Sri Lanka — Mixing Good Fortune and Contrasting Cultures
February 25, 2000
Entering the port of Colombo, I’ve now traveled 20,562 miles of my journey around the globe. We will arrive at day 100 in a couple of days, but the trip isn’t over yet. Sri Lanka is our next port of call.
In ship’s lectures we learned that the word serendipity means always surrounded by very good fortune and that the Arab word for Sri Lanka is “Serendip.”
I am about to check out that reputation of this little island republic only slightly larger than West Virginia with a population or 19 million-- 74 percent Sinhalese and 16 percent Tamil.
Some people on the ship have been saying, “Seen one island, seen them all!” But I found that wasn’t true for Sri Lanka.
I must admit I was a little worried as we approached the port of Colombo. Underneath, I had secret fears that this island couldn’t possibly live up to its reputation as a tropical paradise. After all, I had just left the island of Java, and before that incredibly beautiful Bali, and Bora Bora had been more fabulous than I ever could have imagined as I swam with sharks and turtles in my first snorkeling experience.
So what could be so special about Sri Lanka?
In a word: elephants! Of course, there were other more difficult things to remember about this beautiful nation—poverty and political unrest rising to the top of any list But standing among the elephants will always remain my own private memory.
You remember the childhood ditty, “We went to the animal farm?” In this case, we went to the Elephant Orphanage.
In the jungles of Sri Lanka you can still find many big game animals—bears, wild boars, water buffaloes and cheetahs, along with monkeys. But they’ve created a special place on the island for keeping elephants safe. We visited it as part of a fascinating and grueling 13-hour train and bus trip inland to Kandy and back to Colombo in one day.
But we had to wait until late afternoon to see these majestic elephants.
The day started with a three- hour, 72-mile ride on an old Hitachi train, a disappointing beginning since we had anticipated traveling to Kandy on the first-class sleek and modern Viceroy Train. (But as we’ve learned to say many times on this trip, “That’s expedition traveling!}
Actually, boarding the train alone was an experience to remember. We emerged from our bus and entered the Colombo train station at the height of early morning rush hour traffic. Struggling not to get lost in the teeming crowd, we trailed close behind our guide, winding our way through the onrushing crush of commuters who were hopping off a packed train. I almost panicked at the sight: we saw hordes of people, jammed into old wooden passenger cars, hanging out of windows, and balancing precariously as they clung to the outside of the train’s exit doors. Oh my god, I thought. Are we going to have to jam into one of those cars?
Our train, though hardly the first-class Viceroy Train we had been given to believe would be our transportation for the day, was what you might call “colorful.” Air conditioning was present, along with 1935-era British comfort. With some effort we could raise little trays for tea at each seat, and our car had old-fashioned seats that swiveled half way around to see out the windows.
Spectacular scenery of Sri Lanka compensated for lack of modern amenities on the train. We bounced and jiggled on the journey through the hill country, looking out at precipitous ravines, thread-like waterfalls, misty mountains and tiny villages strung along the tracks. We passed through dense growths of coconut, areca, and palmyra palms, banana, ebony and satinwood trees, cypress and eucalyptus. We viewed rubber and tea plantations and rice paddies. Some displayed workers in the fields harvesting the rice, while other paddies laid dormant with plants uncut and abandoned, in checkerboard squares of brilliant green, lime, or yellow.
We waved at beautiful bright-eyed, smiling children dressed in blue and white uniforms, and they all waved back. We saw dark-eyed women in billowing jewel colored saris walking on the opposite track; others, not so well dressed, stooped, as they pounded and scrubbed their family wash at the rivers’ edge.
Arriving at our destination, Kandy, our first stop was the largest botanical garden in Sri Lanka. In the humid summer heat, the fragile fragrances of spices followed us as we strolled along the paths and through the trees, crushing dried leaves in our hands or peeling a little bark from a tree for a fresh scent of a familiar spice. The aroma of nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon reminded me of home and baking pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, and the medicinal smell of camphor brought back not-so-pleasant reminders of childhood remedies.
