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.
‘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.
Saturday, 12 December 2009
Sri Lanka (2)
We had worked ourselves into a nice routine. Each evening we would say – ‘we’ll get on a bus to Unawatuna tomorrow morning... definitely’. Then we would go to bed, wake up, have a breakfast of fruit, eggs, toast and press coffee, check the surf and decide that we would not go to Unawatuna. We never actually got on a bus to Unawatuna.
So that is how it went: breakfast, a surf check, a little ping-pong, a surf, a bike ride up town to the ATM, lunch, a surf, dinner, a game of ping-pong, and bed.
Each day we would also remark to one another that the surf could not possibly get any smaller than it was that day, but alas, it continued to impress. Despite the dwindling waves and increasing crowds, we would still head out for a couple of surfs a day, although most of the time out there was spent scratching lice bites and following turtles underwater. Kate would have everybody know that she has upgraded from a 7'10 at home to a 7'2 here. Because she is taller than everybody else, she will also have you beleive she is riding a shortboard. She came in the other day and was upset because she did not get a barrell. No joke. she actually said this to me and followed it up with, 'how long do you think it will be before I get one?'. All the same, she is surfing really well - standing up on most waves and riding reef breaks. Kate prefers the reef breaks for the predictability of the wave. At reef breaks the 'tunnel' is easier to find.
Many of these afternoons were interrupted by a storm and some light rain. But as they passed over the air became very still, making the surf look a lot better than it was.
Eventually it all this relaxing became too much and we decided to do something different. So, on Wednesday we booked a tour to Uda Walawe National Park – where we were ‘guaranteed’ to see many elephants. We were picked up at about 10am, by Charles (the driver), and the journey took nearly 3 hours. First we followed Galle road all the way along the south coast and we got our first glimpse of the breaks at Kabalana, Midigama and Weligama – Kabalana looked quite rideable. We stopped for a photo of Weligama harbour, which is a wide U shaped bay with fishing boats hiding behind the reef. There is a little sandbar leading out to a small, rocky island where a Dutchman has built a house. Not a bad location at all.
We didn’t get a look at Mirissa, but travelled on to Martara and followed the coast road, past innumerable palm-fringed beaches, fishing harbours and street side stalls selling fresh blue-fin tuna until we took a left and turned into a completely different landscape of irrigation canals and staggered rice paddies. Regardless of the environment, there are a few constants – people with bicycles, people with umbrellas (for the sun, not the rain) and people riding bicycles holding umbrellas. Of course there are rows and rows of billboards with the president on it – hugging mothers, holding children, waving to the crowd, helping old women across the road, discussing important matters etc. Along the coast road there are also many cemeteries and roadside graves with people’s pictures on it fromthe tsunami.
Although most has been rebuilt, there are still the ruined skeletons of houses abandoned on the beachfront.
Uda Walawe National Park is special because of the density of elephants within its bounds (the elephants are actually all displaced from a controversial reservoir project) and its climate. Because of something to do with the surrounding mountains, this small area of land get very little rain compared with the rest of Sri Lanka. As such, it cannot support the same jungle that fills in the gaps between the rice paddys, and is mostly savannah and plains of chest-high grass. As we approached, it was certain we were going to give this theory a good test, as the surrounding mountains were completely blotted out with ugly green clouds moving towards the park.
Before going into the park, we stopped in a little town for a bite to eat. It would have been a fairly uneventful visit of it not for these little, fried rice cakes that we later found out were made of rice, chilly, spices and ‘mouldy fish’. Only after our stomachs had well and truly turned did we find out that ‘mouldy’ fish is actually dried fish from the Maldives – i.e Maldy’ fish. We still both had a bit of a stomach upset the next day – and it the rice-cakes look pretty guilty in the line-up.
Anyway we entered the park, jumped on an open canopy jeep and met our tracker. The jeep rumbled into the park and set off along the dirt roads wiggling through the high grass. Some of these roads were atrocious, and a 4WD was a necessity. Many times we would have to plunge through huge puddles of water or drive through crevices that made us feel as though we would tip. It wasn’t long before we saw the first elephants – feeding beside the road and about to make their way across. They are fascinating animals and we watched them eat for a while. As they made their way across the road they came in groupings. For each baby 2 females position themselves either side of the baby almost obscuring it from view. We saw a lot more elephants including one herd that got very riled up at our approach and started trumpeting and stamping their feet and throwing dirt all over the place. Our tracker said that 6 vehicles had been damaged that month from elephant attacks. It’s mating season and the males are quite territorial.
