Peter's Solo Travels to Sri Lanka

SL Photo Album
Back in India after eleven days in Sri Lanka (SL), I write this stretched out on the bunk of a train heading north into the mountains towards Tibet. Its hot outside, in fact the glass of the window is too warm to touch. Herds of camel, sheep and goat pass by followed by their keepers, and under the harsh sun, people work harvesting crops of millet and cotton.

My reasons for visiting SL were tenuous. In January we were taught by a SL yoga instructor who seeded the idea, but really I just wanted to go somewhere that Fayette “anywhere you've been I've been too” Fox hadn't! It wasn't exactly nearby. 2500km by train over two days, staying in the cities of Ahemdabad, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Chennai (formerly Madras) and a short flight of 600km.

Ahemdabad
Once a year in mid-January, everyone in town shuts up shop to fly and fight kites from their roof tops. Apparently this is quite a spectacle. Unfortunately for me it was September and instead I visited a tired and musty kite museum, while it flooded outside with torrential rain. People didn't use umbrellas and walked around the market, shin deep in murky water.

My lasting image was a man foraging through river trash a few meters from a dead cow, being picked at by crows.

Mumbai
“The most atrocious city of either hemisphere” - Aldus Huxley

The setting for the phenomenal books A Fine Balance and Shantaram, set in the 70s and 80s respectively. Things have improved, though a few people said it had lost character. I loved the 50 year old Ambassador taxis, was horrified by a family of five living on a sheet of cardboard between parked cars alongside a chaotic main road, strolled along the coastline up to Chowpatty beach and did a non-profit slum tour of Dharavi, witnessing first hand where half of Mumbai’s people live and work (thriving industry and cramped often foul living conditions).

Chennai
“An absolute shit-hole with superb food” - Peter Merrett

Not a sophisticated comment, but factually accurate. Of the tens of million of tones of solid waste generated a day, only 27% is collected and disposed of by the government (comparing unfavourably to Delhi and Mumbai which both exceed 80%. Wow!). The rivers were black and could be smelt from 100 feet and the Piss Wall* was ever present.

Meanwhile, the food and coffee was some of the best (and cheapest) I've had in India!

Needing repairs to my bag, I approached a cobbler on the street. He gladly undertook the work whilst singing the praises of his daughter who was about to graduate. She was fluent in written and spoken English and was hoping to get a job in a call centre. He called her over and we chatted. He then excitedly requested that she read my book out loud (Catch22) which she did flawlessly. When he'd finished repairing my bag, he refused to take payment. I finally forced 10 Rupees on him which he gave straight to his daughter who smiled and ran off to the nearby corner shop.

Sri Lanka
So onto to SL, home of (among others) fantastic food, tea plantations, an ancient and charming (though slow and overcrowded) train network, fantastic beaches and a repressive war in the North with daily threat of terror attacks in the South.

Soldiers were everywhere throughout the country and security blocks dominated roads leading to and within Colombo. Bus journeys were broken every 20 minutes by checkpoints, during which all men had to get off and line up for ID inspection while armed soldiers (sometimes teenagers) came onboard to question the women and search though all luggage.

The British ruled in SL (then Ceylon) until 1948. Since the 1970s ethnic tensions between Tamil Hindus in the North\East and the governing Sinhalese have escalated, as the Tamil’s desire for independence and autonomy was ignored. Norwegian brokered peace talks from 2001 brought some stability, but in January these broke down and now there is almost daily shelling of suspected LTTE hideouts (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) in the North with many unreported civilian causalities and 160,000 Tamil refugees. In addition to the violence, the SL government is now described as the "world's worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances", hundreds of people (mostly Tamils) vanishing since 2006.

It was disconcerting knowing this was going on, despite little visibility in the news. Brief TV reports showed no pictures, just a voice recording and static picture of the heroic troops on parade. People didn't show any sign of frustration with security checks, indeed our taxi driver one day waxed lyrical about the charming and charismatic president who he “loved”.

My time in SL didn't allow for an excursion into the natural parks. Instead I split my time between Kandy (the cultural capital), the hill country (tea plantations) and beaches of the south west coast, touring on and off with a young Polish couple (Joanna and Wojtek). We all loved SL but had very different baselines for comparison. Having just spent 10 days in the Maldives at a phenomenal coral island resort, SL for them was crowded, polluted and chaotic. For me, having spent the last six weeks in India, the comparison was quite the opposite. SL was a veritable holiday.

There were lavatories at the train station, rather than pools of shit on the platform and tracks. Other than in the capital Colombo, I saw no slums, only a handful of homeless and the streets were remarkable clean. The traffic was comparatively serene, fewer animals roamed the streets and the dogs wagged their tails excitedly as you approached (to my dismal, dogs in India are covered in wounds, aloof by day and aggressive at night.

We were accepted by the locals and not continually interrupted by the questions "Where from? What name?". They spoke sophisticated English in an accent I could understand and there were women working in public! (shop keepers, soldiers, police), a real surprise after the inequalities of India.

Three days at the end relaxing on the beach, jogging in the morning, reading and snorkeling by day with evening cocktails was a superb conclusion.

Yes it was more expensive, the coffee rubbish and newspapers little more than neatly folded trash, but it was a good value, friendly experience. Softer on the senses than India, but still lively and tropical. If you can ignore the human rights violations and repression in the North, then I’d highly recommend visiting.

Peter – Back in India, Oct 2008

* Piss Wall – If it’s a wall and it’s in India, then there's a man pissing on it.