Lunch in the old historic Queens hotel (a relic of the old British rule) was bizarre—a Sri Lankan Calypso Band entertained us with music they thought we wanted to hear. Imagine listening to “Country Roads—West Virginia,” “You Are My Sunshine,” and Harry Belafonte island songs in the middle of an Indian Ocean nation!
In Kandy, the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth Relic is a big attraction, and this also brought an unexpected “happening.” Because of the dangerous political situation in Sri Lanka, every visitor to the temple must submit to thorough body searches before being allowed to enter the grounds and the temple. Halfway in, men and women in our group separated, and women in military uniforms felt each one of us up and down very carefully-- several times. I had lipstick in my pants pocket and for a moment felt rather nervous as they checked it out carefully. Our fellow male travelers for some reason got off easier than the women. It seems that sometime recently a woman had tied a bomb to her body and had assassinated someone. They feared similar disaster here and checked everyone without exception. (Coming out of the search, someone in our group said, “This is the closest to sex I’ve come on the whole Ocean Explorer trip!”) But, despite some grumbling, we all went through the search.
Never mind the Tooth Relic Temple. We weren’t allowed to see the tooth. But the building and grounds were beautiful.
Next it was on to the elephant orphanage at Pinnawela. When the people decided to created a haven for Sri Lankan elephants in 1975, they searched for a suitable location that had two important characteristics: flowing water and large open areas. They found it in a 30-acre coconut plantation on a flowing river, where today about 60 elephants, some of them babies, live in a safe environment. (In the early 1900s about 15,000 elephants inhabited Sri Lanka; today there are 2,500 and the killing goes on, often by farmers when the elephants invade their fields.)
We had already seen several working elephants that day, hauling trees or lumber or a person along the road, but were eager to see this special home for elephants.
Arriving in the dense heat of the late afternoon, we found what we were looking for: elephants, elephants everywhere, individual ones tethered to a tree, some in thatched roof huts, others hanging out together at the top of the hill. There, a trainer stood amidst the herd controlling them with a long pronged stick. When he asked if we wanted to touch a trunk and have our photo taken, I couldn’t resist.
With typical tourist elan, I stepped into the middle of eight or ten Asian elephants. Somewhat timidly, I stroked a stilled trunk. It was bristly with hairs, and the thick rough skin could have used some hand lotion!
As I stood there in the midst of these huge grey mountains of wrinkled skin, curling and waving their trunks and smallish flapping ears, suddenly I realized that the huge creatures weren’t standing still. They were beginning to move, and I saw I was trapped in the middle of what I instantly thought of as an elephant stampede. Of course, I hadn’t realized that time had passed as I had stood there fascinated. Now it was feeding time, and the herd knew it.
As I remained there, rather uncertain as to what I should do, several of the mammoth elephants gallumphed right past me, almost knocking me down. I was completely surrounded. I thought, I’d better get outta here. Then I thought better of it. So I stood my ground, elephants brushing by me on both sides. I thought for a moment one might pick me up by their trunk, but no, they were more interested in getting down the hill to eat than in pestering some timid human caught in their midst.
Once they were gone, I relaxed. I walked down the dusty path to the elephant dining room—a thatched roof with palm fronds and hunks of lumber tossed on the dirt floor. The elephants’ evening meal had arrived.
As we watched, the elephants dined on their gourmet dinner. And how elegantly they ate! Tethered with chains around their ankles, they couldn’t move about freely—but they managed to reach their individual share of food— but a couple of times we saw an elephant “food fight” when one wanted the “entrée” of another. They snagged huge palm fronds, curling their trunks skillfully around the long leaves. They stripped a small section from the base of the frond, curled the trunk around it carefully, and with their pink tongue popped their delicious leafy dinner into the mouth. Then moving to the second course, they held down a four-foot stick of soft wood with one foot placed neatly on top or alternatively kicking at it with small strokes of forefoot and toe to strip off a smaller piece of wood. Then with the facile trunk, they delicately stripped off a piece just big enough to tear and stuff into the mouth. The precision of manipulating foot and trunk to coordinate the scissors-like cutting of the strips was quite remarkable.