Apart from the elephants we saw the single scale of a crocodile, many birds whose names I cannot remember – but I do remember one very odd-looking bird called a hornbill – a buffalo that I didn’t realise was getting very cranky at me, lots of monkeys, and some jackals that looked like foxes. There are apparently a few leopards in the park, but we did not see any.
Miraculously the storm over the mountains split into two and passed either side of the park. One storm was enormous with a round falling lip, like the bell of a mushroom. It was so stark, at one point we could see under the lip and into the storm. Somehow, it did not rain while we were there. Incredible.
Part of the allure of the park is the setting. The plains and swamplands are set against the dramatic peaks of Sri-Lanka’s hills. As the sun went down and the clouds drifted down and between the various summits, standing in the back a jeep watching elephants in the foreground and the mountains behind was a remarkable experience.
It was dark by the time we headed for Hikkaduwa. Our driver and Kate got into a conversation about eating and fish and before she knew it she has locked us into a home cooked meal of the most questionable fish we had passed prior to the safari. Charles (driver) had spotted a fat river fish on the road side for a good price. He said that they were excellent on the BBQ. I was unsure. The fish had definitely been sitting there all day with the flies doing the business and a group of goannas hanging around waiting for the fish guts. Not to mention I had no idea about the river that it came from. Anyway, we remained polite, he bought the fish (which would have been a few kilos), wrapped it in one of his car-floor rugs and away we went.
It was a long drive back home, and we were all tired. Again, most of the conversation revolved around the end of the war. I feel quite uncomfortable talking about it with people (mostly because I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about) because, as you would expect, many of them have lived this war and have passionate feelings. Not being in the north of the east, most people, including our driver have very positive feelings about the conduct of the current president. This driver was quick to recite the story that the LTTE placed civilians in front of firing government troops and that government troops would never kill a civilian. There are also some other commonalities, like that the united states was indirectly supporting the LTTE with weapons and also made an offer to purchase the south harbour as a strategic missile base, that Norway, when they tried to broker a cease fire gave financial support to the LTTE and that the UN, when it worked here distributed satellite phones to them. In the same breath are justifications for the government expelling NGOs (unless you go with a government soldier) from the refugee camps (which appear to be indefinite) and claims that the perpetrators of past bombings are confessing to their crimes and being brought to justice. Some of all this might be true and it is very difficult to sort fact from propaganda. Whatever the case, it is clear that the government is very adept at controlling the information coming out of northern Sri-Lanka. He also had some incredible and distressing stories about the tsunami day.
Thursday was a formula day with a late wake up, stinking hot weather and small surf. We did not contemplate the idea of going on the bus to Unawatuna and I spent most of the day stressing about how to politely decline the river-fish. Charles picked us up at about six-thirty, and we drove north a couple of kilometres to his village – Milla. He had a small, but really nice house. We met his three kids who were very funny and his wife, who cooked us an extraordinary dinner, his sister, brother, aunty and great-aunty. As fate would have it, Charles left the fish in the back of the car all day and it went off. So we had an amazing tuna steam-grilled in banana leaves with sides of local brown rice, lady fingers (which are not bananas here, they are okra) dahl curry, coconut sambal, papadums and a sour Mango chutney. They say the best food in Sri Lanka is at the home and it’s true. We had a fun night looking at old wedding photos and pictures of the kids.
Friday morning we planned a surf trip down the south coast. We got up early, packed the suncream and wax and left with a driver named Samba at eight. Samba is a local surfer who works at the place we are staying. He had excellent knowledge of all the breaks and surfed with us wherever we went. It was nice to feel like you were sharing the fun with someone showing you around. He was a quiet guy, but spoke excellent (if sparse) English and wasn’t afraid to share his critique of his religion and culture. We enjoyed the whole day talking and surfing with him.
