Sri Lanka - Isle Of Gems And Spices

A grumpy old expat wearing a Father Ted t-shirt in a spice garden.

The two biggest tourist scams in Sri Lanka are spice gardens and jewellery showrooms. In each case, coach-loads of willing rubes are deposited by drivers who are paid to deliver their charges up to the operator of the dubious 'attraction' who will gouge them for as much hard cash as is physically possible. Both consist of a degree of 'show and tell' before the process of cash extraction commences.

In the case of the spice gardens, the idea is to show you around the spice garden and introduce you to a range of culinary and medicinal spices native to Sri Lanka. Nobody will mention the fact that no spice is harvested here unless you ask and then the answer comes with the clear inference that this is a facility operated by a larger enterprise with plantations deeper in the jungle that are too big to show people around. So this convenient facility helps to familiarise you with the riches of Sri Lanka.

It couldn't be further from the truth. Each spice garden (and they line the roads in their hundreds) is merely a small collection of spice plants together with some huts used for 'demonstrations'. You're taken around the garden and shown little patches of turmeric, pepper, nutmeg, vanilla, cinnamon and other spice plants. Anybody with a basic culinary understanding of spice will come away knowing no more than when they arrived.

You're sat down and fed some spiced tea, given various bottles to smell and introduced to mixtures for this and that ailment. And then you're taken to the shop where, tada!, they're all on sale. At vastly inflated prices. We're talking roughly Dhs100* (Rs 3,000) for a small bottle of essential oil and Dhs13 (Rs400) for four cinnamon sticks. All of it has come wholesale in plastic containers and been decanted into those little branded bottles 'around the back'. They are all, of course, we are assured with many assurances, 'made on the premises'.

All of these dubious little displays are licensed by the government - essentially a concession scheme rather than a watermark of quality and integrity, which is what the license will be whipped out to prove if you question either. And the sell can get quite hard if you balk at this stage.

The Sri Lankan Gem Tour

The gem showrooms have variations on a theme. You're shown into the place, met by your salesman and taken to see an educational video about gem mining.

Incidentally, all mining in Sri Lanka is either pit, open cast or river mining and all three are carried out in the most basic, largely unregulated and - to the environment at least - damaging fashion possible. It's unbelievably manual, pit props are cut from rubber wood and lashed together with ropes, diesel pumps chug as they clear the water streaming from the fern-packed walls of the vertical shaft. In the bottom of a shaft typically about 30 feet deep, sloshing around in mud up to their waists, bare-footed miners dig up gravel to be hauled to the surface and washed in search of gemstones. The miners qualify for something like 2.8% of the take - you're looking at Dhs 1,500 or so if you're lucky, as a seasonal take home. The rough gems are then sold on by the license holder, often at a pre-agreed low price to avoid taxation. The trader will then sell the stones on at a much higher price and share the proceeds back with the owner who has paid the workers at the low price rate. The environmental impact of mining in Sri Lanka, particularly around Ratnapura, the town and area that contribute something like 85% of Sri Lanka's mining revenue, has been - and continues to be - severe.

But you don't care about all that stuff, you're starry-eyed from the video and you're being introduced to various gems in a demonstration room and perhaps walked through the workshop, where workers might be soldering jewellery or grinding stones. And then you're taken to the showroom with its staggering displays of precious and semi-precious stones. You can buy rings, bangles, pendants, earrings or simply bare stones. The choice is entirely yours, but by now your salesman has sized you up and knows pretty well where to guide you.

The prices are never less than outrageous and, unless you know exactly what you're doing, you're going to get majorly ripped off. Sri Lanka's most famous gemstones are its sapphires - the bluer the better - but you'll also find the world's rarest gem - the light sensitive Alexandrite as well as peridots, moonstones, garnets, rubies, topaz and many more gems of a bewildering and dazzling variety. Sapphires can vary enormously in value, particularly given whether they've been heat treated or not - sapphires' colouring can be corrected and altered through the use of heat, radiation and other treatments and only an expert can tell if a stone has been treated. Recently a chap was sacked from his job in a Colombo hospital because he was using the radiography department facilities to correct sapphires!

Can you tell a heat-treated sapphire from a natural one? Then don't buy a sapphire in Sri Lanka.

You'll be offered certificates for gemstones. These are unlikely to be worth more than the paper they're printed on.

There are something like 4,000 gem traders in Sri Lanka. Every one of them will be glad to welcome you into their showrooms. If you're hell-bent on buying a stone, you'll actually need to do your homework before you travel - and when you do decide on buying one, the National Gem and Jewellery Authority offers a free testing service.