Watching as they fed the baby elephants was such fun! Trainers fed the babies milk in a bottle, each baby receiving eight litres a feeding, five times a day. The babies knew just what to do; they opened their mouths as the feeders came along with a bottle, and raised their trunk to help hold the bottle as they gulped the milk; dribbles of milk spilled from their open mouths—just like babies. The only thing you didn’t see was a trainer burping a baby elephant!
Earlier in the day another group of ours had seen the babies frolicking in the river. We were disappointed that we couldn’t have enjoyed this too, but we had to return to Colombo by bus and board the ship by eight p.m.---and this turned out to be the bus ride from hell.
Maybe I should more accurately describe it as a harrowing experience of “playing chicken.” I have to admit I loved every dangerous minute of it—but I lost a few years before it was over!
Our Sri Lankan bus driver knew we had to make it back by 8 p.m. and he wasn’t about to let oncoming traffic get in his way. The highway from Kandy to Colombo goes primarily through small towns and little villages. It is a two-lane road with no white line, jammed with cars, truck, motorcycles, bikes, three wheel jitneys, animals, an occasional elephant and many people crossing the road when they feel like it.
Along the way are little stands and stalls displaying towering pyramids of tangerines, piles of jackfruit, oranges, grapes, and fresh vegetables. Street vendors hawk their wares; people run sewing machines on the street, old men spit beetle nut juice out of their red toothed mouths.
Store front neon signs and huge colorful billboards line the road, and serving along on precarious seats, my friends Larry and Jane and I were constantly pointing, laughing, and trying to pick out the English words among the Sri Lankan words when we weren’t frozen in fear about what lie around the next bend.
Along the way we noticed such signs on buildings as:
The fruit is ripe. Adults only.
Sagacious Hotel.
Vegetarian Hotel. Only vegetarians need apply.
Souls (Private) Ltd.
Hotel, Creamery, & Pawnshop.
And more.
But when we weren’t picking out the English words on signs, we were hanging on for dear life! Nothing deterred our driver, and head-on collisions were the least of his worries. Every driver treated the two-lane road as a challenge and as though it had three-lanes, especially around sharp curves. Blaring the horn at frequent intervals, our driver careened down the darkened road, daring oncoming traffic to move to the side. Move they did, because we weren’t about to.
There were white-knuckled moments, many of them, but at each successful outmaneuver of oncoming vehicles, we managed a sigh of relief or a laugh at the nerve of our driver, and strained our eyes for the next potential accident.
By some miracle, no accident happened, but a Blowout did! Two kilometers away from the port of Columbo, in heavy city traffic, we heard a loud bang, hiss, and bump, and we had ourselves a blown out tire. Helplessly wondering what would come next, we sat by the side of the road for awhile. But suddenly the driver brought all traffic to a screeching halt in all directions as he pulled a U-turn into an empty gas station on the block ahead. Then he filled the dual bus tire with enough air to make it back. And we lurched along at slow speed, catching the ship just a half-hour after our due date.
Along the way, we asked each other what would we remember most about this day if we reunited ten years hence. Unanimously, we all shouted in one voice—the hair-raising bus ride back to town! But when we quieted down the next day, our tune changed…It was the uniquely endearing Asian elephants that would remain as the most vivid memory of our Sri Lanka stay.
Postscript: In closing I have to add that Sri Lanka, despite its unique people and extraordinary tropical beauty, is not “a land of good fortune” right now. Fighting between the Sinhalese-dominated government and rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eclam (LTTE) has been going on since 1983, and there is no end in sight. This is a tragedy for the entire nation, and though cease fires have occurred more than once, the fighting in the north continues sporadically. With it, the entire nation suffers.
