Sri Lanka: Days 10-12

Travel diaries for evening Monday, April 7 to Wednesday, April 9 written Wednesday, April 9 and Thursday, April 10

Monday, April 7:

I’ll start today’s entry with some interesting demographic information, since Sri Lanka is an island with quite a lot of ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. Some quick facts:

About 75% of the population is Sinhalese, who are mostly Buddhist and speak Sinhala (pronounced “SING-uh-luh”); historically, they were an Indo-Aryan people who arrived to Sri Lanka back in the 6th century B.C.
11% are Sri Lankan Tamil, who are mostly Hindu and speak Tamil; Tamils started arriving to Sri Lanka from Southern India in the 2nd century B.C., and most Sri Lankan Tamils are descended from residents of the Jaffna Kingdom in the far north of the island
9% are Sri Lankan Moors, who are mostly Muslim and speak Tamil, and who are descended from Arab traders who started coming around the 8th century A.D.
4% are Indian Tamil, mostly Hindus who speak Tamil, who were brought from India by the British in the 1800s and 1900s for indentured servitude

Long before any of those folks arrived, the island was inhabited by the aboriginal Vedda people. The Veddas are forest-dwellers, and although they have pretty much fully been absorbed into the Sinhala population by now (Etosha’s family believes they have Vedda ancestry), there are still some Vedda people around today.

On the safari yesterday, we learned a story about the Veddas who used to live in the Kumana National Park area where our safari took place. Remember how I mentioned about the 2,000-year-old road and the yearly Hindu pilgrimage? Well, the story goes that hundreds of years ago, the Hindu pilgrims would stop to chat with the Veddas in Kumana each year on their route, but one year when they returned, all the Veddas had completely disappeared. The theory is that some Vedda men had decided to follow the pilgrims all the way to the end of the pilgrimage and see what all the fuss was about. At the final stop of the route in the southeastern town of Kataragama, the Hindus had a huge festival to worship the gods. When the Vedda men returned home and told the others what they’d seen, the rest of the Veddas thought it sounded really cool and asked them to recreate the festival. To do so, they required a lot of oil (I’m not 1000% sure why), which they didn’t have, so they decided to kill some deer and use the animal fat. They ended up having such a blast and wanting to keep the party going, to the point where they ran out of deer and had to start killing wild boar. But it was so fun that they kept going and killed all the wild boar in the forest as well. One of the Hindu gods got really pissed that they killed all the boar, so he sent a bunch of man-eating leopards to wipe out every last Vedda in that forest. (Another theory is that, instead of an angry god sending man-eating leopards, the leopards were just really hungry because all of their prey had been killed by the humans and they had nothing else to eat.)

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming. I believe we last left off Monday evening. Daniel and I decided to enter full-on chill mode and caught up on White Lotus in our hotel room while Aparna and Etosha went to visit some of their friends for dinner. The friends are a couple named Onela and Saman who own a really cool hotel in Arugam Bay. Saman’s family is the local mob family in the area, and Onela comes from a high-society Colombo family. They sound like two very cool if slightly intimidating people, but unfortunately we didn’t get to meet them this time around. We ordered room service and relaxed and allowed ourselves to fully recover from our lingering sickness.

Tuesday, April 8:

On Tuesday, we were leaving the East and heading to the South. We stopped for breakfast at Onela & Saman’s hotel, but they weren’t able to join us. The breakfast was delicious – I had a bacon jam and cheese panini on flaky buttery bread and Daniel had avocado toast on sourdough and a smoothie. And the hotel was really cool – nature and architecture blended together for a clean and comfortable yet wild and natural vibe. I think Saman (and maybe others of his mob family?) lives in some of the villas at the hotel. Aparna and Etosha taught us a game called carrom, since there was a carrom table there, which is kinda like pool-meets-air hockey.

We then headed out on a 5-hour drive to the southern city of Galle. On the way, we passed a lot of rubber trees, and we even passed two elephants that were right on the road! We didn’t linger, since elephants are known to smash cars. On the drive, Etosha and Aparna continued to share more from their seemingly infinite well of history, culture, and gossip about Sri Lanka. One such piece of gossip was that apparently, there were two Italian guys living in Arugam Bay, and rumor has it that one of them pushed the other one into an elephant, intentionally making the elephant mad at that guy, and the elephant stomped that guy to death. Murder by elephant! And the surviving Italian guy is apparently currently suing one of the members of Saman’s mob family, which Tosh thinks means this Italian guy’s days are pretty much numbered.

When not chatting on the drive, I was reading Anil’s Ghost. I found this passage to be really interesting:

‘This was a civilized country. We had “halls for the sick” four centuries before Christ. There was a beautiful one in Mihintale… There were dispensaries, maternity hospitals. By the twelfth century, physicians were being dispersed all over the country to be responsible for far-flung villages, even for ascetic monks who lived in caves… There were villages for the blind. There are recorded details of brain operations in the ancient texts. Ayurvedic hospitals were set up that still exist—I’ll take you there and show them to you sometime. Just a short train journey. We were always good with illness and death. We could howl with the best. Now we carry the wounded with no anaesthetic up the stairs because the elevators don’t work.’

