Of Sri Lanka - The Best And Worst Of Serendib

Sri Lanka! Land of Fibreglass Monks!

So this ends Sri Lanka week. I've enjoyed it, getting all this stuff out of my system and down on paper but it's been disastrous for traffic. Lucky I don't lie awake at night worrying about traffic, isn't it?

Given our disastrous week in Galle led to us fleeing the place and swearing never to go back to Sri Lanka, Deepika gets props for talking us down off the ledge and she and travelling companions Ishara and Duminda take full credit for the remarkable turnaround this hectic and madly varied week have shaped. We'd go back at the drop of a hat as a result of this latest visit. And no more Worst Meals Of My Life took place! By the way, should you ever find yourself in Galle don't do what we did - eschew the rumpled twit up the hill and go stay at the excellent Galle Fort Hotel.

So what's the takeaway?

Sri Lanka is a land of contrasts, of poverty and wealth, beauty and dirt, glory and failure. It's never less than fascinating, often entertaining and amusing - sometimes toe-curling, sometimes beam-inducing.

From flying in, getting 40 winks and then being pitched into the dubious pleasures of the Elephant Orphanage at Pinnawala - as well as the madcap dash up the mountain road to Kandy - and the Earl's Regency Hotel, we were plunged into a full-on experience that confounded our suspicions and fears. Sri Lanka's fun, people. Truly.

Sigiriya's Citadel and Lion Rock - that immense ruined palace is well worth half a day of your life. And dashing around the veldt-like drylands of Kandulla National Park is a great way to round off that day, too.

One of the charms of Sri Lanka was the constant presence of a government that never comes across as anything other than sublimely venial. Every street corner is bedecked with the Cheshire Cat grin and trademark red sash of Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, a man who looks as if he'd eat you raw if you were salted and there were a few Rupees in it for him. Sri Lanka's politicians are to be celebrated as a breed: conflict of interest, corruption and a clear appetite for the trough sit hand in hand with ostentatious acts of seeming philanthropy which are as shrilly celebrated as they are phony. It's all quite fun in its way.

It was that sense of power corrupted that had me questioning the cosy version of history we found as we visited Mackwoods' Labookellie Tea Factory, which we enjoyed tremendously. It seems like a bitchy way to thank our hosts by penning an expose of Sri Lanka's morally indefensible tea industry but obfuscation does that to me. It makes me want to scratch the itch. Hence this post about the story of tea that nobody's telling because they're so busy trotting out the press release version.

Sure, there are tourist scams and scamsters. Just go along for the ride and keep your money nice and dry. Remember, you've got a lot more money than the average Sri Lankan and they can't be blamed for trying to part you from some of it. What kills me is at the top of the pile are fat cats who could buy and sell the likes of you and me and they're squeezing everyone below them in the system. Armchair socialist, me...

And then there are the cool, gorgeous highlands of Nuwara Eliya, mountain passes and misty peaks, rolling hills and gushing waterfalls cascading for hundreds of feet down wooded slopes. The delightfully potty, charming and excellent Warwick Gardens Hotel was our reward and we regret not having tarried there longer - despite the bonkers, broken track that leads up to it.

We should have been more disappointed and perhaps even angrier at how screwed up the Mount Lavinia Hotel was - how the lovely old building and its rich heritage have given way to a lazy, sloppy hotel that manages to get nothing quite right. But we weren't - we'd learned the most important lesson there is to learn if you're to enjoy your time in Sri Lanka: Just go along for the ride.

Anyway, that's the wrap. Thank you for coming along for the ride this past week. Business as usual from tomorrow - well, usualish - because I'm just finishing the final edit of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy and hope to have that up online next week. So you can look forward to the odd book promo here and there. Nothing de trop, you understand... Subtle and understated is the watchword...

Kaudulla National Park, Habarana

 Making tracks...

Having endured the awful sight of these majestic animals chained up and herded around for tourists at Pinnawala's Elephant Orphanage, seeing them in the wild really rams home how awful that place is.

We actually got taken to Kaudulla National Park by a guide who is a friend of Duminda's. It's a good couple of hours' drive and more away from Kandy, the other side of Dambulla on the Trincomalee road - the last section of the drive courtesy one of the best roads in Sri Lanka, recently built following the cessation of hostilities with the Tamil Tigers - this was Bandit Country and perfect it is, too, if you want to fight a guerilla war.

We met our safari car in Dambulla and hared through the country in an open-backed jeep. If you're staying in Kandy and up for a long day, set out early and visit Lion Rock at Sigiriya in the morning and Kaudulla in the afternoon.

Kaudulla is a typical Sri Lankan set-up in that the park is managed by the government, which sells concessions to 'licensed' tour guides and tickets to tourists. I can only say you're best off with an English speaking guide who has a proper four wheel drive vehicle rather than a pickup, which is liable to get stuck in the coastal mud or in wet weather.

The Kaudulla Park is based around the Kaudulla 'tank', one of sixteen man-made lakes created at the end of the C3rd AD by the then king, a visionary-seeming chap. It was restored in 1959 and preserves the waters from the rainy season to keep a year-round resource in what is, for Sri Lanka at least, an arid part of the country. The contrast between this area and the cool, wet highlands of Nuwara Eliya is quite stunning.

Elephants in the wild. The kids are kinda cute...

The ride through the park is great fun, the tracks are rutted and you'll ache the next day from standing up and getting jolted around, but that's okay. A good guide will stick to the tracks in the main - they know what the punters want and that's elephants - and lots of 'em. The park is home to a rich abundance of wildlife, including cats, buffalo, a rich variety of bird life and reptiles. But it's heffalumps wot draws the tourists and our sighting of painted pelicans (some rat has daubed all their bums with pink paint), ibis and buffalo was an incidental - elephants were the game d'jour.

 It's great seeing them in the wild; the dexterity of their trunks as they knot them around tufts of grass, knock off the sand then roll them up and pop them into those big mouths is something quite spectacular. We caught small herds, family units with ridiculously cute babies and protective mothers, old tuskers standing alone in the grasslands and all along we bounced and juddered along the side of the huge lake.

Fishermen buy licenses to net Tilapia and other freshwater fish from Kaudulla Tank.

For you, Tilapia, ze war is over...

Late afternoon in autumn is when the elephants amble down to the lakeside for a nice, cooling bath and the jeeps start gathering in anticipation but there's a been a shower of rain and the elephants are in no hurry and don't pitch for the occasion. Slowly the cars peel away en route home - others have seen but a lone elephant and we're gleeful at our own elephantine cornucopia.

Home, elated and weary, we've had tremendous fun and feel blessed to have seen something good to counter the feeling of mean dirtiness we took away from Pinnawala.

We're due to leave Kandy and make our way up to the highlands of Nuwara Eliya tomorrow. We've timed out and never did make it to the Temple of the Tooth. To be honest, that's no bad thing because it gives us an excuse to come back...

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...