SRI LANKA I

Negombo, Kandy, and the train to Badulla

Sri Lanka means Resplendent Island. Situated about 50 km off the the southern coast of India, Sri Lanka has held a significant position among the Indian Ocean trade routes an has an extensive history as a highly advanced ancient civilization, popular colonial ambition, and modern trade hub. Though nearly invisible to they eye of anyone outside the field of civil engineering, the landscape is highly architectural. Reservoir lakes stretch across dam-rimmed highlands, providing water to agricultural fields via sluices in the dry season. 

Sri Lanka was colonized in turn by the Portuguese along the coast, the Dutch farther inland, and the British via these pre-established pathways as well as their own, ranging to the internal mountains where they cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of canopy forest to plant tea. Though Sri Lanka retains it own distinct culture and language, the presence of foreigners, both historically and in the present, is palpable. One of the first religious icons I saw after getting off the plane was a statue of the Pope. Not exactly what I’d expected in a country that’s primarily Buddhist. Sinhalese is just as looping and entrancingly inscrutable as Khmer or Sanskrit, but more rounded. The story goes that the language was fashioned to be written on ola palm fans and the characters were designed to be arcing rather than angular to keep the writing quills from tearing the leaves. Tamal, the language of the northern part of Sri Lanka and of Southern India, is very curvilinear as well. We learn the phrase “Ayubowan,” a polite greeting for any time of day and any person. Add a small bow and you're ready to go. 

A favorite stop along the first part of the trip are a visit to Negombo Fish Market, where a steady drizzle doesn’t keep the locals from spreading small fish with a layer of salt on coconut fiber mats and covering them with plastic to dry. The scent of the briny sea washes over the market where anything and everything that can be lifted out of the water is sold: Squid, prawns, red snapper, tuna of all sizes, sting rays, and crabs are piled and priced at the stalls. Pairs of people carry baskets between them on a pole lifted over the shoulders, their hands are rough with work, their knives are sharp. 

We bicycle through the extensive complex of temples and monasteries at Polonnaruwa, learning about the succession of Sri Lankan kings and all they did for the people of their times. Rather than build opulent palaces the Kings often focused on developing the infrastructure that supported the people—agriculture, irrigation, monasteries for meditation, study, and education of the next generation, codes of conduct. The most striking architecture surviving at Polonnaruwa is a series of 11th-century (or perhaps earlier) walls built to support the massive roof and three stories of the royal family home and offices. With almost no foundation, the walls still stand and a reconstructed model at the temple complex museum demonstrates the impressive woodwork and joinery that was burned when the stronghold was sacked by Kalinga Magha in 1214. The fires fueled by the woodwork burned for days. 

We stay in hotels far from town, out in the jungle or near a river where we're of the the only thing around for miles. It's not so hard to imagine the presence of an ancient civilization from the vantage of these modern ones, each an oasis of water and flowers by day, of light and shelter by night. The soundscape of Sri Lanka floats over walls and in through windows; sometimes a Christian-sounding hymn followed by another in French, then a third I can't recognize from the local church; sometimes the melancholy Doppler-shifted plink of Fur Elise from a "tune pan," a bread delivery tuk tuk that drives through town each morning; sometimes the relentless din of traffic rolling through Kandy, or the haunting, thin, distant sound of the evening chant amplified by tinny speakers. There's curry for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but with less heat and more aromatic sweetness than Indian curry. We're 6 degrees north of the equator and papaya, mango, watermelon, and pineapple are staples. Coffee on a rooftop offers a view of the incoming afternoon storm, and we take our masala dosa with salted lassi. 

All the windows are open on the train.  We ride 172km in third class from Kandy to Badulla. When we go through a tunnel people scream out the windows into the darkness for fun. On a train passing in the opposite direction some guys have a portable karaoke set and it's a rolling party. On our train one car down they're singing happy birthday and we all applaud.  Sweet, sweet chai and peanuts roasted with curry leaf are sold onboard. The peanuts are still warm. They're salted and wrapped as the're sold in pages from someone's old chemistry notes dated Halloween of 2017. The workers in the fields pluck the new tea leaves and prune the bushes by hand as we go rolling by.  Words from a poem I learned long ago come back, as if delivered by the train itself: keep it all--perhaps tomorrow, we will be somewhere else altogether.