We stopped at a random little family-run place on the side of the road for rice and curry (which is the most common Sri Lankan cuisine that is served everywhere – rice plus an assortment of all kinds of curries), which was only 550 LKR per person (less than $2). It was very spicy. A crow stole a chicken drumstick off of Etosha’s plate. We got back on the road and arrived to our hotel in Galle in the late afternoon. This hotel was the fanciest and chic-est yet – stunning art and design by the famous Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa (who Aparna loves), gorgeous ocean views, a long list of spa services, two big beautiful pools, etc. Luxury. We were greeted with a purple lotus flower and a cool damp towel and a juice of our choice upon arrival. I opted for Amberella juice, which is a type of wild mango.

After a shower and a bit of settling in, we converged in Etosha and Aparna’s room for some gin & tonics and hummus and fried cuttlefish and more gossip. I was asking about the Easter bombings terrorist attack that happened a few years back, when multiple churches and nice hotels were bombed on Easter Sunday. ISIS took credit for the attack, but ISIS notoriously claims credit for literally anything. Etosha said that the real story is most likely that the dictator guy was behind it. The dictator was in power for awhile, then he got voted out briefly, and during that one-year reprieve from the dictator, this terrorist attack happened, which made the people run scared back to the dictator and bring him back into power. Crazy if true!!

Speaking of dictators, another piece of gossip that Aparna and Etosha shared is that the Pico Trail, which is the jungly/leechy hike we went on the other day, was actually a USAID project that was developed to connect all the remote mountain villages, which is really cool. So Etosha joked that the fact the trail was overgrown and leechy was actually Trump’s fault for cutting USAID funding!

We decided to venture out to a bar that Etosha liked called Uncle’s for karaoke night. Their friend Shreya met us there, and we (mostly me) sang the night away. We had a couple more cocktails and yummy bites and ended the night around midnight.

Wednesday, April 9:

The four of us had breakfast at the hotel buffet around 9:30am, then wandered the rocky beach around the hotel for a bit. We saw some crabs and snails and pigeons. We went back to the rooms to chill for a while. Daniel and I booked a couple’s spa experience, which was 60 minutes of massage followed by 30 minutes in the steam room. The massage was one of the best I’ve had – super relaxing, not too harsh, very soothing. The steam room was insanely steamy to the point where it was fairly difficult to breathe or even see. We alternated about 10 minutes in the steam room followed by a few minutes in the chilled pool, cycling through three times. We emerged feeling extremely rejuvenated, and went straight to the hotel bar for a chili pork and pineapple pizza, a mojito, and a chocolate milkshake. Life is rough!!

A quick aside, while on the subject of life being rough. It is easy to be grateful for a day like this one, where the hardest decision I made was which spa service to choose. But I think I was feeling even more gratitude the previous day, which was a day of mostly car travel. And the reason was that I was finally 100% not sick any more. When you are sick, you are very present inside your own body and mind. You are focusing on not focusing on your pain. The outside world is pressing in on you and you are fighting against it. When you are healthy, you are back in the world. You see the colors and feel the breeze and smell the aromas. You get the jokes and ask follow up questions and don’t get annoyed when someone points out a cool-looking bird. When you’re sick, the world is an inconvenient distraction from the mental and physical effort of trying to feel less sick. When you’re well, you don’t notice your body, and so you are able to notice the world. I am awed by people with chronic pain or illness who still pay attention to the things and people around and outside of themselves. I believe that takes great resilience and a profound love of the world that many people take for granted. I hope I more often remember to be grateful for days where I feel no illness or injury, even if I don’t also have a massage and a chocolate milkshake.

By this point, it was around 6pm, and we again converged in Etosha and Aparna’s room for some Arrack and soda and an investor pitch. Before coming on this trip, Daniel and I had expressed interest in investing in Apihappi. We’ve been following the business from the earliest days, buying the bags then the bean bags then the beach chairs as each new product line came out. We’ve watched from afar as Tosh & Aparna harnessed their combined skills and talents in textiles, artistry, design, marketing, hustling, networking, and hard work to build an ethical, sustainable, beautiful business from the ground up. They’ve entertained investment offers before, but usually from businesspeople who, as Tosh said, were “conniving” and “trying to steal their company,” so they always rejected those opportunities and are happy to be bringing on investors (us) who are their friends.

We chatted for a bit more on the balcony. Aparna told us that Florence Pugh had recently been spotted in the area, and that celebrities in general like to come to Sri Lanka because they aren’t as easily recognized here. Gillian Anderson owned a house here. Joey from Friends has been spotted time to time. From the balcony, we could see in the far distance lines of lights dotting the horizon, which Etosha explained were a bunch of ocean vessels lining up to enter Colombo port. Colombo has an especially deep port, which makes it easy for even very large ships to navigate and turn around in, which is why Colombo has historically been such an important trading port, and why Sri Lanka has been settled by various peoples time and time again through history – Sinhala, Tamil, Dutch, Portuguese, British.

After we finished the entire bottle of Arrack, we got an Uber to Galle Fort, which is a fort built by the Dutch back in the day. If you’ve been to Old San Juan in Puerto Rico, it kinda had those vibes, like an old city stuck in time, almost like a middle eastern market, but now every store front is either a swanky restaurant or a gem store. (Loooots of gem stores in Sri Lanka, which is one of the world’s biggest sources for gemstones.) We had dinner at one of the swanky restaurants, then took an Uber back to the hotel.

Go to next: Sri Lanka Days 13-14