Sunday 20 December 2009

The final installment

I forgot, the first thing our taxi driver from Colombo said to us, upon disembarking was:
‘Welcome to Sri Lanka Mr Sir Charles Butcher. Great country, stupid people’.

We left Hikkaduwa with tears in our eyes. We went downstairs to say goodbye to all the staff that had treated us so well, and at first I thought they too had tears in their eyes, but they were actually still stoned and tired from the trance party. I had shaved the night before for the first time in a month, so I don’t even think the owner recognised me. Nevertheless, genuine thanks were exchanged and we were off.

Our destination was Yala national park, not too far from the South-East coast, via a 100ft concrete Bhudda statue and tunnel-temple built from Japanese donations. Apparently the Tamil Tigers and the SLA had fought a battle in Yala some years ago. Yala also has one of the most dense leopard populations in the world.

We did not see wild cats of any description. The park is best not viewed in a monsoonal downpour, and as we checked into the Yala village, at about 2pm, we were just in time for the first rains of the eastern monsoon. I was a bit nervous about the storm, because we had heard that it had not rained in Yala much over the past few weeks. When it has not rained, all the animals must search for water at the easily identifiable, large, watering holes. I asked the man at reception whether the booming, pulsating thunder meant that it was going to rain. ‘No sir’ he said, ‘this is just a small tropical shower, it will pass’.

It did not pass. It was pouring when we jumped in the jeep and pouring when we jumped out. Yala had been quite popular that day and there were no trackers left, so it was just us and the driver. However, he did a magnificent of job of searching every cranny for the elusive leopards, hooning up and down rivers, over big granite rocks and generally breaking the rules. We saw the rocks that leopards always hang out on and the remains of a meal, but the driver’s efforts were to no avail – leopards just don’t like the rain.

Despite not seeing any leopards, and getting saturated for three and a half hours bouncing around on the back of a jeep, we had a great time. Yala is mostly scrub-jungle, not the plains of Uda Walawe, so spotting wildlife is an adventure in itself. There are also huge, moss covered wetlands and an incredible beach that juts out with a granite boulder like an obelisk. We saw a lot of spotted deer, some very close up. There were reptiles galore, from goannas to crocodiles and even a chameleon eyeing us off from a tree branch. As usual there were thousands of peacocks and waterbirds perched above the buffalo wallowing in the pools of mud. Down at the beach, we caught site of a lone elephant feeding from a distance. There are very large, tusked elephants in the park, but elephants too don’t like the rain, they hang out under the cover of the jungle and wait until it stops. There is no hurry too – water is everywhere.

Right as the sun was setting, our driver glimpsed an elephant walking over the road and blasted down the trail to find it. It was a big male and we watched its trunk curling between the thicket of jungle, but it did not come out and we had to leave. We returned to the village a little disappointed, but that’s the way it goes. We contemplated the idea of canning the train from Ella to Nuwara Eliya the next day and going out on the jeep again the next morning, when it would be clear, but the observation carriage on the train was supposed to be very good – so we opted to stick with the plan.

Our hotel was very nice. Yala village is right inside the park, so after six you have to be escorted to and from your room on the chance that wild elephants attack (oh how I wish they did!). Our room was simple, but very clean, with, I must say, the best interior decor thus far. We had a drink on the observation balcony and stared at pictures of leopards and elephants and bears that we did not see. Dinner was a huge buffet with everything imaginable. However, I opted for the plain old Indian curry and roti breads.

We were up at 5:30am for the drive into the hills. As we expected, the weather was beautiful. We saw a crocodile lazing in the lake right out the front of our hotel. The drive to Ella took a few hours of winding through the Sri-Lankan hills, and we stopped at a waterfall for some tea on the way. We arrived at Ella train station roughly on time to find out that our observation carriage tickets were not actually booked, but had been supplanted by some public sector intervention. So we had to be satisfied with second class tickets. The very little green and brown train rattled into the station on time, but, as we got on, there were no seats in second class. In the end we sat in the corner on the floor of the ‘restaurant car’. It was a beautiful view if you could squish past the other two hundred people packed into the restaurant car, and we took turns at kneeling beside the window to take photos. By the end of the three hour journey, neither of us could feel our bottoms and we certainly had a taste of Sri-Lankan public transport, but all I could think about were lost leopards, elephants and bears.

