More Sharjah News! The 'Water Tank Cooling Device' Announcement!

It's amazing what you can find living in water tanks. 

Actually this is a lie as this is a fish in Sharjah Aquarium. 

Which is, incidentally, a great day out with the kids.

Oh, the excitement! It's all happening in Sharjah these days - following hot on the heels of this weekend's crackdown on pesky prayer-time parkers, Sharjah Municipality has announced that all property owners in the emirate will be required to install a 'water cooling device' in their water tanks.

If you're not a resident of the UAE, you might not appreciate we all have water tanks (many of us have two to be sure to be sure) on the roofs of our villas and on our apartment blocks. Water is pumped twice daily through the public network, filling these holding tanks from which we then derive our daily supply of water. Although some are plastic, many - especially older - tanks are fibre-glass. Over time, some interesting species of fresh water slugs and other things can be found in tanks which should, ideally, be occasionally flushed just to keep 'em clean.

But this is the first I've ever heard of a 'water cooling device'. Never mind, Gulf News is a real newspaper and will have asked the first question that came to my mind - 'what device?'

Oh.

So whatever the device is to be, we know not. Apparently there'll be a degree of choice, in that water tanks can either have a water cooling device or be shielded from the sun 'especially during the warmer summer months'. The move is to 'address the problem of high temperature of water faced by many residents in Sharjah.'

What problem? It's long been accepted fact that you know summer's arrived when either a) hot water comes out of your cold tap (and you can turn off the immersion to get cold water from your hot tap) or b) Gulf News publishes a photo of a pigeon drinking from a standpipe. When both happen, you know it's gonna be a hot one.

So we don't know what device, when it will be implemented, how it will be implemented, who will be affected, what the application process is or who is going to pay for all this. Whatever all this is.

So much for Rudyard Kipling's 'six honest serving men'.

Gulf News does point out residents can call 993 for more information. I tried just for fun and so you wouldn't have to. I am none the wiser, but have spoken to a number of puzzled-sounding people and been transferred to many, many phone lines that ring out and cut you off.

Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the cooler weather that is upon us and the consequential cool water coming from our water tanks...

Sharjah Cops Nail The Friday Free For All

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A one-month traffic safety awareness campaign has ended in Sharjah with a major drive to stop people dumping their cars in the streets outside mosques for Friday prayers in what is, to many, a quite incredible move.

It's long been traditional for Friday's midday prayer time to be the cue for people to park where they fancied in the street, abandoned cars outside popular mosques often reducing traffic to a single lane or even blocking roads entirely. It's amazing how people would park three or even four cars abreast on the approaches to - and even around - roundabouts. Given Sharjah has a large number of mosques, many located on roundabouts, serving residential neighbourhoods, Friday traffic can get quite random. That the problem has not been more severe has been in part down to the fact that shops and other businesses close between 11.30 and 1.30, so you've got fewer people in the streets in general.

The practice is justified by the fact the person is praying and therefore beyond reproach and has been tolerated for as long as I've been wandering around the Gulf. In Saudi Arabia, you'll often find people pulling up at the side of the road to pray, gaily abandoning their cars while they do so. But Sharjah's Friday street parking, which can reach a quite breathtaking scale, has clearly gone too far for authorities and we were amazed to see police patrols outside mosques, with cops taking numberplates and the usual jams on roundabouts notably absent.

Gulf News reports that over 200 traffic tickets were issued on Friday (a Dhs500 fine and four black points, if you don't mind) and that police distributed traffic awareness leaflets.

The acid test, of course, will be how this is implemented over time. And while it means emergency services and traffic in general won't be impeded by the 'random street parking', I can't help but feel a little sad at the passing of one of the many little quirks that makes living here so, well, interesting...

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...

A Different Story Of Tea (The One Nobody's Telling)

Some tea.

As a writer, if you ever get asked to pen a feature about tea you know precisely what to do - the vast majority of pieces on Sri Lankan tea consist of a number of trusty tropes. Chinese emperor discovers tea when leaves fall in boiling water, British trade opium for tea with Chinese until they smuggle seeds out of China and plant them in Assam, James Taylor comes to Sri Lanka and establishes a tea plantation after coffee was wiped out by blight, lush highlands of Nuwara Eliya provide 'champagne of teas', workers nip buds, processed by drying, rolling and fermentation bosh bosh there's your 2,000 words. Nah, cheque'll be fine, thanks.

