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.