We disembarked at Nuwara Eliya, the highest town in Sri Lanka and one of the centrepoints of the tea industry. Tea is everywhere – I have often heard that the hills are ‘carpeted’ in plantations, and that is a pretty accurate metaphor. It is like that have taken the original hills and shaved them bald. Then they put a knobbly green carpet all over them. The plantations roll on and on forever – kilometres and kilometres of smoothed, luminous green hills broken only the roads and armies of tea pluckers traversing the brown tracks cut into the hills.

For lunch we had some very genuine Sri Lankan rice and curry with beef, chicken, dahl, coconut sambol, and papadums. It was an enormous meal. That afternoon we visited a tea factory which went through the process of how tea is made. I did not know that tea is fermented. I was pretty tired from the early start though, and was most entertained by the Santa Claus wearing what looked like a bearded ‘scream’ mask handing out balloons. From there we visited a ritzy hotel, and our driver went AWOL and pretended that we were interested in a room so he could get a look at them. We managed to convince him to drive us back to the hotel, and, both still full from lunch, we went to bed.

We slept in (relatively) the next morning for a leisurely breakfast at about nine. By ten we were on the road again, this time to Delhouse – the launching point for our 2am walk to Adam’s Peak. The drive was extraordinary – along potholed, single lane roads swirling through the tea plantations. Driving through them was a slow affair - apart from the hair-pin bends that plummet into the green abyss, there are the psychotic red buses that career around every one of them. The road moves through many tiny villages with mothers and fathers and their children, just standing on the porch, waving and smiling to whoever comes past. So too the tea pluckers who come to the roadside to combine their individual sacks of tea – they smile and wave as we pass. Even at the innumerable security checkpoints the eighteen year old soldier with an AK-47 smiles and waves as he lets us through.

We arrived in Delhouse in time for some lunch and a stroll through town. Delhouse is a tiny town, built mainly to service the pilgrims who take the 5000 step walk to the peak at this time every year. Most religions claim the peak in some way or another. The Catholics think that Adam (or St Thomas, either will do) took his first step on earth here. Hindu’s believe something similar, but with one of their gods and Buddha is said to have taken his last step here before ascending to nirvana. Most of the pilgrims are Buddhists, but through the window of our hotel room, we could hear the familiar, sonorous Hindu music wafting from a loudspeaker over the valley. Our hotel had a great view – from a balcony you could see up either side of the mountains surrounding the valley – some of them planted with tea, to the peak itself, which is periodically covered with passing clouds. At night, a single lane of lights crawls up the mountainside to the summit.

Dinner was an assortment of curies with rice and pappadums, served with the assistance of a sri-lankan man sporting a huge gut, a mullet, a sarong and a t-shirst reading ‘i’m sick of it all’. We both went to bed early, but I was anticipating the 2am alarm and didn’t sleep well. The alarm didn’t matter anyway as someone came bashing on our door at two. We woke, put some DEET on for the leeches (along with some clothes) and went downstairs for coffee (the ‘i’m sick of it all man was still there in the same shirt’, smiling). By 2:30 we were on our way through Dalhouse town. All the shops were covered in tarpaulins, but you could hear people snoring behind them. It was a clear night. Stars and the illuminated trail were clear and easily visible – except for the peak which was obscured by a solitary cloud.

The first part of the walk was gentle, past a couple of temples, some statues of Buddha and one of Ganesh. After the first couple of kilometres, however, the stairs became steep. And when we thought they could not get any steeper – they did. All the way up the trail – right to the summit – were shops overstocked with coke, biscuits and lumps of what looks like brown fudge (but is actually awful to eat). The fittest people on earth walk up and down this trail with boxes of glass coke bottles on their heads.