Poem: "Seen Fleetingly from a Train" by Bronislaw Maj

SRI LANKA II

Central Mountains to the Southern Coast 

The story of tea and trains did not end with our arrival to Badulla. The next morning we got to learn the process of how tea is cultivated; field to cup. At the Halpe Tea Factory near Ella, picking starts early--before dawn. Women are typically the ones to go out into the field and select the top three leaves from the bush. Leaves are gathered in picking baskets that women carry resting on their backs, but tied with a cloth around the forehead so that both hands are free. When the baskets are full, the women take the leaves into the factory where they are loaded into long, fan-ventilated drying troughs. The tea is wilted here, so that less than half of the moisture remains in the leaf. The volume reduces significantly too, and the tea is then easier to move through the factory via a series of conveyor belts where it is further dried, crushes, and sorted for packaging. Packaged tea is taken to the costal tea market daily where it is valued by the tea tasters of global tea companies, purchased, and shipped worldwide. Large-volume distributors often blend tea from multiple sources to create a consistent taste, but Ceylon tea is grown specifically in Sri Lanka and can often be found as a distinct type in shops. Because the climate is consistent (being so close to the equator) tea thrives continuously throughout the year in Sri Lanka, so the availability of Ceylon isn't dependent on growing seasons or the life cycle of the plant in the same way many agricultural products are. Tea bushes require a rejuvenation pruning every six or seven years, but can live for a century, and cuttings will propagate well in soil. 

After our day of tea we spent some time in Ella, a very cute and well-backpaced town in the mountains. We tried Kottu, a comfort-food dish made from slices of roti stir-fried with egg, shrimp, onions, spices, and pretty much anything else you like folded in. The sound of the mixing blades on the metal grill make a rhythm, and there are Kottu chefs who have some youtube fame for their beats. Ella is also a nightlife hotspot and we got to be our own DJs at a club that let us pick the music as we had some drinks and danced and felt inspired to  try on the leopard-print shirts we bought at a local shop in preparation for our wildlife drive at Yala National Park. It was a late night, it was an early morning. Certain portions of the trip are just not photographable... ✨

We rode the bus out to the wildlife sanctuary to the sound of morning Buddhist chants, recorded and played back (or maybe broadcast live?) loud into the dim sky. Even before we entered the park, we saw another elephant! The footprints he left at the park entrance were almost as impressive as he was! We also got really lucky and saw a leopard. She was off in the distance sunning on a rock, but one of us had a zoom lens that got close enough to make out her spots. She gave birth to a cub about 3 weeks ago, and our park guide showed us his video of mama leopard carrying the cub in her mouth.  Yala receives a lot of attention as a wildlife spotters' destination, but the park also functions as a wildlife sanctuary. We were only allowed in 1 or 2 of the 5 total regions of the park in order to balance the need for the park to be supported by visitor funding with the need for the park to be as wild a place as possible for the animals that live there. 

After Yala we made our way to the Dutch colonial town of Galle for the night. Wandering in town we all felt a little bit like we'd been transported from the jungle of Sri Lanka to a small town in central Europe. Since we'd been up since 4 am for the wildlife drive, most of us slept on the bus and had to do a little re-orienting upon awakening. We got soaked when heavy skies swept in over the Laccadive Sea and poured down rain on our tour of the Galle ramparts, which now function more as a breakwater sheltering the town from storms than a military fortification. We dashed through some art galleries, found a hotel bar with an extensive list of craft arak cocktails, dried out, and  had one of the nicest dinners of the trip at a restaurant in town to celebrate the birthday of our guide. Dessert and three cheers promise many happy returns. 

Then it was back to the beach, this time at Kosgoda, for the final days of our trip. We sunned by the sea and drank late nights by the pool and sunned some more and danced on the beach and got tanned and burned and hung over and slept in. Thanks to the short walk and minimum of effort, we also visited a turtle sanctuary just down the beach from our hotel. The local fishermen watch for turtles laying their eggs, and will often collect them to sell as a delicacy at the local market. Turtle sanctuaries buy the eggs and re-bury them in the sand on their beach property so they can hatch as naturally as possible and maintain the local population. A few of the hatchlings stay at the sanctuary, where tourists come and pay a small fee to visit them and learn about the their life cycle. Some sanctuary residents are turtles who are in rehabilitation following injury from fishing boats or nets, and the intention is that they will be supported in recovery and then released to the ocean when strong. One in a million turtles is born an albino (normally a Green Turtle) through genetic mutation, and lacks the pigment, and often also shell integrity, to live in the wild. These turtles are given permanent shelter at the sanctuary, and can live for decades in protection. 

It was hard to say goodbye to the Japan Flash Pack group, and it was hard to say farewell to these guys too. Now familiar with the wound, my heart was perhaps more accustomed to the injury but also still a bit broken from the last one. But we bid each other safe travels and went our separate ways out into the world. There are still a few texts floating through our whatsapp chats from both groups, and it's good to hear how beautiful the fall colors are in Montana, and that Andy finally found the addictive Japanese tomato stick pretzels stateside. 

❤️ Global Neighbors. See you again someday!