#51: Sri Lanka, December 2002
Journey to Colombo and Beyond

I managed to get everything organized and left the house on Saturday, December 7th, at 8:30 a.m. Good friend Giuseppina drove me to the train for the two-hour ride to the Rome Airport. The plane took off at 11, and thanks to Russell’s Frequent Flier points, I sat in business class with decent seats, good food and a choice of films. Six hours later, I was in Dubai, trekking through their award-winning airport — too big and too commercial for me, but many people enjoy the infinite chance for duty-free shopping there. Another flight, and I arrived in Colombo at 10 am on Sunday, happy to see Russell’s head and shoulders above the crowd once I cleared Customs.

I fell asleep during the hour-long ride into town and awoke in time to see beautiful Beira Lake, which snakes through Colombo and is featured in a wonderful view from Russell’s hotel room. Even more impressive was how fond the hotel staff were of Russell and how warmly they all greeted me, from the bell captain to the desk crew to the floor staff.

After a shower, lunch and a nap, I was ready for a little tour, and Russell took me around the mammoth hotel with its garden, swimming pool, business center, exercise facility, five restaurants and shops selling everything from gemstones to handicrafts. Given that he’s had to live there for more than four months during 2002, I was pleased to see a variety of cuisines and activities on offer.

The next day was Monday, and R had to go back to work, so armed with all the tourist information he’d collected for me, I set out to see some sights. During the work week, I visited lots of places. Perhaps the most interesting was the National Museum with its wonderful collection of artifacts, including gem-studded statues of the Buddha. One can well understand how all those 19th century adventure stories came to be written about golden idols and cursed gems. I also visited several shops selling handicrafts modified for Western tastes and uses — Barefoot with its soft furnishings of bedspreads, pillows, tablecloths and whimsical animals, all made from hand-loomed fabrics; Paradise Road, an emporium of all sorts of items for the house, both decorative and useful; Odel, selling clothing and more household items. All these enterprises were started by Western women married to Sri Lankans who could see the potential in modifying traditional handicrafts for a wider market. It seemed clear to me that they also have a good potential for export now that peace is bringing increased international commerce.

One day, I hired a car and driver and went down to Galle Fort, which Russell had written about in his previous letter:

Legend has it that a Portuguese galleon blown ashore on Sri Lanka’s south coast in 1505 had its crew awakened by crowing cocks the next morning. “Gallus” is Latin for “rooster,” so Galle it became.

Successive occupations of the headland promontory by Dutch and British garrisons have left the Fort and town within its intact walls a romantic ruin. The New Oriental Hotel is in fact 200 years old. The Dutch Reformed Church 100 years older. There’s a cricket pitch surrounded by whitewashed verandahs straight out of Kipling. And street after street of fey colonial houses and shops. In Japan or Carmel, this treasure would be painted and polished. Here, it’s sinking steadily into collapse. But Adrian Zecher, Asian hotel mogul with an international reputation for taste and acumen, has very quietly bought the New Oriental. It could truly rival Singapore’s Raffles if restored. And if, as expected, that anchor spawned surrounding restaurants, galleries, etc., this fort could easily become a premier tourist destination.

I, too, found exceptional tourist potential in this 500 year-old walled town with its multiple cultural influences. To give you an idea of these juxtaposed connections, I’m enclosing a photo of typical Sri Lankan architecture next to the Anglican All Saints Church. 

En route to Galle, I stopped at two hotels designed by the famous Sri Lankan architect, Geoffrey Bawa. He was one of the architects who “invented” something we take for granted now — hotels designed with traditional motifs and materials, taking into account the natural landscape — but something new and different when they were built in the 60s and 70s.

One thing really struck me as I rode around Sri Lanka and down to Galle. Virtually every driver spoke with pleasure and hope about the peace efforts. I was often asked why I had come to Sri Lanka, and when I said “to visit my husband,” everyone asked what he was doing. When I said he was working with the Prime Minister to build peace, the response was nearly overwhelming. For example, my lunch waiter in Galle Fort asked me to write down Russell’s name, because the waiter was Christian, and his congregation prayed daily for peace, naming those whom they knew to be working for its permanent establishment. Everything was lavishly decorated for Christmas, even though Christians make up only 1% of the population. I asked one taxi driver why this was so. He responded, “Because we finally have something that everyone wants to celebrate,” referring to the arrival of peace after twenty years of strife.

One evening, Russell arranged a dinner party in one of the hotel restaurants so I could meet some of his Sri Lankan colleagues and their wives. I found them far more enchanting than the expatriates we met on a later night at the home of the World Bank Rep. Why is it that expatriates mostly talk about the same boring stuff wherever they are in the world — what’s wrong with living where they are, the beastly weather and why they have’t read the most meaningful book about the country in which they find themselves (in this case, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje)?

Once Saturday arrived, Russell was free to spend most of his last week sightseeing, so he’d arranged a trip to Kandy, the last royal capital, and Nuwara Eliya (new-au-ray-lia) high up in the tea country,  complete with car and a wonderful driver named Fernando Kumar. On the way up to Kandy, we stopped by the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, where I did some cross-species communing, as evinced by the photo enclosed. This photo is representative, but we missed snapping the best event, when this same cow gently wound her trunk around my ankles as I caressed her. A lovely moment, second only to the time that I softly “called” in Swahili to a giraffe in the Kuala Lumpur zoo, and she came slowly toward me, then bent her long neck down to gaze soulfully into my eyes.

Kandy is remarkable for so many things — a far more salubrious climate because of the altitude (1600+ feet), compared with seaside Colombo; a great botanical garden, site of Mountbatten’s HQ during WWII; a beautiful man-made lake in the heart of the city; and the Temple of the Tooth. Devout Buddhists believe that this temple houses one of the Buddha’s teeth, and thousands come to venerate it each year. But the truth is that it was destroyed at least once in history (by the Portuguese) with multiple eye witnesses to the fact. Still, many believe that the tooth was miraculously restored, now residing under a golden canopy erected over the central building of the complex. We dutifully removed our shoes and joined the queue of worshippers, but I was curiously disappointed. This is one of the main shrines of Buddhism, but I found it less impressive than many Buddhist temples elsewhere in Asia.

After three nights in Kandy staying in a hotel high on a hill, we set out for Nywara Eliya, climbing up, up around switchback after switchback through 40+ miles of constantly ascending road, past glorious waterfalls, often with a steep drop of hundreds of feet on one side of the road. Not a trip for the faint-hearted. Finally, we arrived at The Tea Factory, 6800 feet above sea level. This award-winning hotel conversion was so well done that even though the weather was cold, foggy and damp, we were happy just to sit there and drink the local brew (tea, of course).

Now and then, the fog would lift, and we could look across hills of bright green tea filled with the brilliantly-colored saris of the tea pluckers. These tiny Tamil ladies with gold nose ornaments and flying hands each pick c. 44 pounds of leaves a day. I’m sure I couldn’t manage half that. We also visited the hotel’s small tea factory and purchased some freshly-picked and dried tea to take back to Italy.

We returned to Colombo and the challenge of finding a place for Russell to live now that the U.N. had extended his contract for another two years, managing a project to help implement the recommendations he’d made during his first, four-month assignment. We spent our last morning in the city racing around to look at furnished apartments, ending up with a facility run by Hilton Hotels — centrally located with maid service, on-site swimming pool, gym, laundromat and cafeteria, good supermarket next door.