We had enormous fun dickering over a particularly lovely 5 karat white sapphire we had no intention, frankly, of buying - blue sapphires are valued, white ones are not held in particularly high esteem. The price started at $12,000 and had gone down to $8,000 by the time we left. Its true value, an expert pal assures us, was likely less than half of the 'last price'.

Buyer beware!!!

I'm not saying, BTW, you shouldn't go on these tours - quite the reverse, do: they're fun. I'm just saying don't buy anything. You're perfectly well within your rights to refuse to be ripped off. They have merely gambled on you being a willing rippee...

* Exchange rates for the Sri Lankan rupee are amazingly diverse. UAE Exchange wanted to give us 29 Rupees for the Dirham, a popular Sri Lankan exchange off Sharjah's Rolla Square gave us 32 Rupees and if you bought a draft and cashed it in Sri Lanka, you'd get over 35 Rupees! We sort of went with converting mentally at a rate of 30 to the Dirham to make things mathematically easier, 'cos we're dunces.

The Mount Lavinia Hotel, Colombo

Built in the early years of the C19th as the British governor's residence, extensively rebuilt in the 1820s and used in the Second World War as a British military hospital, the Mount Lavinia is a stunning colonial building wrapped around a beautiful small beach. It's all teak and brass, white walls and colonnades. It is without a doubt one of the most impressive colonial buildings you'll come across in Sri Lanka - a country with a rich stockpile of amazing colonial buildings (the Galle Fort Hotel is one such - and an excellent hotel to boot).

It's also thoroughly neglected.

The evening we arrived, the hotel reception and bar areas were liberally provided with a collection of buckets, from coloured plastic pails through to white plastic tubs, and soggy towels. The bar area was shut because of the water. There had been rain that day, we were told.

Bring a bucket for monsieur! 

And I'll chuck in a free signed copy of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller 

to the first commenter who identifies the film that quote comes from.

Sri Lanka gets a lot of rain in general - and Colombo's wettest average month is October when the city gets something in the range of 300ml of rainfall. London in the same month could expect perhaps 70ml. So rain is hardly a surprise, is it? And if you're going to dot your five star 'breathtaking colonial experience' reception with buckets, couldn't they at least be brass or branded? Paint tubs are hardly de-rigeur.

Our room was old and dowdy, the ancient green patterned carpet was stained. The sheets were also stained, something I regard with mild horror in hotels, no matter how washed those sheets have been. There were no bathrobes or slippers, although there were tea and coffee facilities and a minibar. The vintage AC worked. The bathroom was old but clean and functional. The balcony, overlooking the palm-lined beach and giving a view across to the main hotel restaurant and terrace areas, was a place of sublime and magical beauty. The stormy evening added to the sheer gloriousness of it all.

Although shuttered by the rain, the bar off reception was open for business. The seating in the bar area is strange, more suited to being a waiting area for reception than a bar. It certainly lacked any romanticism or link to the hotel's much-touted colonial heritage. Large blue sofas around chunky coffee tables are more suited to large groups than romantically inclined couples and the service was slow.

The bar area, as many of the hotel's other surfaces, was dotted with palm shoots in terracotta trays. These, we were informed in a leaflet, were part of an earth day project to 'give back to the community we gain so much from'. The hotel buys the seeds, plants them until they sprout then gives them back to the community the seeds come from so they can plant them along the river banks. Quite mystifying, really, sort of greenwash without a point.

Escaping the drip of water into plastic buckets and the frigid AC in the lobby bar, we went upstairs to eat, only to find the only choice in town was the Indian theme night at the hotel's gorgeously Victorian Governor's Restaurant. We stayed at the Mount Lavinia because of the food - the executive chef here, Chef (Dr) Publis Silva, has published a number of popular Sri Lankan cookbooks. So we were looking forward to a lively menu of Sri Lankan specialties rushing out of a bustling, world-class kitchen. This, we fast found out, was not going to happen.

Meeting cookbook author and Mount Lavinia's executive chef, 

the engagingly eccentric and 78 year-old Chef (Dr) Publis Silva. 

That's a story for another day but it was a strange, 

strange encounter in which he promptly sold me a cookbook.

The Mount Lavinia really only has Governor's Restaurant - although its website talks about seafood cove (open air dining on the beach) and the terrace (open air dining at the poolside), there is really only one restaurant as such. Especially when it rains, which it does quite a bit in Colombo - as we have already discussed. Governor's has an open air area and closed, air-conditioned area. There is an á la carte menu, which is a pretty standard walk through coffee shop fare the world around. And there is a buffet - offering, on the night we were there, the delights of India. There was also a smaller area of Sri Lankan food on offer.