I, too, have in the past been guilty of this very sin of commission.

And yet the true story of Sri Lanka's tea producers is more disturbing than that. It's fascinating, dramatic and in many ways deeply questionable.

As you cruise around the high passes of Nuwara Eliya admiring the misty landscape, a series of very British names passes you by: Palmerston, Edinburgh, Craigie Lea, Dunsinane, Harrington, Preston and many, many more. There's a definitely Scottish flavour around here. There is, naturally, also a Rothschild Estate. The names have been maintained, although the owners of those plantations were forced out of Sri Lanka by a Marxist government hell-bent on ridding the country of the last shreds of colonialism at any price. Today these estates are managed by Sri Lankan companies eager to associate themselves with 150 years of history and the very British sounding brands that go with it - and very eager indeed to avoid any mention of the rather less prosaic nature of their businesses and the means by which they came by those nice, comfy-sounding names.

Tragically, Sri Lanka's critically important tea industry has been ripped apart by the side-effects of that very governmental intervention - and it's staggering into a very bleak future indeed.

Good Old Fashioned Colonialism

Sri Lanka's tea business was founded through good old fashioned colonialism. The British government had turfed the Dutch out of Sri Lanka in the very early C19th and proceeded to cede land to former military officers and other worthies to operate coffee plantations. Sinhalese labour being hard to find, they sourced cheap labour from that Jewel Of Empire - India. Tamil Nadu, to be precise. All went swimmingly until the late 1860s, when a coffee blight started to wipe out crops. Following from pioneer James Taylor, the remaining planters (many had chucked in the towel, upped sticks and gone home to regret their choice of retirement) took to tea, using that same cheap Tamil labour in the fields they had established for coffee and expanding their plantations as demand for tea back in the UK and elsewhere rocketed.

The estate's relationship with its workers would be familiar to any student of mid-C19th Victorian England and, indeed, contemporary UAE labour practice. The estate housed the workers in labour accommodation, known as 'line rooms'. Each 'division' of an estate has its line rooms, an elementary school and a central creche and dispensary. At a basic level, the estate took care of its workers. And they still do - precisely in this fashion, little has changed - today.

The clearance of rain forest proceeded at a rate that makes the biocide currently taking place in the Amazon look like child's play. Tea was the drink of Victorian England - refreshing, invigorating but never inebriating. More land, more labour, more plantations were the order of the day and Sri Lanka had it all - apart from the labour, but the Tamils were pleased to come. So were the Scots - the highlands of Nuwara Eliya are cool, to the point where you'll find fuschias and roses in abundance, with warm but not uncomfortable summers and shivery but not uncomfortable winters. A nice planters' house in the hills was a dream. Well, apart from the malaria...

Settling Down to the Trough

Sri Lankan independence came in 1948 and two of the earliest pieces of legislation the new government passed were to confirm almost a million Tamil tea estate workers stateless. With the new owners settling down to the trough and getting comfortable, many of the British planters could see the writing on the wall and a slow creep ensued, family companies like Mackwoods selling out to Sri Lankan investors - of which N.S.O. Mendis, buying Mackwoods in 1956, claims to be the first.

By 1972, with a fresh socialist government in place, Sri Lanka had found its post-colonial feet. The plantations clearly could not be allowed to continue to be managed by foreigners and staffed by Tamils. Sri Lankan involvement in the tea industry was minimal and you can only imagine how British plantation owners would view the idea of the new, brash crop of Sri Lankan management wannabe's with their strong sense of post-colonial entitlement wanting to muscle in on positions held variously by experienced British or Tamil workers.

The government acted decisively and passed a sweeping land reform act that nationalised the entire country's plantations in one fell, draconian swoop. The law removed foreign land ownership and took any holding above 50 acres into the government fold. The poor chap who owned the Warwick Estate (if he did, as our friend at the Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel tells us, buy it from the Scottish owners in 1940 he'd precede NSO Mendis and lay claim to being the first Sri Lankan to buy a British sterling company) - like many others, without doubt - had his heart attack. In a flash, hundreds of owners lost everything. Companies and individuals alike were bankrupted overnight.

The trough had suddenly become a great deal bigger, which was lucky as those busying themselves at it were also expanding at the waistline...