First we visited Kabalana, it is named after the hotel it breaks in front of. Apparently it was only ‘discovered’ 10 years ago, but maybe you Dad or Ph surfed it in the 70s or 80s. It was pretty small when we arrived, but was picking up by the time we left. Kabalna is only about 5km from Midigama and is a left-hand reef break with a bit of right on it. Apparently it can hold quite big swells and get very good (it is the south coast’s most ‘powerful’ reef break according to Lonely planet) but this day it was a short but fun ride. All up we surfed for about two hours. Kate rode the beach-break further down by herself. The beach itself is superb with clear, light blue water, white sand and palm trees. She was going well until I came down to check the progress and convinced her to go out for one more. We paddled back out together and she pulled back on one that took the board and flicked it into her sternum. She left the water soon afterwards with some tears and a damning stare. It’s just bruised, but it hurt alot.
Next we surfed at Midigama, at a place called ‘plantation’, which was a fun right hand point, set in front of some semi-cleared land and houses, presumably by the tsunami. Just beside plantation is a point called ‘Coconut’ – it looked okay but we didn’t surf there. I was the only one out at plantation.
Just down the road we stopped at Weligama – the harbour I described earlier. Down the beach there are some great learning waves. Kate had a go, and even managed to jag one, stand up and ride it into shore, but her chest was too sore and we moved on to Mirissa.
Mirissa is a tiny place, just some small houses with bamboo fences and cows. At Mirisisa we had a lunch of fried rice, and Kate had Dahl curry, looking out over the point. Samba had described surfing at Mirissia like surfing in a pool – and it is. On side is a steep headland covered in palm tress, on the inside of the break is a line of reef bristling with urchins that forms a barrier to the shore and on the other open side is a rock outcrop that you paddle around to get out. Mirissa is a fun wave and a very beautiful place. It was only 2-3ft but I surfed for 2+ hours. If we come back it would be great to stay here.
On the way home we checked out Kabalana again but I was exhausted and we drove back to Hikkaduwa. Our surfing adventure, apart from Kate’s injury (she stiff but okay today) was a great day.
Today the well has come up, and it was quite good this morning (although I surfed very poorly and was very tired). The wind is quite strong this afternoon and it has mostly blown out, but I surfed again at lunch. We will see what happens at sunset. Tonight is also occasion for the weekly A-frame trance party. One way or another, it shall be a sleepless night.
Tomorrow we leave at about 8am for an afternoon safari and stay overnight in some ritzy bungalows inside Yala National Park. I’m hoping for some more elephants and maybe a leopard. We have had a wonderful time in Hikkaduwa and are sad to leave.
Our love to you all,
Kate and Charles.
So that is how it went: breakfast, a surf check, a little ping-pong, a surf, a bike ride up town to the ATM, lunch, a surf, dinner, a game of ping-pong, and bed.
Each day we would also remark to one another that the surf could not possibly get any smaller than it was that day, but alas, it continued to impress. Despite the dwindling waves and increasing crowds, we would still head out for a couple of surfs a day, although most of the time out there was spent scratching lice bites and following turtles underwater. Kate would have everybody know that she has upgraded from a 7'10 at home to a 7'2 here. Because she is taller than everybody else, she will also have you beleive she is riding a shortboard. She came in the other day and was upset because she did not get a barrell. No joke. she actually said this to me and followed it up with, 'how long do you think it will be before I get one?'. All the same, she is surfing really well - standing up on most waves and riding reef breaks. Kate prefers the reef breaks for the predictability of the wave. At reef breaks the 'tunnel' is easier to find.
Many of these afternoons were interrupted by a storm and some light rain. But as they passed over the air became very still, making the surf look a lot better than it was.
Eventually it all this relaxing became too much and we decided to do something different. So, on Wednesday we booked a tour to Uda Walawe National Park – where we were ‘guaranteed’ to see many elephants. We were picked up at about 10am, by Charles (the driver), and the journey took nearly 3 hours. First we followed Galle road all the way along the south coast and we got our first glimpse of the breaks at Kabalana, Midigama and Weligama – Kabalana looked quite rideable. We stopped for a photo of Weligama harbour, which is a wide U shaped bay with fishing boats hiding behind the reef. There is a little sandbar leading out to a small, rocky island where a Dutchman has built a house. Not a bad location at all.
