leaving yet again.

I just met a lady who was cleaning the bathrooms here at the airport. Sri Lanka tour over? She asked. Yes, I said. Going back to London. London. Ah. She said. Have you been there? I asked. But really, I knew the answer to that one. So I jumped in with India. Have you been to India? Nooo. Live Negumbo. She said. It is the city closest to the airport.

A lot of people have never left Sri Lanka. Most of the people I have met. The cultured and multi lingual guide on my tour, Lakshen, had only been to India because his girlfriend, now his wife went to university in Poona. The owner of the hotel I have just been staying in Bentota told me that it is very hard for anyone from Sri Lanka to get a visa anywhere outside of South East Asia. So Europe or America is a pipe dream for them.

I have three passports. I think it is legal. I always had a British one. I got an American one when I had been living over there for a number of years and felt that it was important to vote. I got an Irish one, based on my having been born in Dublin, last year. Because the sadness I felt over the Brexit Vote to leave Europe has not subsided. I don’t take it for granted. I remember the hard process to get my American passport and I had a lot going for me. And the present world is full of people risking everything on boats or through deserts to get to a land where they have no sure way of being able to stay. It is one of the great things about traveling the world is that the ground under you never stays stable. If you steer clear of the 5 star living, then the ground rules of the community you are visiting will show themselves quickly.

Most Sri Lankans are just so happy to smile and push their children forward to shake your hand and try out their school English.

I met a woman yesterday who got off her pink bike and after finding out where I was from wanted my address. Why? I said. Are you going to write to me? Then she started to say that she wanted to repair her house. I didn’t have much with me. What do mean? I asked. Money for a new roof? She smiled and tilted her head. I don’t know you, was my response. She didn’t seem fussed. I went on walking. She passed me on her pink bicycle and waved, saying Good bye. Smiling as she went. Odd really. Just trying it on I think. Charming in it’s own way.

Sri Lanka is really trying, with a new hard working primeminister, to take care of their own. There are no pensions and there probably will never be enough money in the depleted kitty to have any. The pay is low. The lovely lady who gave me a couple of Ayurvedic treatments works daily at a fancy shmancy hotel where she does at least 7 female customers a day and she is paid 18,000 rupees for the month. ( $61/ 48 pounds GBP)

The noble and wonderful Shiva who took us for Hikes in the mountains around Heptale used to work as a salesman in the textile industry. Before he came back to take care of his wife after she had gone into depression after losing a baby. His pay then was 3,600 rupees ($ 12.20 /10 pounds GBP) He has built his house out from a one room hut into a house with a separate kitchen and two bedrooms. So now with his salary of 600 rupees a day for the hiking ($ 2./ 1.61GBP) he told me with a quiet pride that now he was middle class.

There is an echo here of the dignity I found in the Cambodian people. Self contained. Honest. Proud. Trodden on, but intact. Gentle. Kind.

The children all go to school from 7.30 till 1.00. School is free for everyone. As are the unforms. Every child gets two every year. Here in Sri Lanka the uniforms are white , white white. Symbol of their optimism that every thing will work out somehow.

eating like a native

I remember many years ago I had a Tibetan family living next door to me for a few months. They were truly lovely. They set up a shrine in the bedroom. They allowed me to join in their New Years Celebration when everything you wore and ate off had to be new. And you made these dumpling things and hidden inside each one was an element which would indicate how your next year would go. Charcoal - not good. Coral - jolly good. I also remember because they were Buddhists that I assumed they would not eat animals for food. They did have yak cheese and yak butter, but they also ate an enormous amount of red meat. They answered my question by explaining that there were almost no vegetables that grew in the high altitudes of Tibet… what was I thinking…. So here I am in a predominantly Buddhist country where the national symbol is a cockerel. Coconut Oil abounds.

They have 72 varieties of bananas.

Rice is with almost every meal. But chicken, fish and mutton ( which is actually goat) are on every menu at home or in a restaurant. Cows aren’t sacred over here. They are not wandering the highways like they do in India. No one eats the many dogs. And the cats are very skinny. And elephants have always been herbivores.

They drink coconut milk. In hardware stores, you can buy machines that will scoop out the coconut flesh. They fry bananas. They pull mangoes and papayas off the trees in their gardens or lean over to their neighbours. They believe lemons are not good for you and ayurvedically Limes triumph every time. They grow the real cinnamon… not the cassia that is like bark and should be sucked not chewed. This cinnamon dissolves. The vanilla pods are long and bendy. That is apparently how you tell if it is not old and therefore devoid of it’s essential oil, you just wrap it round and round your finger. (I will be trying that the next time I visit Wholefoods.) Pepper grows as a vine up the trunk of other trees. Tamarind is used medicinally along with limes and hot water to start your day. And of course there is Cardamon. And cloves. Which should be green and light brown respectively otherwise they are useless.

