Wandering around Galle and the Fort
It’s almost that I don’t really want to finish it. My house is still a bomb site, two weeks after the builder promised he’d be 90% finished, my living room and dining room and garage are full of my kitchen. I keep saying "It will all be worth it," but I’m really no longer sure!
The second evening Mel decided to wear her sari, the one from Kandy. This takes courage, not to look beautiful - the sari makes every lady who wears it look beautiful - but to wear for the first time a lovely garment from someone else’s culture. The first time is a surprisingly big thing.
The next day one of the staff came up to her and said "It was lovely to see you wearing a sari last night, madam. You looked wonderful." Al and I looked scruffy by comparison wearing even good sarongs.
So those who are nervous about wearing local clothes, stop being shy and start wearing them. They’re the most wonderful colours. I just wish men could also have such colourful things to wear. We just get the dull stuff.
Earlier in the evening she and I walked into town to collect her tailoring. We passed a very Baden Powell thing on the way there! A cub scout meeting! (there were more than these two lads, honest! When we walked back there was a whole cub pack running races in the heat!)
Of all the things I expected to see just outside the walls of the fort, Wolf Cubs (well, that’s what they were called when I was a kid) with caps and scarves in woggles at the local scout hut was not one of them!
I was expecting scenes far more like this one in the fruit market. Cattle are not ’everywhere’ like Al says they are in India, and these are most assuredly well fed, and often marked with their owner’s brand.
Something tells me that this freedom to roam is nothing to do with sacredness, more do do with making sure they can find free food!
This one certainly looked longingly at the fruit stall.
This was the day we wanted, well, I wanted, to do an entire circuit of the ramparts of Galle Fort. We started by the lighthouse and Al met his adoring throng of kids again. A couple remembered his name, too. In excellent English they told him their ages, who was related to whom, that a couple were twins and loved chatting to him. I think he rather loved chatting to them, too!
The really nice thing is that the kids were just kids. No angle, no begging, nothing except proper innocent fun.
We had a great wander round the ramparts. The fort’s an excellent piece of defensive engineering. Every part had a gun position that can aim at it. If an attacking force got through one set of walls and defences it would soon be whittled down. The engineering is very different from British forts. A great example of these is the huge Palmerston fort at Dover, the Drop Redoubt.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, but this was a Portuguese fort, then a Dutch one. Despite the British taking over(!) from the Dutch the entire contents of the fort is overwhelmingly Dutch. In fact the Dutch government is doing some huge works inside it right now repairing the ancient but effective sewer system within the fort complex.
It was hot strolling round the fort. By the clocktower we met a vendor with two really nice wooden elephants. He wanted a ludicrous price for one of them, 6,100 rupees. These guys are desperate for money, and it puts us into a dilemma. We, whose money goes much further in their country, have money, almost an embarrassment of it however poor we may be back home.
So, if we spent, as we could have spent, 6,100 rupees on the item, bearing in mind the low cost of food there, his family would be well supported. The elephant will have cost him well under 1,000 rupees to buy or make. But that changes the dynamics of the economy and makes a street vendor disproportionately wealthy. It also overvalues the items sold. Nice as Jumbo is, he is not worth £30 back in the UK.
We negotiated. He added a teak elephant into the pot for 6,000. The original is supposed to be Royal Ebony. It may be any old wood with black boot polish, or it may be ebony. We just like the look of it. We liked its friend too. We liked them both £15 worth.
He followed us for ages. Then he kept popping out of side streets at us! We knew and he knew that we’d reach agreement in time. We almost reached it at the Police Garage (really!) ’Built in 1917’.
It’s the left hand one, peer hard to see!
We also got met here by an old ’friend’ who wanted to sell us a Buddha. Mel also wanted a Buddha, but in teaching pose. He rushed off on his bike to bring back a ’friend’ with a vanload of Buddhas, but none were right.
We ought to have bough a Buddha in Pollonaruwa where Al bought his Krishna. We did buy the elephants, for 3,300 rupees the pair. We didn’t find a Buddha we liked enough, a matter of some regret. But we do have one in our living room now.
We needed the hotel and its pool after that.