and prepaid my hotels and transportation. I feel a little bad about the obvious lie, but now know that I did the right thing.

Colombo was brutally hot, its air thick with humidity and truck exhaust. The streets were filled with grim looking soldiers with grenades hanging off their uniforms and automatic rifles pointed a little above the ground. Everyone appeared to be tense and expecting something unpleasant to happen at any moment. I immediately headed to the train station with the intention of taking it to the cooler environs of Kandy.

The train ticket was very inexpensive, and all of the seats were filled. I saw people standing or sitting in the doorways between cars, so I found an empty doorway, took off my backpack, and sat on the steps with my feet out the doorway. The train was traveling so slowly that I could have jumped off the steps, jogged next to the train for a few minutes and then hopped back on with no problem. Every few minutes the train would stop and workers would jump off the train to fix problems in the track ahead. The trip from Colombo to Kandy is only 75 miles, but it took the train most of the day to get there.

At first the train crossed a series of flat, muddy fields, and there was no change in the heat and humidity. After about a half hour the train started to climb into the Sri Lankan highlands. Six young local guys stood behind me on the landing between cars. Eventually one tapped me on the shoulder and asked. “Where you from?”
“The United States.”
They started laughing and shouting, “Yes, Yes! The United States. You know the Backstreet Boys, yes? The Backstreet Boys! We are Sri Lanka’s Backstreet Boys.”
They then proceeded to sing what must have been the Backstreet Boys’ greatest hits. Eventually I was able to ask them where they were going. They were the sons of various Colombo garment manufacturers, and were heading into the hills for a vacation. They spoke excellent English and our conversations made my day on the dusty, cranky train pass by quickly.
The train arrived in Kandy during the late afternoon, and I moved directly from the train to a hostel I had read about when researching my trip. It was a pretty grungy place with bare electrical wires next to the bathroom’s shower head. I decided at that point to book ahead for all of my next stops.

Kandy was the last capital of the Sinhalese Kingdom before the British annexed the whole island during the 19th century, (the Portuguese and then the Dutch had been content to occupy only portions of the coast, but the British wanted the whole pie).

Kandy was, and still is a Buddhist religious center. The Temple of the Tooth, where one of the Buddha’s teeth is allegedly housed, sits next to the old royal palace and exists as a popular pilgrimage site. The Temple of the Tooth had been bombed by the Tamil Tigers the year before I arrived, but any damage had already been repaired when I visited the temple.

In front of the Temple of the Tooth rocked a tame elephant wearing a jeweled head covering and side blankets. Though Kandy was cooler than Colombo, the elephant must have been miserable in the heat. If I took a picture of the poor beast, I can’t find it now.

Near the royal palace was what I’ll call the “Justice Loggia”. I can’t call it the “courthouse” or even the “courtroom” because it had no walls. It was a large square area covered by a roof. Spectators could approach the court from all sides to view justice being disseminated. It was  Justice theater in the round. Under the roof a wooden balustrade surrounded the court area and separated the spectators from the litigants. Inside this area the prosecutors,  and the defendants with their legal counsel pleaded their cases before a judge dressed in full robes and a powdered wig. I felt almost as sorry for the judge as I did previously for the elephant.

I then walked downtown to the commercial district where business was noticeably slow. Several stalls were selling brand name nylon ski parkas for about $12.00 each. I doubt that anyone needed such parkas in Kandy, but they showed up at the market because they were made in Sri Lanka and possibly “fell off the truck” on their way to export.

The next day I walked out to the Kandy botanical garden which was nice enough but did not contain a lot of green or luxuriant growth. I rains a lot in Kandy and the rain leeches a lot of the nitrogen out of the soil. The caretakers simply couldn’t afford to replace the lost nitrogen with supplements.

After two days in Kandy I headed further up the mountains to the British hill station of Nuwara Eliya where the British governor and his senior civil servants would spend Sri Lanka’s hot summers.

When I arrived, Nuwara Eliya still retained the echoes of its former magnificence and elite status, but it clearly had been in decline for a number of years. I stayed in a former governor’s mansion which a Sri Lankan bank, (Ceybank),  had purchased and converted into a hotel. Despite its former glory, there was no heat or hot water while I was there, and though it sported a bar and restaurant with an extensive menu, I sat at my table during my first night for over an hour and a half while the chef went out to buy the ingredients for a chicken curry. During the entire time of my stay, the only other guests were a British couple with a 9 month old baby, and one other guest.