We had been walking for an hour and a half or so, and were now stopping every couple if minutes to rest, when we heard the sounds of Buddhist chanting and thought we must be close. We struggled further and further up, sweating and heaving with breath to find out that another of these small shops had a big radio and that the summit was ‘another 2 hours’ further up.

Further on the stair became so steep that handrails were attached to the trail. As we moved into the solitary cloud (produced by the sweat of westerners I think now) it became extraordinarily cold. The steps went on and on. Kate threatened to vomit every couple of minutes. It was an eerie place. It is pitch black but for the orange lights. Clouds rush past in front of your eyes and it is bitterly cold, but sweat has wet your entire shirt and you are really hot on the inside and cold on the outside – like a badly microwaved pie – trudging one foot after another towards a distant echo of chanting further up in the clouds.

Eventually, eventually, we ascended our last step to the summit at around 5am. I was expecting a flat rock with some vegetation and this mythical footprint, but there is just a small temple with some drummers and a guy sitting behind a desk asking for donations from a microphone.

We had walked up 7km of steps for nearly 2 and a half hours and felt duly satisfied. However, the point of walking up is to catch a glimpse of the sunrise. Being an hour or so away, we huddled at the top in the freezing wind beside a dog that had followed us the entire way.

Alas, we were foiled again. All we saw (apart from a very occasional glimpse) was the grey innards of passing clouds. At around 6:30 we joined the local pilgrims and walked back down. We met a Welsh guy on the way and chatted back through the valley to the hotel. After breakfast, we jumped back into the car. Kate sat in the front and spent most of the slow, windy journey, waving at people on the roadside.
Eventually we turned onto the main highway, although we had to stop and turnaround at a few points because we had gone the wrong way. Once on the highway, it was a quick drive to Kandy, stopping only once for spicy roadside rottis .

Our hotel in Kandy was on the side of one of the hills surrounding the city, and looking over the lake in the middle of town. Both Kate and I were exhausted and sore from the walk and we chose to lay low for the night – we went for a swim, had dinner and went to bed.

Kandy is an old city and the Sinhalese cultural capital. I read that for 300 years this kingdom in the hills managed to survive against repeated Dutch and Portuguese raids. It was not until 1815, when, what sounds like internal dissent, created the motivation for the Kandian king to sign over his territory to the British for the purposes of ‘law and order’. Kandy is now Sri Lanka’s second largest city (but pales in comparison to Colombo, which has over a million people. Kandy had around 112,000 in 2006). The town is nestled into and surrounded by hills crawling with jungle. We have to keep the doors locked because the monkeys hanging in the trees are on constant patrol for anything left on the balcony. Every morning they come out and sit on our balcony, munching on their morning’s steal of croissants and bread rolls from the buffet downstairs. One night we made the mistake of leaving a bottle out there. By morning the monkeys had smashed it all up, probably looking for food inside.

The main part of town seems to be the lake, which is long and narrow and ends in the centre of town, not far from one of Sri-Lankan Buddhists most sacred sights – the temple of the tooth.

We were up at 7:30 the next morning and went for a swim, had breakfast and prepared for a big (and final) day of sightseeing. As we were about to leave we got a phone call advising against travelling on public transport, as there had been some cases of avian flu here recently. The guys at reception did not seem perturbed, they just suggested not to travel on the bus. We had actually planned to take the 654 from the clocktower to the botanical gardens later that day, but alas, just as with Unawatuna, the public bus in Sri Lanka eluded us.

