The trip and arrival in Kandy
The Sri Lankan pages are reproduced verbatim from my blog in August 2008, hence the references to blog posts, etc.
Why no blog for the past couple of weeks? Simple. I’ve been on vacation. Or, rather more to the point, my son took me and She Who Must be Obeyed At All Times on an adventure. We joked that he was taking his children with him!
Last year he vanished in September, to reappear in May after visiting Thailand, Nepal, India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Half way through he called and said “Dad, ask Mum if she’d like to see Sri Lanka?” I did. She did. So we booked three return flights and no accommodation! Brave us! Or rather, Brave him! Fancy taking two old farts on a trip like that!
And what is this doing in a blog about marketing?
That part’s easy. Sri Lanka seriously needs marketing. And this blog entry is my small part of saying a heartfelt ’thank you’ to the land and citizens. Ok, that sounds pretentious, but I think you know what I mean.
Let me set out my stall:
Sri Lanka is a small nation. Wikipedia says: “Sri Lanka, officially the ’Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka’; known as Ceylon before 1972, is an island nation in South Asia, located about 31 kilometres (19.3 mi) off the southern coast of India. It is home to around twenty million people.” And the thing is, it ought to be extremely prosperous. It just isn’t.
It has plenty of rice, loads of well cultivated vegetables, decent livestock for those who eat meat, and a fantastic harvest of good fresh sea and lake fish. It has a substantial population capable of productive work, and it has industry ranging from tea to heavy engineering. And, if you add to that the fact that it’s a paradise, almost Shangri La, then you start to wonder why it seems to be a strangely underdeveloped and poverty ridden nation. And one of the reasons is the lack of tourism.
I’m not going to make a case for package tours. After all, Monty Python’s Flying Circus says it so well:
“What’s the point of going abroad if you’re just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don’t make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh ’cos they "overdid it on the first day."
And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they’re acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you’re not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.”
That really isn’t what Sri Lanka needs. Really not. And, luckily, those people don’t need Sri Lanka! I’ll try and show you why.
Day one we arrived after a pretty long trip from the English Summer in Bracknell. We took the train to Gatwick, and flew in two hops via Qatar to Colombo. The Lonely Planet told us we could catch a commuter train to Colombo Fort Station from “A station 500 metres from the airport”, so we tried to get some rupees (I would like to offer my grateful thanks to First Direct, who blocked my debit card instantly because they decided it was potential fraud at the very first ATM I tried) and walked towards where we were assured a station was.
Of course the whole time we were finding the ATM, trying and failing to get money out, walking hither and yon, we had the benefit of taxi touts, some of whom assured us there was no bus to Colombo (there are loads) and all of who wanted more than 3,000 rupees to take us to the city! And it was hot and humid.
And we found the station, though it was more like a whole kilometre away, involving walking along a long hot road outsiode the airport fence wondering if it would ever come into view.
Only there were no commuter trains.
A helpful heavily armed patrol of the Sri Lankan Air Force told us that they sometimes went north to Negombo, but we’d have to get a bus to Colombo. We opted to head to a small group of shops and negotiated a taxi to Colombo Fort for 1,600 rupees. At 210 to the pound that’s not half bad! A litre of petrol is 157 rupees here. In the UK it’s about 230 rupees per litre.
You’ve already seen the first issue that deters tourists. The words ’heavily’ and ’armed’. This nation has been in civil conflict for a quarter of a century, but, since the Tamil Tigers are now on the losing side it appears as if instances of terrorism will rise as they become increasingly desperate. But, as someone whose working career started in London at the height of the IRA bombings, way before we gave dates to bombs and cared about their anniversaries, in reality the small number of buses that get bombed is immaterial. It just isn’t going to happen to a bus I’m on, in the same way that I never got blasted at Harrods, or in Canary Wharf.
But it puts tourists off.
And so, weirdly, did the 2004 tsunami. “It’s not worth going. There’s nothing left!” Which is total unmitigated trash. Lets see why!
We’re independent travellers. Though, to be fair, the last holiday I went on was a package tour to Huelva in southern Spain! Ah the irony!
So we caught the train from Colombo Fort to Kandy, 4 hours or so away, second class. The fare was under 300 rupees, against about 5,000 rupees by taxi from the airport. And the train is quite an experience. Apart from switching lines form narrow to standard gauge the track is not in the best condition, and no more has been laid since 1948 when the Brits left. We started with backpacks on the luggage racks.
Oh no! They have to go on the floor in case they explode! This seems more to be a passenger regulation than a railway regulation. They are afraid of bombs. Maybe we’re just used to that sort of thing.
We shook, rattled and rolled to Kandy. I had a cardboard box of live chickens on my feet for the first hour. It was crowded. Vendors came in selling vdai (fried patties of spiced stuff, pronounced ’waddi”), nuts, drinks. We had a kilo of small bananas, which Al (our son) bought at the station fruit and veg stall on the platform! [Memo to ’the housewife’: demand Sri Lankan bananas. They have flavour! Ours are rubbish!]
Kandy is an amazing bustling place, home of the Temple of the Tooth Relic, a relic of Buddha revered for centuries, retrieved from his funeral pyre, and taken to the temple in Kandy. The story is in pictures inside the temple.
Of course you can’t get away from the bombing history - a truck bomb damaged the temple seriously a few years back, but security and bag searches are so tight that, while you can’t say "never again" you can certainly think it would be extremely hard for another incident like that there to take place.
Out of the station into the hurly burly of "taxi, sir? MY taxi, sir? Tuk tuk, sir?
You can fit three adults, with backpaks into a tuk tuk!
We’re talking about a 3 wheeled Vespa with arbitrary brakes, almost certainly built in India by Bajaj and owned proudly by its driver, a man who needs tourists. We’re looking broadly at 40 rupees per km here, but business is so thin that they compete downwards to earn just about anything.
Ours looked at our girth. Well the others are slim, I’m on the portly side. Then he looked at the bags. We agreed, well Al agreed, 250 rupees for the trip. That’s about £1.20 or so for a lot of uphill work and a load of traffic dodging for the entire kilometre to Lake Bungalow, one of only two hotels we’d booked for the trip.
And, apart from this week, when Kandy is full for the Esala Perahera, something we managed to miss by total accident, everywhere needs people in hotel rooms. Lake Bungalow is no exception, and yet it charges only £4 per room per night. 1,600 rupees, though breakfast is a whole 300 rupees per head extra!
The Perahera? Back to Wikipedia again:
Kandy is also popular because of the annual festival known as the Esala Perahera in which one of the inner caskets used for covering the tooth relic of Buddha is taken in a grand procession through the streets of the city. This casket is taken on a tusker of royal caste. The procession includes traditional dancers and drummers, flag bearers of the provinces of the old Kandyan kingdom, the Nilames (lay custodians of temples ) wearing their traditional dresses, torch bearers and also the grandly attired elephant. This ceremony which is annually held in the months of July or August, attracts large crowds from all parts of the country and also many foreign tourists.
More follows later, I’m still exhausted from what I found the builders had not done when I got home yesterday morning! Yes, I was mad enough to ask them to modify my kitchen while away. And yes, I believed it would be done. But my builder had a nervous breakdown a week ago and ran away leaving the place in tatters. Still, he says he will be back on site tomorrow at 8am!
Ah, there’s Lord Lucan, and he’s riding Shergar!