Sri Lanka

The Subcontinental Shift SL #10

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While walking from the car park to Lion Rock, an ambulance drove slowly past. That’s ominous we both thought as the child bride’s and my psyches blended together resigned to a path of mutual destruction on the mountain casting its overwhelming shadow over us. Not to get too melodramatic, ambulance or no ambulance, we are going all the way even if it kills us. Okay, not to dramatise things too much, we’ll keep going until the discretion that supposedly comes with maturity gets the better part of valour.

It’s 187 metres high and sticks straight up out of the ground and it’s apparently a 1200-1300 steps climb, depending on where you start counting. I prefer to rationalise it along the lines of 3 metres per floor which means it’s the equivalent of a 62 story building. Would I contemplate climbing the fire stairs of a 62 story building? Only if I was retarded. Apparently you can say “retarded” and “gay” now that Trump’s  been re-elected. I was offered considerable encouragement by the rather diminutive lady at my side. It was a magnificent physical effort on her part considering she has such a soft arse relative to my buns of steel.

There are historical and religious places all over this rock including some incredibly detailed and saucy wall paintings in a cave half way up a smooth vertical escarpment. How the painters (and punters) got up there in the first place in many years BC, I’ll never know. But they gave the rest of us plenty of incentive to get there to see what perky used to look like pre-implants. In Australia we have an increasing number of rocks and mountains that are off-limits because of some religious significance or whatever even though they pre-date people by millions of years and as Australia’s early indigenous people didn’t have any written languages there’s only word of mouth stories to indicate a relationship between these places and some mythical thing. The Buddhists and Hindus are much more sharing of their religious heritage.

Here, people get to experience the history and mysticism by being in amongst it although on finally getting to the top of Lion Rock, those things were furthest from my mind. I didn’t have the energy to suck a barley sugar and thank God for blood thinners. If I was going to have another stroke (or TIA or transient ischemic attack as happened the first time), this would have been the time. We both felt pretty proud of ourselves to have made it until we saw some of the others who also made it, some wearing thongs. That feeling of deflation rapidly passed when we remembered how old we are. And it extended to that feeling of smugness as you go down past the sweating, weazing climbers going the other way. Going down is much easier than going up, right? Speaking of sweat, when considering the rather sparse hand railings, mine is now mixeed with the DNA of about a million other people. So even if I was permitted to climb a very old rock monument in the centre of Australia, I’d give it a swerve because that itch has been well and truly scratched.

The Subcontinental Shift SL #9

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We have left Colombo and I could say “finally” but that would be unfair. Nice place but you couldn’t get a beer (or anything else of significance) from a bar or restaurant for the two days we were there thanks to Buddha. The first day we were fortified by Air India’s perfectly acceptable French fizz. The CB and I took it as a challenge to see how much we could guzzle between Delhi and Colombo. A respectable amount by Absolutely Fabulous standards I think. Religious festivals unfortunately also apply to those who have no formal interest in them so we were collateral damage. But room service was the loophole we were looking for so the CB and I pulled a couple of chairs up to our hotel room’s window and pretended we were in the bar.

To get to the Dambulla temple caves you have to climb 393 steps, all of them up until you get to the top where they turn round and go down. When we got to the turnaround point I was sweating like Mr Creosote on death row. There were five caves/temples and each one had a huge (as in length not bulk) Buddha lying down. Apparently he was dead in one of them. You could tell by the way his feet were oriented apparently. I don’t think I was the sole person who couldn’t nail it. There were also numerous identical statues of Buddha all through the caves. They must have only had the ingredients for on mold.

Having completed the challenge of getting to the top but more importantly getting back to the air conditioned car in the car park, we went to lunch looking like a couple of San Franciscan hobos. I was extra uncomfortable because I had to wear long pants. I made the mistake (or was badly advised) in assuming i would’t get into the caves unless i pulled a pair of jeans over my shorts. If it had been a Jain temple l’d have got away with wearing no pants at all, like the Jain disciples we saw striding through the heaving Varanasi market crowds in their birthday suits trying not to step on bugs. But young ladies in crutch hugging shorts got in after having a sarong type thing tied round their waist. I’d have done that.

There are just the two of us on this expedition with our driver/guide. So if things get a bit too strenuous and out of hand I can tell him to get f…d. After the Dambulla climb I was set to do that but we got to lunch and cold Lion Lager before I could. After lunch we were still struggling and I got all philosophical. The stages of our lives are generally defined by infancy, school-years, college, marriage, parenthood etc. Right now they are defined by the time it takes for the nearby fan to swing back onto me as it does it’s back and forth.

It sounds so crass but we just spent quite a few hours in a heritage listed place called Polonnaruwa which is magnificent and we saw everything. But we didn’t need to. All the temples look the same, especially from the outside – I am not taking my shoes off again. This is the attitude that emerges when you are struggling to make your legs cooperate, your shirt is soaked with sweat and you know there is something better. Little did we know but we were about 14 hours away from something infinitely worse.