We'd been looking forward to fine Sri Lankan food flung together by the best in the business. What we got was a fight for a table (reception had told us not to bother booking, we could just rock up. Rocking up, we were told all tables were reserved. A short, taut conversation later we had a miraculous table appear) in the restaurant's enclosed area.

And what an area. It's a Victorian tea-room, white pillars reaching up to the far ceiling, panelled teak windows all around. It reminded me of the achingly beautiful Cinnamon Room at Galle's Lighthouse Hotel and, for all I know, this room could have inspired architect Geoffrey Bawa to build that very lovely (and hopelessly bad) restaurant.

The buffet was, well, lazy. There were two dishes of each salad on the salad buffet, one in front and the one behind a repeat in case the front dish ran out. Nothing stood out, it was the usual melange of seafood in dressing, green salad, beef in vinaigrette and the like. The hot Indian food (not really matched up with Indian starters to any great extent we could see) was a standard rolling out of Northern staples - chicken makhani, dal makhani and the like.

The Sri Lankan food suffered from being piled up in large containers, slowly steaming away for hours and becoming tough and dull in the process, rather than being cooked in small batches and frequently refreshed. A black pepper mutton was spicy, hot and tough, the beef was also tough. The fish curry was tasty, but the fish flaky and dry. A lotus root and yam curry was overcooked by the time we reached it. The hoppers were cooked live and were stunning, light and crispy with a soft heart - and served with a rich onion sambal that wasn't as hot as most you'll find on offer with hoppers. These were the best we've ever had but, tellingly, they were the only things on the whole buffet that were freshly made.

The desserts were awful. Tiramisu is made from mascarpone cheese and egg yolks, 'lady finger' sponge dipped in coffee or, better, liqueur- not Polyfilla-like imitation cream and chocolate sponge. Many of the other desserts defy description. The 'creme brulee' was floury, tasteless and the sugar topping was soggy.

The service was pretty much as bad as you'd get. With absolutely no food knowledge on offer, the waiters were disorganised and appeared to be randomly assigned. Getting any request met was down to spending minutes on end waving your hands and crying out at them as they ran past avoiding eye contact with any of the tables. The whole wearying thing cost twice as much as dinners in other hotels we'd stayed at during our trip.

We left the Mount Lavinia totally perplexed at how you could make so little from so much. it's lazy, there's no other way to put it. There is every reason to invest in this hotel, to re-evaluate the limited facilities and shabby furnishings and come up with something truly outstanding that delights and inspires - a hotel that lives up to the standards and expectations of that rich colonial history. It's a beautiful building, but the colonial heritage schtick doesn't go deeper than the structural level. Everything else is just bleh. As it is right now we wouldn't go back if you paid us. We just thought it was all such a terrible shame.

The Elephant Orphanage, Pinnawala

Plenty of room - it's overtake time!

We got into Colombo at 3am-odd and met travelling companions Ishara and Duminda (Deepika's nephew) together with Duminda's rather smart Lexus minibus.

They whisked us off to the Ramada Katanayake where we had elected to try and sleep, wash and grab some breakfast before hooning off up-country to Kandy. The hotel was okay, barely - fine for the stopover. The master plan was to visit a spice garden and the Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala on the way up and we duly did this. Of our encounter with spice, more later.

It's hard to get used to driving in Sri Lanka, although Duminda was as safe a pair of hands behind the wheel as I've ever seen. TukTuks and motorbikes are all over the place, trickling through the choking traffic like sand through marbles. It's all breakneck stuff, coaches appear out of nowhere heading straight at you as they overtake a pair of parallel TukTuks and a moped before melting out of the way miraculously at the last minute just as you'd started to see your life flash in front of your eyes and only got as far as the first time you put your hands up a girl's jumper. The road to Kandy is a twisty turny thing, constantly choked with sluggish lorries and peripatetic coaches given to sudden stops sans indicators. We're overtaking half the time, crouching poised on the bumper of the lorry in front the rest of the time. It's not for the faint-hearted, this stuff.

The Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala was a fascinating experience, but one we won't be repeating thank you very much. In reality, this is no more an orphanage than a kitten tied to a stick and pelted with stones is an orphanage.