We didn’t get a look at Mirissa, but travelled on to Martara and followed the coast road, past innumerable palm-fringed beaches, fishing harbours and street side stalls selling fresh blue-fin tuna until we took a left and turned into a completely different landscape of irrigation canals and staggered rice paddies. Regardless of the environment, there are a few constants – people with bicycles, people with umbrellas (for the sun, not the rain) and people riding bicycles holding umbrellas. Of course there are rows and rows of billboards with the president on it – hugging mothers, holding children, waving to the crowd, helping old women across the road, discussing important matters etc. Along the coast road there are also many cemeteries and roadside graves with people’s pictures on it fromthe tsunami.
Although most has been rebuilt, there are still the ruined skeletons of houses abandoned on the beachfront.
Uda Walawe National Park is special because of the density of elephants within its bounds (the elephants are actually all displaced from a controversial reservoir project) and its climate. Because of something to do with the surrounding mountains, this small area of land get very little rain compared with the rest of Sri Lanka. As such, it cannot support the same jungle that fills in the gaps between the rice paddys, and is mostly savannah and plains of chest-high grass. As we approached, it was certain we were going to give this theory a good test, as the surrounding mountains were completely blotted out with ugly green clouds moving towards the park.
Before going into the park, we stopped in a little town for a bite to eat. It would have been a fairly uneventful visit of it not for these little, fried rice cakes that we later found out were made of rice, chilly, spices and ‘mouldy fish’. Only after our stomachs had well and truly turned did we find out that ‘mouldy’ fish is actually dried fish from the Maldives – i.e Maldy’ fish. We still both had a bit of a stomach upset the next day – and it the rice-cakes look pretty guilty in the line-up.
Anyway we entered the park, jumped on an open canopy jeep and met our tracker. The jeep rumbled into the park and set off along the dirt roads wiggling through the high grass. Some of these roads were atrocious, and a 4WD was a necessity. Many times we would have to plunge through huge puddles of water or drive through crevices that made us feel as though we would tip. It wasn’t long before we saw the first elephants – feeding beside the road and about to make their way across. They are fascinating animals and we watched them eat for a while. As they made their way across the road they came in groupings. For each baby 2 females position themselves either side of the baby almost obscuring it from view. We saw a lot more elephants including one herd that got very riled up at our approach and started trumpeting and stamping their feet and throwing dirt all over the place. Our tracker said that 6 vehicles had been damaged that month from elephant attacks. It’s mating season and the males are quite territorial.
Apart from the elephants we saw the single scale of a crocodile, many birds whose names I cannot remember – but I do remember one very odd-looking bird called a hornbill – a buffalo that I didn’t realise was getting very cranky at me, lots of monkeys, and some jackals that looked like foxes. There are apparently a few leopards in the park, but we did not see any.
Miraculously the storm over the mountains split into two and passed either side of the park. One storm was enormous with a round falling lip, like the bell of a mushroom. It was so stark, at one point we could see under the lip and into the storm. Somehow, it did not rain while we were there. Incredible.
Part of the allure of the park is the setting. The plains and swamplands are set against the dramatic peaks of Sri-Lanka’s hills. As the sun went down and the clouds drifted down and between the various summits, standing in the back a jeep watching elephants in the foreground and the mountains behind was a remarkable experience.
It was dark by the time we headed for Hikkaduwa. Our driver and Kate got into a conversation about eating and fish and before she knew it she has locked us into a home cooked meal of the most questionable fish we had passed prior to the safari. Charles (driver) had spotted a fat river fish on the road side for a good price. He said that they were excellent on the BBQ. I was unsure. The fish had definitely been sitting there all day with the flies doing the business and a group of goannas hanging around waiting for the fish guts. Not to mention I had no idea about the river that it came from. Anyway, we remained polite, he bought the fish (which would have been a few kilos), wrapped it in one of his car-floor rugs and away we went.
It was a long drive back home, and we were all tired. Again, most of the conversation revolved around the end of the war. I feel quite uncomfortable talking about it with people (mostly because I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about) because, as you would expect, many of them have lived this war and have passionate feelings. Not being in the north of the east, most people, including our driver have very positive feelings about the conduct of the current president. This driver was quick to recite the story that the LTTE placed civilians in front of firing government troops and that government troops would never kill a civilian. There are also some other commonalities, like that the united states was indirectly supporting the LTTE with weapons and also made an offer to purchase the south harbour as a strategic missile base, that Norway, when they tried to broker a cease fire gave financial support to the LTTE and that the UN, when it worked here distributed satellite phones to them. In the same breath are justifications for the government expelling NGOs (unless you go with a government soldier) from the refugee camps (which appear to be indefinite) and claims that the perpetrators of past bombings are confessing to their crimes and being brought to justice. Some of all this might be true and it is very difficult to sort fact from propaganda. Whatever the case, it is clear that the government is very adept at controlling the information coming out of northern Sri-Lanka. He also had some incredible and distressing stories about the tsunami day.