So we walked down, past the lake in the centre of town (which had some dead carp in it), to the temple of the tooth. The temple is said to contain the sacred relic of Buddha’s left tooth, but there is some controversy over whether the Portuguese stole the tooth on one of their raids and destroyed it in Europe. Of course the Portuguese records say that they did and the Sri Lankan records say that the Portuguese destroyed the ‘fake’ tooth relic that they kept for that purpose. Either way, the Sri Lankans believe it resides in the inner sanctum of this temple, and is a very sacred site for them. In fact, even the British acknowledged that this relic was important for the stability of the Kandyain state and consequently the effectiveness of their indirect rule. The British took the tooth as well, but had to return it and apologise for the offence caused. That is probably why the LTTE bombed the temple in 1998 or 1999 ( I think ). In the museum there are many photos of the crater left by the truck bomb and the damage to the temple, which was very extensive. Burma and Thailand had donated many ornate statues and gems to the temple and they were on display as well. It was a good museum.

Before visiting the museum, which is inside the temple, we walked though the outer courtyards, where they were preparing for an address by the president that evening. As you would expect, there the army was everywhere with roadblocks and machine guns. It was an interesting contrast to see a fully fortified pillbox out the front of the ‘ministry of Buddhist affairs’ building.

Once inside the temple, we visited the inner sanctum where the tooth is supposedly kept. During our visit the morning ceremony was underway (good luck rather than good management) and so we watched the Kandyian drummers and pilgrims being herded past the relic. We joined the line and were herded ourselves past the little door that opens to the place where the tooth is kept. I was being a good tourist and trying to take a photo, so missed the chamber we were being herded so fast. Kate looked and saw one of the big gold dagobahs (half domes with a pike on top) that the tooth is supposedly in. I think i now understand George Lucas’s inspiration for the planet dagobah where the very Buddhist Yoda comes from. In fact there was a Yoda lake on our way to Yala National Park.

From the sanctum there was a series of smaller temples, one very hindu looking with colourful dragons and an unidentified god, and a reading room. Outside people were placing prayer candles on a rack and another dagobah and some more temples with adorned statues of Buddha and other figures inside. The temple elephant was hanging around eating and there were two more elephants chained further outside for the pleasure of tourists. Elephants have obviously always been a part of Sri Lankan life and culture, but it’s still not enjoyable to see them like that.

From the temple we walked down the main street of Kandy, past the heritage queen’s hotel which retains all its white, austere Britishness. A wholesale handicrafts market was in one of the adjoining buildings and both secret santas did well here.
Further down the main road there was a bakery which did decent coffee and fantastic pastries and sandwiches. Being a little sick of rice and curry we hung out here for quite a while. The main street was busy with stalls on the footpath selling colourful toys and underwear. As we walked towards the clocktower, where the red buses and green tuk-tuks live, a demonstration started to brew. After three weeks, I finally worked out who the opposition candidate for the presidency is. It is a general from the army. Both candidates are running on the platform that they won the war. The demonstrators marched up the street letting off fireworks, waving green flags and jutting pictures of the general in the air. Near the clocktower busloads of people carrying blue flags brandishing pictures of the president were gathering. We decided to head off at that point.

A tuk-tuk drove us to the botanical gardens, about 7km outside of central Kandy. We wandered around the gardens which had every variety of vegetation imaginable form herb gardens to flowers to rainforests. One palm tree, found only in the Seychelles produced coconuts 10-20kg in weight that take decades to produce. Mostly, however, the botanic gardens were a den of kanoodelling. In every shaded corner and tree crevice were local couples embracing and glancing furtively at passers-by. As with everywhere, there was a scam, and here, it is the ‘come and look at the scorpion I just caught’ angle.

We did not ask our tuk-tuk driver to wait around, but as we walked out of the botanic gardens, exhausted from the kilometres of wandering in the heat, there we was at the gate, waving and smiling. I was impressed at the initiative – he certainly took a risk in coming back to get us. It also means that we probably paid a little too much. Nevertheless we were overjoyed that he was there and, although he also tried to take us to a silver shop (which is standard), we tipped him well.
That evening we went for a Kandyian dancing show. Officially it is the ‘Kandyian arts and cultural centre’, but if you walk in the front door, it looks more like a bingo hall with old men leaning lazily against the wall sipping drinks and smoking. A lady was counting piles of money on a cheap craps table. Down the hall was the auditorium and we sat with about six other people waiting for the show to start. It was a shame that so few people attended, because the dancing was brilliant. The show was professional, the costumes were incredible and the performances visually stunning. There was fire walking and some great drumming. We enjoyed it alot. Kate enjoyed it so much she wanted to take home a piece of the action, and with some translation help did a dark deal in the carpark for a handmade Kandyain neckpiece.
We had dinner but something was awry in Kate’s and she spent the night vomiting. By the morning she was tired, but feeling much better. We put our departure time back an hour and left the hotel at nine. The drive to Kegalle took two hours or so. We stopped on the top of of one of the hills surrounding Kandy for a photo before leaving.