The British couple were a little vague about why were traveling in Sri Lanka with a 9 month old baby, but I thought it was a bad idea. The baby already had a bad cough.

I  had encountered several other European young people when I was in Kandy. They appeared to be working as interns or trainees for their governments. Their assigned tasks didn’t seem to be particularly dangerous or secret. One young French guy I kept running into would rent a motorcycle each day and drive different routes north until he reached a government road block that prevented him from going any further. He would then report the location of this road block back to his government.

At one time Nuwara Eliya must have been a very comfortable place for the British elite to spend their summers. There was still an functioning golf course while I was there, as well as public rose gardens. A thoroughbred race track was still in place, though while I was there the town was using the infield as a garbage dump. It looked like horses could have continued to race on the turf course if it had been maintained properly. (Kids were playing cricket on it when I visited).

Despite the grandstand’s condition, there were plenty of horses in and around the track that may or may not indicate that racing did occur from time to time.

The next day I decided to circumvent the lake that sat just outside of Nuwara Eliya. On that walk, I found an abandoned trout hatchery that had silted in years ago. I saw no one fishing on the lake and suppose that any trout it may have harbored in the past had long since been fished out. There were plenty of leaches, however. Once when I had to wade through tall grass to get a picture of the lake, I found dozens of them attached to my shirt sleeves and trousers. This discovery caused me to remove my shirt and trousers to search my body for any that may have made their way inside. Thankfully, there were no leaches, and no other hikers on this side of the lake.

I later came upon a farmer who drove his cattle into the lake, perhaps to wash them off or maybe to remove mites. Given what I had experienced a half hour earlier, I was sure they would leave the lake with  more leeches on them than when they went in.

The evening after my stumble around the lake, I decided to splurge and eat at Barnes Hall, another governor’s mansion turned hotel. I arrived early and was escorted into a dark paneled bar along with about 20 other people. I settled in at the end of the bar and quietly watched the rather sophisticated fun and games unfolding  around me. The rest of the patrons consisted entirely of young British couples and their friends. As a group they were young (25 to 30 years’ old), attractive, sophisticated, articulate, and, above all, self assured. They often aimed snarky remarks at each other which always resulted in laughter, even from the targets of the jibes. The sharpness and originality of the speakers wit seemed to be valued more than its content, and no one seemed to take the ridicule seriously. I wondered where the hell these people were doing the day, since during my walk in and around the town, I had seen only local Sri Lankans. There are some exclusive bed and breakfasts on the tea plantations in the hills outside of town, and I thought they might have been spending their day out there.

After about 20 minutes uniformed waiters led us to the dining room. It was about the size of Hogwarts’s dining hall, and along the entire side wall were a series of tables that held more food than I had ever seen in one place at one time. As I picked through the roast turkey and lobster tails I wondered where they could find so much food in a town where the previous night’s chef had to search for chicken curry ingredients. Did I feel guilty about my gluttony in such a poor country as I returned to the tables for seconds of cheesecake and creme brulee? Sadly, I did not. I was just glad to have something good to eat. It’s just so easy to become corrupted, isn’t it?

The next two days I spent exploring the tea plantations in the hills surrounding Nurawa Eliya. It was here that I made the best pictures of my trip!

Although the tea plantations were private property, no-one ever stopped me from entering, or asked me what I was doing there.

While Sri Lanka earned some hard currency from its garment manufacturers, its economy relied primarily on its tea industry. Thousands of acres in the high country had been planted in tea, and several processing plants were located there.

The Sinhalese actively fought the British, (sometimes successfully), when the British decided to take over the whole island. After their defeat, they were in no mood to work for the British on the tea plantations. As a result, the British imported Tamils from India to plant and harvest the tea. In the tea growing area, Hindu temples greatly out numbered the Buddhist stupas.

There was a lot of activity on the tea plantations when I visited. Tea was harvested at the same time it was being planted.

The tea business must have been making plenty of money because I saw a lot of workers building terraces for new tea cultivation.