Thursday was a formula day with a late wake up, stinking hot weather and small surf. We did not contemplate the idea of going on the bus to Unawatuna and I spent most of the day stressing about how to politely decline the river-fish. Charles picked us up at about six-thirty, and we drove north a couple of kilometres to his village – Milla. He had a small, but really nice house. We met his three kids who were very funny and his wife, who cooked us an extraordinary dinner, his sister, brother, aunty and great-aunty. As fate would have it, Charles left the fish in the back of the car all day and it went off. So we had an amazing tuna steam-grilled in banana leaves with sides of local brown rice, lady fingers (which are not bananas here, they are okra) dahl curry, coconut sambal, papadums and a sour Mango chutney. They say the best food in Sri Lanka is at the home and it’s true. We had a fun night looking at old wedding photos and pictures of the kids.
Friday morning we planned a surf trip down the south coast. We got up early, packed the suncream and wax and left with a driver named Samba at eight. Samba is a local surfer who works at the place we are staying. He had excellent knowledge of all the breaks and surfed with us wherever we went. It was nice to feel like you were sharing the fun with someone showing you around. He was a quiet guy, but spoke excellent (if sparse) English and wasn’t afraid to share his critique of his religion and culture. We enjoyed the whole day talking and surfing with him.
First we visited Kabalana, it is named after the hotel it breaks in front of. Apparently it was only ‘discovered’ 10 years ago, but maybe you Dad or Ph surfed it in the 70s or 80s. It was pretty small when we arrived, but was picking up by the time we left. Kabalna is only about 5km from Midigama and is a left-hand reef break with a bit of right on it. Apparently it can hold quite big swells and get very good (it is the south coast’s most ‘powerful’ reef break according to Lonely planet) but this day it was a short but fun ride. All up we surfed for about two hours. Kate rode the beach-break further down by herself. The beach itself is superb with clear, light blue water, white sand and palm trees. She was going well until I came down to check the progress and convinced her to go out for one more. We paddled back out together and she pulled back on one that took the board and flicked it into her sternum. She left the water soon afterwards with some tears and a damning stare. It’s just bruised, but it hurt alot.
Next we surfed at Midigama, at a place called ‘plantation’, which was a fun right hand point, set in front of some semi-cleared land and houses, presumably by the tsunami. Just beside plantation is a point called ‘Coconut’ – it looked okay but we didn’t surf there. I was the only one out at plantation.
Just down the road we stopped at Weligama – the harbour I described earlier. Down the beach there are some great learning waves. Kate had a go, and even managed to jag one, stand up and ride it into shore, but her chest was too sore and we moved on to Mirissa.
Mirissa is a tiny place, just some small houses with bamboo fences and cows. At Mirisisa we had a lunch of fried rice, and Kate had Dahl curry, looking out over the point. Samba had described surfing at Mirissia like surfing in a pool – and it is. On side is a steep headland covered in palm tress, on the inside of the break is a line of reef bristling with urchins that forms a barrier to the shore and on the other open side is a rock outcrop that you paddle around to get out. Mirissa is a fun wave and a very beautiful place. It was only 2-3ft but I surfed for 2+ hours. If we come back it would be great to stay here.
On the way home we checked out Kabalana again but I was exhausted and we drove back to Hikkaduwa. Our surfing adventure, apart from Kate’s injury (she stiff but okay today) was a great day.
Today the well has come up, and it was quite good this morning (although I surfed very poorly and was very tired). The wind is quite strong this afternoon and it has mostly blown out, but I surfed again at lunch. We will see what happens at sunset. Tonight is also occasion for the weekly A-frame trance party. One way or another, it shall be a sleepless night.
Tomorrow we leave at about 8am for an afternoon safari and stay overnight in some ritzy bungalows inside Yala National Park. I’m hoping for some more elephants and maybe a leopard. We have had a wonderful time in Hikkaduwa and are sad to leave.
Our love to you all,
Kate and Charles.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Sunday, 6 December 2009
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