Because Sri Lanka has coast upon coast that belongs to them they have fishermen. Who bring their catch in and sell it at the markets, or on the docks, or it is caught and frozen ready for export to foreign lands. Tuna, sardines, butter fish, crab, and many that have names I can’t pronounce.

Fishing is a family tradition but it also a dangerous game. Some men just wander around with a bended stick or a small round net that they hurl into the waves from the sea shore. Some larger nets are thrown out over night and then pulled in by groups of men in the morning light. But there are also boats that go out for a week or three. That can hold 7 tons of fish. Young men go out to make quick money. But seemingly many don’t come back and the main reason is that they go to relieve themselves over the side of the boat holding onto the ladder and they lose their grip and bam. The poop death.

They love dal and fish curries. They often make them with the much prized dried fish which have a overwhelmingly salty taste. They make salads with onion, tomato, grated coconut, lime juice and salt. The favourite condiment is Sambal, which is coconut, red chilli, lime and salt.

They have hoppers which is rice batter swirled around in a small round pan and is turned out as a perfect bowl for you to fill with dal or curry. And there is Kottu. Starts with vegetable, grows with an egg and can end up with chicken ( bones and all ) and the most important ingredient, Roti, which is a chewy kind of bread. And the whole thing is chopped at speed and with some noise on a hot metal plate, and then piled like a Cobb Salad on a plate.

They even make their alcohol from the coconut flowers. These extraordinarily agile men climb high into the trees and walk between them on taut ropes and hit the flowers which release the liquid into the waiting coconut shells. Refined it becomes Arrack. But they call it toddy. And the men are called ToddyTappers. They use what they have. Like those Tibetans next door.

17 miles from India..

Sri Lanka is separated from India at it’s closest point by 17 miles. But it could be. 170 miles. You can’t lump cities here as being representative of the country. As you can’t with almost any country. But one of the first things I noticed was the lack of garbage. And I don’t really understand how 17 miles could make such a difference. But there it is. Inexcusable really. In Mysore, which was the cleanest city I visited in India, apparently the Royal Family have given money to fund a programme to clean up the streets. And you do notice it…a bit. But over in little Sri Lanka, you may have unfinished buildings and bumpy pavements but you don’t have the piles of rotting vegetables, or mountains of plastic bags.

There are many street dogs, and an occasional one with mange, but they are amazingly calm. And they look much more nourished than those in India. All the male dogs are running around with their balls hanging. Actually, that’s where I’d start, if anyone asked me. A quick nip would relieve a lot of confusin at street level. I started in Negombo which is a city just north of Colombo and what I lost in those 17 miles was the colour. The saris are no longer blasting your eyes at every turn. There are lungis on men and some occasional pretty dresses on women, but there are a lot of T shirts and jeans, which don’t make a feast for the eyes. But the vegetables and fish compensate a lot.

The main religion by far in Sri Lanka is Buddhism. There are Protestant churches from the Dutch. Catholic Churches from the Spanish. There are mosques, there are Hindu temples. They all seem to rub along together.

There are the tea plantations originally planted by a Scotsman. The centre of the island is the high country where, as in India, the tea is picked by women from India. But here,these are Tamil women from the south of India. They live in those same tiny huts. They carry the same bags on their head. They have to pick 18 kilos of the leaves to get their daily wage of 2000 rupees. ( which is five pounds or six dollars 50 cents)

The north is where the civil war took place. The south is where the beaches start. And they continue up the south west coast and that is where the tsunami hit on the day after christmas in 2004. The roads are remarkably good. They were made with Chinese loans. And there begins a tale that rivals science fiction. The Rajapaksa family came to power in 2006. Mahindra Rajapaksa then gave his brothers the best jobs and billions were siphoned out of the country… Hmm doesn’t that sound familiar? They lost power in 2015 briefly, which is when the inflation rate went sky high and they grabbed the power back in 2019 until they were thrown out of office by an angry mob in 2022. So not only is the country in unending debt to the Chinese, the family oversaw a project called Port City”..which is 2 sq. Kilometres of reclaimed land just south of the original and totally functioning port of Colombo, but this one belongs to the Chinese. And I mean really belongs. No leases here. It is sovereign land in the middle of the Country’s capital that belongs to the Chinese. They originally released prisoners from China to work on the construction, but the Sri Lanka lifted a hand and now the labor comes from the local workforce. Port City, when finished, will make the original Colombo port outdated and it will die. And it seems all the beaches on the south western part of the island will be so affected by this new outcrop that the ocean patterns will change, and they may die too. It is estimated that 18 billion was slipped into foreign offshore accounts by the Rajapaksas. It truly makes me want to cry when people do it their own. So heartless. Unspeakable.

But there are trains and buddhas and elephants and many, many many smiling people.