The Subcontinental Shift SL #8

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The Child Bride and I are now in Sri Lanka. We’ve noticed one or two differences already with two standing out. In #3 of this saga, I outlined the tortuous procedure we went through to get into India. It was almost like they were agonising over whether to let these two reprobates in. Here, we bowled up to the almost deserted immigration line. We abandoned the business class line as it was occupied by a couple of dozen shouting, arm waving family members of a particular religious persuasion. Our immigration man looked at all of the items I put on his counter, took the passports, made sure it was us, stamped them and gave them back. I said “is that all?” He nodded and we headed to the baggage carousel where our bags appeared in the first half dozen or so. Way to go Sri Lanka.

So far all’s hunky dory. The drive in was on a smooth almost deserted highway. If this road was custard, the Gwalior/Orchha road mentioned previously (at length in #7) would be gristle. The roadside is mostly clean and tidy with no randomly arranged piles of dirt and broken masonry and walls don’t look like they are half built (or half demolished). In other words, while India looks partially finished, like Rome, the Sri Lankan’s have completed the job.

Colombo has quite a Singapore feel to it with lots of colonial style buildings and an increasing number of glass behemoths. I say “increasing” because these guys are relatively late to the building orgy which has seduced much of Asia. 2009 to be exact which is when the civil war ended. It’s amazing what can be achieved if you’re not spending most of your money on guns and bullets to kill each other. Consider the USA after their civil war, the Japanese and Germans after WW2 and the South Koreans after the Korean War. The Vietnamese are also going okay with their version of capitalist communism.

This blog has always tended to focus on the quirky, weird, funny or, as a last resort, the interesting. Something happened when we checked out of our hotel in Colombo which we have never experienced before and falls under all of those descriptors. We met our guide in the hotel driveway but there was a short delay in leaving. It turns out that something suspicious was found on a towel in our room. It was blood because the CB scratched her nose. I guess they had to ensure there wasn’t a body stuffed in the safe before allowing us to leave. You’ve got to think that nastier things than a drop of blood on a towel are left in hotel rooms on a regular basis. Especially this place which has just had a religious festival. Say no more.

The Subcontinental Drift #1

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I used to have a love-hate relationship with India – I hated going and I loved leaving. But after 80 or so visits, with 1993 being the peak with nine, and about a year of my life spent there all up, I think I’m finally getting the hang of the place.

After a life snuggled up in the bosom of Western civilisation, my first experience of Madras as it was then called, was queuing up on the airport tarmac, patiently waiting for my turn at the single immigration desk. The door out of customs emptied us into the car-park where I was immediately identified by my then agent and now great friend who whisked me through the dark but crowded and noisy streets to a Taj hotel where I was introduced to something the Indians excel at – hotel bars. If you like subdued lighting, wood panelling and leather chairs, join the club. I always felt like I needed to be wearing a tux and smoking a cigar when sitting in one of these places, ordering my dry Martini, shaken not stirred. They are about as far away from the ubiquitous slums as it is possible to get.

But back to trip number one. I had decided that the food was going to kill me so during the ten or so days I was there, I subsisted on fried chicken, toast and beer, apart from the last meal. The last stop before going to the airport to leave was a revolving rooftop Chinese restaurant in Bombay, as it was then called. The Asian gentleman throwing up into a bathroom sink should have given a clue so by the time I reached Singapore, my body was the equivalent of a supermarket shopping trolley – it just wasn’t cooperating with my brain so all the way back to Brisbane I sat motionless staring straight ahead. If I moved my eyes above or below the horizontal I experienced what it must feel like riding a tumble dryer – rather odd actually. Mind over matter got me out of that plane and I have only ever once since felt worse, courtesy of a dodgy prawn in Seoul. That’s a story for another day. Incidentally I am now a slavish devotee of Indian food and have graduated to putting hot chillies in green salads. So I love hot food but will admit to being beaten by it twice; once in Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and once in Singleton in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. That night I had to saw the top of my head off to let the fire out and I swear my teeth and hair were sweating.

A friend once told me that you can tell how “civilised” a place is if you fly in at night and look down at the lights. If the streets and houses are arranged in reasonably predictable rows, you’re coming into a place with some semblance at least, of planning. If the lights appear to have spread like mold with just the occasional waving ribbon of flickering light, like a vein in cheese, you’re in for an interesting time. Not criticising here. Just saying. The culture shock comes in many guises. There’re the wash-your-eyes-out-with-bleach moments which I won’t go into right now (think of the children) and there are moments of incredulity like a hotel breakfast for three for the equivalent of $6. Admittedly that was before the ravages of 1990’s and more recent inflation, but seriously… I’m still expecting to be shirt-fronted by something entirely unexpected but the more mundane, like a man on an elephant patiently waiting for the traffic lights to change will be contemplated with a stifled yawn.

We won’t be restricting ourselves to India on this trip. Why fly over places when you can stop over. This doesn’t apply to the USA of course where the snobs living on the East Coast or the Left coast consider the rest of the place to be redneck flyover country. We don’t consider Singapore to be even a little bit redneck so will be stopping there to look at all of that glass. We wanted to go to the Maldives also so Sri Lanka gets a guernsey. And joy of joys, it’s not international cricket season although Australia has beaten both India and Sri Lanka recently so I would have bragging rights. I still expect cricket to come up in conversation but only every time we speak to the locals.

We’re on our way to Singers now so see you at #2.