I had walked about 7 miles out of town and up into the tea plantations in the morning and spent most of the day exploring and photographing the landscape there. I was plenty tired by 4 o’clock and was very pleased to see a Nuwara Eliya bus parked in a cul-de-sac as I spilled out of an area of new plantings. There I saw the driver, the conductor and two passengers playing net-less bad-mitten in the road. I sat down and rested while watching them play. After about 10 minutes the conductor looked at his watch and nodded toward the bus. We all acted like this was an every day event.

When I got back in town, I could see that I had missed what must have been a very busy market day.

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The street overflowed with garbage. It looked more like a battle had occurred on the street than a market.

That night I bought some cashews, dried fruit and a Coca Cola which I consumed in my room so as to balance out the previous night’s expense, and then fell into a sound sleep.

The next day I took the bus back out to the tea plantations.

As I was walking back toward town later in the day I came upon a large cow standing on a very narrow path. The slope was very steep on both sides, and I was having a difficult time getting around the cow without grabbing onto someone’s tea plants to pull me up on one side of the path or risk sliding down the slope of the other side. As I was trying to squeeze by, a young boy appeared out of nowhere. He held a stick and struck the cow’s rump with it soundly. The cow moaned and stepped off the path, sliding down the slope a few feet. I then committed a well-meaning mistake. I gave the boy a coin to repay him for his help. I moved on down the path. A couple of minutes later there were three kids following me, each holding his or her hand out. I moved along a little quicker. Soon ahead of me were a another half dozen kids, while the group behind me had grown to about 15. Behind them the cow was looking over their heads apparently to see what all the fuss was about. I was surrounded by smiling faces and outstretched hands (not the cow). I could move neither forward nor back. I immediately knew what to do. I reached into my pocket and grabbed a handful of coins. I threw them high into the air over the group behind me. One coin bounced off the cow’s back a a little girl caught it in mid air and laughed. The kids in front of me scooted past to wrestle for their share. As the kids behind me engaged in their own contentious budget meeting, I ran down the hill toward the town. I don’t know how these children were able to communicate with each other, but just outside town two teenage girls came up from a ravine laughing and holding out their hands. I thought it was unseemly for these older girls to be asking for money and just shook my head “no”.

I woke up the next morning feeling a little under the weather. I didn’t think much of it as I checked out and walked to the bus station to purchase a ticket to Colombo. I should have known better and bought my ticket the previous day since many other people also wanted to go to Colombo. Luckily I bought the last ticket, but had to sit on my backpack since there was no available storage areas.

At around 10:00 am the bus began its descent toward Colombo. For hours the bus traveled down through beautiful valleys past tea and vegetable plantations. I didn’t remember climbing so high when coming up on the train, but at that point I wasn’t thinking clearly. I felt dizzy and nauseous. Several times I drifted off to sleep. Around noon the bus stopped at a restaurant so the driver and passengers could have lunch. I wasn’t hungry and stayed on the bus and slept. The bus pulled into Colombo about 2:30pm. I staggered through the broiling streets looking for a hotel. After I found one and checked in, I hauled myself up to my room and passed out on the bed.

I woke up suddenly around 7:00 pm. aware that something was wrong. I knew I was sick, but something else was causing my panic. I had stayed an extra day in the highlands. My God! My flight to Hong Kong leaves tonight! Whatever illness I had contracted, I didn’t want to address it in a Sri Lankan hospital. Hong Kong offered much better care. (A Hong Kong doctor later identified my illness as a mosquito borne form of encephalitis, and provided the necessary medicine). I immediately checked out and rushed outside to catch a taxi to the airport. My flight was scheduled to leave at 9:00. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare. Unfortunately, there was a long line of cars stopped at a road block outside the airport. When my taxi finally reached the checkpoint the guards took their time studying my passport and searching under the taxi with mirrors on long sticks for bombs. I finally made it into the airport and through its internal check points. My flight was making its last call for passengers just as I reached the gate. When I got into the plane I hoisted my backpack into the overhead compartment, eased myself into my seat, locked my seat belt, and fell asleep. Several hours later I arrived in Hong Kong and felt well enough to easily find my hotel, and a doctor.