Foreigners pay 2,500 rupees to get into this exhibit and Sri Lankans 100. Neither gets any explanation of the work of the orphanage, the need for such work or how the orphanage is investing our 2,500 rupees (the price of a fine dinner for two in a hotel) into bettering the lives of the elephants in its care. In fact there's little to no information on hand anywhere, just bunches of elephants.

As you walk around, you start to realise why - there is no focus on education or familiarisation at all - and no evidence of any focus on animal welfare whatsoever. This is spectacle, not conservation at work. It's actually mildly revolting. The animals are chained, some exhibiting clear locked-in syndrome behaviour. The 'mahouts' control the animals using barbed pikes. You can feed a (unhealthily fat-looking) elephant a bowl of fruit for a fee and have your photo taken. You can watch others eating leaves as they wander about in puddles of their own faeces in concrete pens.

Chains and shit. Something of a theme at Pinnawala...

Tourists feed baskets of fruit to an unhealthily fat-looking elephant. 

The 'mahouts' rake in the cash...

One particularly sad spectacle was an elephant who'd lost her foot to a landmine. Stumbling, impossibly hunched, she presented a grim sight. Chained with others for no apparent reason other than to present a spectacle, it was hard to see if she was unable to move freely because of her injury or the heavy chains around her ankle.

There's no clear signage. There's a shop you have to exit through. Crossing the road, you can watch the elephants bathing. This daily spectacle is best viewed from two restaurants with balconies overlooking the river. The elephants enjoy the water. Two of the elephants are encouraged - in front of the more expensive hotel balcony - to immerse themselves. This is achieved with pokes and scratches from the mahout's pike.

It's all heart-warming stuff: the exploitation of animals for tourists gawping from perches in concession-paying outlets reached through an alleyway of tourist-trap hucksters pushing 'elephant poo paper' and various other gaudy knick knacks.

Government-run, you do wonder if this is not some strange microcosm of Sri Lankan governance, but this is the route to acute depression, so it's time to move on and swear never to return...

The Citadel Of Sigiriya - Lion Rock

 "Right lads, I'll have a palace up there and some pleasure gardens please. 

Quick as you like now. Chop chop!"

Sigiriya is an ancient palace built by a king who decided that if you're going to do 'palace', then it might as well be a gigantic, sprawling moated complex topped by a 200-metre high rock with a pleasure garden, pools and harem at its top.

The guy certainly had style, I'll give him that. 

Fighting off the insistent and rather seedy-seeming gentleman who wanted to be our guide to the sight, we bought our tickets (Rs3,900 for foreigners, Rs50 for Sri Lankans). These were expensive by UK standards, let alone Sri Lankan and our Sri Lankan friends felt shamed by the difference in prices. Oddly enough they seemed more annoyed by it than we were. 

But to be honest, we were a little taken aback. Understanding we earn more than Sri Lankans do, put in a system of concessions for schoolkids and the aged then find ways of presenting the experience that wealthier European or Asian travellers would pay premiums for rather than out-and-out gouging. There was no guidebook to the site and no audio guide on offer. There were no official guides and little evidence of any attempt to structure the experience as a value-added one beyond 'pay up and go up'. 

In some ways, this adds to its charm - it's not slick and over-developed. But then in others it detracts - the pestering freelance tour guide, the lack of any facilities or information. Even the availability of cold water until you get to the stalls in the drivers' car park at the exit. That apart, the site itself is splendorous.

I'm sure there was more information in the museum, but that was 500 metres the wrong way away from the site and we decided to skip it and get on with what looked to promise a hot, gruelling climb.

You travel through the ruins of glorious water gardens and what once must have been an amazing citadel towards the rock towering above you. You can see the steps stretching up to the foot of the rock, then the gantries and walkways stuck to the side of it and vertigo already cuts in. We chose a hot, sunny day and it was certainly warm going. There are delightful signs all over the place telling you to stay silent to prevent hornet attacks. Shame they weren't in Korean or Japanese. 

The hornets, presumably unable to speak Korean or Japanese themselves, let the babblers pass. 

The climb up, taken with care, is not onerous if you are relatively fit. Many choose to go as far as the 'lion's feet' and leave the final - and most vertiginous - part of the climb to more foolish folk. 

The Mirror Wall. No, it's no longer shiny. 

Not even Dubai could be shiny after 2,000 years...

On the way up you pass the Mirror Wall, a porcelain wall once apparently so burnished the king who built his palace atop this 200 meter-high boulder could see his face in it. You also get the chance to clamber up a spiral staircase to look at the remains of the frescoes some experts believe once adorned much of the rock. We passed, it was too hot, too busy and none of us much liked the look of the buttressing holding the viewing platform together. 

