Yes, well…

I’d intended to launch straight into a description of the wonderful, ancient city of Anuradhapura, but seem to have got distracted by frills and spills.  So history will have to wait till next time.

We arrived in Anuradhapura, in North Central Province, after a long journey of some six hours from Negombo. If you look it up you will find that the distance between the two places is less than 200 km. I had expected to be there sooner and worried about only having allocated one overnight stop to this fascinating and important site. 

The problem with getting anywhere fast in Sri Lanka is threefold: firstly the roads – while the main roads are quite well tarmacked, there is usually one lane in each direction. Secondly, the heavy traffic,  particularly trucks and buses. This of course, goes hand in hand with the narrow roads – overtaking is difficult and traffic jams are frequent, especially in towns. Out in the country you often find yourself crawling behind a long line of vehicles. Thirdly, our driver told us that a law prevents him from travelling faster than 60 km per hour when he has ‘foreigners’ in his vehicle. If he disobeyed this, he could lose his livelihood. So we crept towards our destination.  While Sri Lanka, like India, is notorious for its dodgem-car driving mentality, Upali, was an exemplary driver and never took any risks.

On the road to Anuradhapura

We’d left Negombo at 6 am and so reached Anuradhapura at midday.  First stop, our overnight accommodation.  The Palm Garden Hotel was idyllic. The best hotel of the whole trip – in my opinion. Small units distributed throughout a lush area of parkland and the biggest swimming pool I’ve ever seen – it disappeared around the corner. After we returned from visiting the city’s ancient sites, we persuaded the attendant to let us swim in the dark, the pool only lit by low floodlights. Absolute heaven!

Of course nothing is perfect.  This was the first of many hotels where the news hadn’t filtered down from the tour company that two beds in each room were an absolute essential.  We were shown to our room: one glorious bed, draped in a mosquito net as romantic as a wedding veil.

It took a while to get through them. ‘We are not married!’ I joked, pointing at Pam. Not a flicker of a smile. Did they think my smirking remark was non-PC? Or was it simply that in eastern countries personal space is not a priority, and that they could not understand why two women refused to share a bed?

Eventually they agreed to bring in a folding bed. Pam and I tossed a coin. She won. So she spent the night safe from mozzies and with room for a pony, while I squeezed onto the put-me-up and exposed my delicate flesh to the vampires of the night. Luckily the bed turned out to be very comfortable and the vampires stayed away.

The hotel provided a mouth-watering evening buffet with a wide choice of Sri Lankan and Western dishes. And no concession to tender western tastes. If you chose Sri Lankan you got full-blown spiced dishes – chillies and all. Indian hotels take note: you could learn from this. We would go on to discover that almost everywhere we ate at night (usually in the hotel) offered a buffet – almost always excellent and all uncompromising.

Breakfast in the morning was so good that I noted in my journal ‘best ever – lots of fruit and curds in clay pots’. Fruit was generally papaya, water melon, hard guavas and out-of-this-world pineapples. And of course the wonderful little bananas that make you never want to eat another South American or Caribbean import again.  Curds in clay pots means buffalo curd. It’s eaten with palm syrup, which the hotels all insist on labelling ‘trickle’. Curds took me back to 1996 when I had been ‘on the road’ with my Sri Lankan relatives. We bought a pot from a roadside stall and, when we got back to Colombo, had a feast. It was a taste I’d never forgotten, the syrup complementing the curds in a true fusion of deliciousness.

Naturally I wasn’t going to get through the tour without falling over. This time the steps up to our room caught me out. I went flying. The steps were hard and sharp. It hurt. No real harm done but my knees took the brunt and remained ‘delicate’ for the rest of the tour (still a bit sore now!) I wasn’t the first to take a tumble – on our descent from the boat in Negombo I’d turned round to find Pam rolling around in the sand.

The steps of my downfall

I wasn’t the last, either. No wonder Upali panicked whenever we tried to sneak away from under his watchful eye. He clearly realised we were the combined ingredients of a recipe for disaster.

‘Sri Lanka—teardrop of India. Life has been returned to me here. Over the past year I have learnt to live, and to love again, unconditionally. Here I have found greater happiness and peace than I could have imagined during those first, terrible days in this tainted paradise. For paradise it is, a voluptuous island, a lush garden of swaying coconut groves lapped by the Indian ocean; of mountain peaks and savage jungle; of ancient temples and elephants; of gentle people and enigmatic faiths. But this paradise has been violated; for it is also a place of brutal conflict and intolerance; of civil war and repression.’ The Moon’s Complexion

My novel ‘The Moon’s Complexion’, was, of course, set in the 1990s. Now, spurred on by friends who wanted to go there, it was time to try and discover for myself how tainted this paradise still is.