Kegalle is near the Pinewalla elephant orphanage. Various people had told us differing stories about the quality of the place, but we were impressed. First we walked down to the river, where maybe 200 elephants, orphaned for some reason or another, were having their morning swim. None of them were chained and it was an awesome spectacle to watch them wallow and roll in the river and throw mud all over themselves for a few hours. They come incredibly close to the rocks where people watch (and there are many many tourists), although always under the eyes of their ‘mahouts’. The elephants are still wild and have been known to get aggressive. One elephant had lost a leg, apparently from a land mine.

After the bathing, all the elephants walk back up the street to the park area. We had lunch in the restaurant overlooking the river then walked up the park. In the park the elephants just roam around eating. The only chained elephant was a huge blind tusker. Apparently if they don’t restrain him he just walks around bashing into trees and other elephants, injuring himself and potentially the numerous baby elephants in the park. He does get regular walks. It was extremely hot and all parts of the park are in the sun, so we jumped back in the van and headed for Negombo.

We reached Negombo (near the airport) at around four, (after I had to guide our driver through various towns). Negombo is a lot like other Sri Lankan towns that we passed through except that instead of a Buddha or a ganesh in a little box with flowers around his head, there is a statue of Jesus in a box with flowers around his neck. Negombo is 90% Catholic – something which dates back to the Portuguese era. There are still large white churches and river canals from that period.

Kate had a sleep when we reached the hotel and I sat outside trying to find a wireless internet connection and getting eaten by mosquitoes. We left for the airport at 1am, and had a little sleep before. Our flight left Colombo at 3:20am and we arrived in Chennai at 4:25. After making our way through the incomprehensible web of security checks and forms our flight to Delhi left at 6:35 and we came in on time at 9ish. Thankfully there was someone there to pick us up and we got into the hotel by 11 – not in time to visit our favourite Indian buffet joint around the corner for breakfast. It was interesting to see Delhi from the air. After an endless patchwork of rice fields and agricultural land, delhi rises like a juggernaught from the landscape. There are very few tall buildings, just a jungle of stout, square apartments. Even from the air, the pollution on the Yumna was visible.

After checking in we took the metro to Ramakrishna Ashram Marj and finished up our shopping. Even for the third or fouth time, Delhi is still left us bewildered. As we walked out the door, a giant eagle swept down in front of us to grab a piece of rubbish that must have had some morsel of food in it.

From the metro we walked down the Parhaganj bazzar and fended off our last wave of touts and shifty men asking you to come back to their house for tea. Many of them have an uncanny ability to pick your nationality. There are very few Australians here, but they seem to be able to spot me – maybe its the shorts. For the last time we choked and coughed in haze, dodged the piles of rubbish and dangling electrical wires and picked black snot from our noses. Thankfully we didn’t have to do too much bargaining.

In the evening we had dinner at a local restaurant and met up with Kristine – the girl we met on our first tour into the mountains. It was nice to catch up, although we were all tired and we met up again the next morning for breakfast and lamented about all the things we would miss (mine was the food).

We are staying in the same hotel as when we first arrived. Mentally (and temporally) it is eternity ago that we stepped into the burning air from Delhi international airport and thought ‘what have we done?’ as the tuk-tuk careered its way through what looked like a wasteland of rubble and dust.

We are looking forwards to stepping off the plane in Sydney.

Love,
Kate and Charles.

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