It's only when you're traversing rock a couple of hundred feet from the staging point below looking out over vistas of Sri Lanka's forest carpet that you realise you're standing on a flimsy structure nailed to a rock and maintained by the Sri Lankan Office of Public Works (or some such). The presence of a broken strut on the ground below doesn't add to any vestigial feelings of confidence.

It's not until you're on the way out you get to see what you've been walking on. 

Which is lucky, really...

Struggling to the top (not because of the climb, but negotiating the press of people coming down - even a section which had two walkways, clearly intended to be one for up and one for down, was crammed with people going both ways), you're rewarded by an amazing view of the lush countryside, as well as a scramble through the stepped ruins of the palace, complete with a huge cistern and water pools. 

Apparently yer one had 200 wives and liked to disport with them here. You can't blame him. If I were the King Of All I Surveyed, I'd be tempted meself...

Mind, it didn't do him much good - he was defeated and fell on his own sword in AD495. 

This is where Sri Lankans discover why their ticket only cost Rs50...

Delightfully, once you've struggled to the top and wandered around a bit, you come across a sign that says 'GOING DOWN IS DANGEROUS'. Thanks, you might have mentioned that before...

Sigiriya is a true marvel. Suck it up, cough and pay the inflated fee. Give this at least half a day. Do not, under any circumstance, pass it by.

Sri Lanka Week

Some flowers. A symbol of Sri Lankan hospitality or some such...

Rather in the same mould as a hotel special night - and having had one too many themed buffet meals than we needed over the past week, thank you - this week's going to be Sri Lanka Week, so if you're not interested in Travels In Serendib, I'd give it all a miss if I were you.

We did a hare-brained, breakneck tour of Sri Lanka over Eid, as usual ill-informed and wilfully determined not to be told what to do. We had help at hand - an 'inside job' had been arranged by Sri Lankan pal Deepika, who had a driver at hand. The scheme was simple - clock into Colombo at the dreadful hour of 2.50 am thanks to Air 'we like the cheap slots' Arabia and stay briefly at the Ramada Katunayake at the airport before whizzing up to Kandy for two nights staying at the Earl's Regency, Nuwara Eliya for a night at uber-funky boutique plantation house The Jetwing Warwick Gardens and then back down to Colombo for an evening at the Mount Lavinia before flying out again in the early hours.

There was method behind the four-night madness. We had travelled to Sri Lanka before, a week's stay at the lovely-looking Sun House in Galle. That week was to turn out to be nothing short of disastrous, featuring a gurgling twit English hotelier, a randy old monk, sham tea plantations, rats piss blankets and The Worst Meal Of My Life. We eventually escaped to Colombo and got drunk before fleeing Sri Lanka vowing never to return.

I reviewed the Sun House Hotel for now defunct food blog The Fat Expat back in the day. The review's linked here and worth a read for a laugh. As a taster, it starts...

"What more could you want to make your boutique hotel experience unforgettable than the facilities offered by the Sun House in Galle, a former colonial bungalow converted into a small, exclusive and luxurious hotel?

The Sun House offers a gurgling twit British owner who appears to have escaped from a comedy show, limited and inflexible dining, a set of threadbare towels and sheets, broken plumbing and a nice, steady stream of rat's piss onto your pillows as you sleep. It really is the perfect way to come to a state of fear and loathing in Galle."

As for The Worst Meal Of My Life, that was at the gloriously beautiful Lighthouse Hotel in Galle, in probably the most handsome restaurant I have ever dined in. That one's linked here for your listening pleasure. As a piece of review writing, it's one of my personal favourites, by the way and still makes me, despite everything, laugh. Here's a snippet:

"In fact, the entire meal had come out and then simply gone back. And the waiter didn’t bat an eyelid. He had obviously seen this happening before: seen the breathless anticipation of romantic couples turned into wide-eyed horror and revulsion and then plunge into despair."

Sarah 'The Hedonista' Walton went to Sri Lanka and loved it, writing it up as an ethereal and magical experience. I could never reconcile that with our own snarling, resentful journey of furious disappointment.

So this time around Deepika talked us into it - but we decided to move so fast that if we encountered disaster, at least it would be fleeting. And I'm glad we did it now, because we had a fantastic time - a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs that was never less than fascinating, frequently endearing, sometimes frustrating but never in danger of going anywhere near the painful lessons of Galle.

So welcome, armchair traveller, to Sri Lanka Week...