 My last visit of any duration had been in 1996, when I’d attended the wedding of my Sri Lankan nephew.  I’d ‘called in’ briefly overnight in 2002 but that was it. In 1996  much of the country was still out of bounds due to the devastating civil war, and not even Colombo was without tension after a devastating bomb had torn through the centre of the city: handbag searches in stores and plenty of uniformed officers around.  We managed a short trip to Kandy and Sigiriyia and a day at the sea, but the rest of my stay had been filled with ceremonies and celebrations in Colombo.

 My early memories of Sri Lanka are from the 1960s and 70s, when my sister lived there. No  photos to look back at as they are all on 8 mm film or 35mm slides. One day I really must get them digitalised.

 Even in those early days I didn’t get to the far north or the east of the island.  These areas are not exactly accessible.   My time was limited, and my main purpose was to see the family in Colombo.

 Now, over forty years later, the family has dispersed throughout the world. My nephew emigrated to the antipodes during the height of the civil war, in order to give his daughters a better life.  There’s hardly anyone left in Colombo now, except for a few of my sister’s relatives-by-marriage.

 So although I would contact these relatives when I was in Colombo at the end of the tour, it was a strange feeling to be heading as a ’tourist’ to a place that had figured so large in my family's lives, which held bittersweet memories.

 My fellow-travellers were ‘the usual suspects’ – Pam, Margot and Heinz, my companions of many previous trips, including to India and Burma.  I’d booked via my usual Indian Tour Company, and had caused some raised eyebrows when I specified the areas to be included on the itinerary. But more of that later.

 We started off in Negombo – not by choice, but because the tour company had decided to put us in this seaside resort for the first night. It is not far from Colombo’s airport, while not particularly inspirational,  a convenient goal for weary travellers on Day 1. Since we’d arrived early in the morning, this meant that we had a whole day to unwind by the sea before heading off to Anuradhapura the following morning.

Our driver,  Upali, who had met us at the airport, put us all in a great mood when he warned us not to stray from the resort because ‘some foreigners were attacked and robbed yesterday’. Great. Just the start we needed.

As it happened, I would have been quite content to stay on the beach or by the pool all day – how very unlike me!  But after a long flight with a chaotic transfer in Mumbai (don’t get me started on that!!) a day doing nothing was just what was needed.

 Margot had other ideas.  After she and Heinz had lunched (obviously they hadn’t been as well-stuffed on Etihad as we had been on Jet Airways) she decided that  a boat trip was necessary, in order to explore the Dutch Canal that her German guidebook recommended. My heart sank. Last thing I needed was to be hauled onto a boat and dragged down some smelly old canal.  But Margot persisted and managed to secure a fishing boat with an outboard motor at considerably lower cost than the hotel had offered. The boat’s proprietors  promised us plenty of bird life en route, so Pam and I allowed ourselves to be torn from our stupor. We donned life-jackets (mine was a child’s and wouldn’t  fasten),  clambered on board and set out to sea, together with the captain and his crew – a lad of around sixteen.

 The boat and its crew

We didn’t get far. Just far enough away from land to feel uncomfortable when the engine died.  For too many heart-stopping moments we bobbed around on the not-insignificant waves, drifting further out to sea.  The only  wave that mattered was the wave of relief that I’m sure passed through us all, when, finally, the outboard sprang back into life and we headed off at some speed over the water. We traced the coast north for some twenty minutes and then turned inland and entered the mouth of the Dutch canal.

 It was not what I expected.  Apart from the lack of current it could just as well have been a river.  The boatman’s promise had not been an exaggeration, far from it. What a stunning start to our holiday. Here is just some of the scenery and some of the wildlife we spotted on our trip up the canal.

 The view from the boat as the canal broadens out.

A little green heron

A common kingfisher

A white-breasted kingfisher

A pied kingfisher

A swimming kabaragoya (water monitor)

A resting kabaragoya

Two friends strolling on the bank beneath the mangroves

The young crew member rescued an injured blue rock pigeon and cradled it gently in one hand all the way back. He would take it to his uncle who has the equivalent of a pigeon loft.

Altogether it was a magical ride and a promising start to our tour of Sri Lanka.