Teardrop - Part 1
Sri Lanka hangs like a teardrop off the southern coast of India. The teardrop could represent such beauty to wet the eye, or for its still recent war torn past. It stunned my senses like I never thought it would – punchy blue skies, vivid greens, and a spectrum of colours injected by women in Sari’s. Marco Polo described the Island as the ‘finest of its size’, and I would have to concur. I hate making throwaway comments like ‘it’s my new favorite country’, so read on…
Like a wave the humidity engulfed me as the airport doors parted. I headed for the Fort area of Colombo, the centre of it all, and checked into the YMCA. (Why? – its fun da da dada). Colombo, it’s fair to say, is not like any Indian city I’ve been in. For a start it’s clean - there aren’t the trash lined gutters and pavements and the CBD is developed complete with a twin tower world trade center! The Fort is also the traditional target for Tamil Tiger bombings. (A cease fire has been holding since Dec 2001, however there was an assassination of a high TT leader in the north the day I arrived, generating speculation in the papers.) The buzz of the center is muted a little by road blocks with an imposing military presence complete with sandbagged posts, razor wire and automatic weapons. PHOTOGRAPHY FORBIDDEN. Adrian, whom I met at the YMCA and split a room with, posited: ‘Do the military guys arrest people or just shoot?’ I didn’t push it with the photos. North of the fort men played cricket on a dirt patch under the nose of a sentry tower.
It might have been the smiling happy people, or the colourful tuktuks that lowered my guard. A gentlemen who worked (and I had met) at the YMCA caught up with us near Galle Face green, a strip of park nuzzled up to the sea. He was on his way to his Ayervedic specialist. Adrian, a UK doctor, advised him that blood out your butt is serious, and if he doesn’t get better in a few days to see a real doctor. He’d come up short to buy his medicine so he harmlessly asked to borrow the 320 rupees that he’d pay back at the guesthouse. Of course, he didn’t work at the YMCA and I had never met him (I was dazed when I arrived there) and I never saw him again. I lost out about NZ$5. It explains too why he didn’t seem too fazed when Adrian unethically told him he might have cancer!
We just had to have a meal at the World Trade Center, and in a different scene, the Pagoda Tea House, the retro diner where Duran Duran shot their video for ‘Hungry like a Wolf’. I got my new Indian Visa in a day, and chilled in Viharamahadevi Park, set to move on the next day.
Our train departed from the old English style Fort Station for Rambukkana, the jump off for the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. The government run orphanage was set up to save abandoned or orphaned wild elephants. Where else can you be up close to a herd of 60 elephants roaming freely in the sanctuary area, working under the watch of their Mahouts, before rolling down to the river for a soak and play? Magnificent. Hearts gushed at the sight of a two month old baby ele being bottle fed.
Inland Kandy is said by some to be the only other real city in Sri Lanka. Here the Sri Dalada Maligawa (Temple of the Tooth) houses the left molar of the Buddha, snatched from the flames of his funeral pyre and smuggled in the hair of a princess into Sri Lanka in the 4th Century AD. The tooth survives here, having been moved around, stolen, returned, and burnt in Catholic fervor by the Portuguese (but no! they pulled a swap and the real tooth was saved). The reverence for this Buddhist site is echoed beautifully in the grounds and architecture of the temple, now restored after been rocked by a bomb in 1998.
In one of those freak meetings I bumped into Asa and Theresa, the Swedes I met in Varkala, around the lake. We paid our way into a plush hotel pool over looking the lake, and in the evening caught a Kandyan dance performance. The night was capped with some bevies at the locals, cut short by spoilsport closing times.
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