The management of the country's estates (tea, rubber and coconut alike), numbering some 500-odd estates and representing over 130,000 hectares of tea plantation was vested by the government in the Janatha Estate Development Board and the Sri Lanka State Plantation Corporation. A great deal of mismanagement, corruption and general idiocy resulted, with yields plateauing and then dropping sharply over the period following nationalisation.

A Quiet Shame

But there was another, quieter movement that took place right after 1972 - the Sri Lankan and Indian governments signed a shameful agreement to divide the stateless Tamils up - a first repatriation agreement in 1964 (directly after 'I don't want them back' Nehru's death, actually) was followed by that of 1974 - India was to take back 600,000 of the Tamils and Sri Lanka was to, finally, grant citizenship to 375,000. It wasn't to be until 1988 that a final act would grant citizenship to Sri Lanka's remaining 'Estate Tamils'. The phrase differentiates them from the secessionist Northern Tamils.

The skills left the plantations and went 'home' to India in one of the biggest - and quietest - forced movements of labour seen in the C20th.

By 1990 it had become all too clear that the whole nationalisation experiment had been a mess. Pressure from the World Bank increased and the government decided to part-privatise the plantations in 1992, retaining ownership of the land but awarding management contracts to the country's 470-odd tea plantations and 700-odd tea factories (as well as rubber and coconut plantations). The whole lot was sub-divided into 23 RPCs - Regional Plantation Companies. Each unit was intended to be a profitable enterprise and consisted of groupings of estates between 6-10,000 hectares in all. A (questionable) bidding process followed, with 39 Sri Lankan companies submitting 102 bids for the right to become managing agents over the 23 RPCs.

The original scheme was a five-year renewable management contract, but it quickly became clear that wasn't going to work and the term was extended to 53 years. The companies awarded management contracts took over the management of estates, workers and factories alike. Many quickly found they didn't have the capital needed to get things rolling again after 20 years of negligence and the government eventually had to bail a number out to the tune of over Rs2 billion.

The Wrong Tea

But there was more trouble in paradise in store. The cost of tea production, especially with the new requirements for social provision for labour and unionisation of the labour force forcing costs up, were high and rising, while market prices were anything but. And Sri Lanka was - and is - producing the wrong tea.

Most of us drink tea made from tea bags these days. There's no time to go around measuring out tea, heating pots and straining the stuff. So demand for tea bags has risen while demand for leaf tea has dropped. In fact, tea consumption generally has dropped. But making tea bag tea - known as CTC (Crush, Tear, Curl) - is a different process to making whole leaf tea. In 2004 Kenya overtook Sri Lanka as the world's leading tea producer, principally because it makes CTC tea. Sri Lanka makes, in the vast majority, leaf tea.

You can hear the plaintive voices arguing that it's all about the quality, even as the billowing clouds of fell destiny gather on the horizon.

So Sri Lanka's market is a fast-shrinking one. And the management companies - holders of limited leases with onerous profit-sharing requirements - have little incentive to invest in new plant and equipment - in fact, many of the country's 660-odd working tea factories are operating with ancient plant, even *shudder* British plant from before 1972. Sri Lanka's also working with ancient plants - the strains of tea planted are traditional and they, too, date back to the Brits, while competitors such as Kenya are working with newer, more productive strains of tea - and younger plantations. Production is further reduced by under-fertilised, over-farmed land.

In fact, there's been little investment in the entire industry since the Brits were sent packing. The trough self-fills, no?

There's a labour crunch on, too. Fewer young people are finding a life of picking 18kg of tea a day (the bare minimum per worker, which nets them about Rs500 a day - the price of a beer in Sri Lanka) attractive. The insanely manual business of tea picking is dominated by women, but the estate also has to provide housing and facilities for their dependents - even if they're not actively involved in working on the plantation. Social issues are on the rise, on the back of widespread unemployment comes hopelessness, brutalisation, alcoholism and rape, while basic amenities such as clean water remain patchy. Labour conditions appear to have changed little since the Victorians - they've arguably worsened.

It's all teetering on the edge of disaster.

Worse, Sri Lanka's tea producers appear dangerously set in their ways. Those ancient factories churn out sacks of tea which are traded on the market in Colombo. Tea's a commodity, so its value goes up and down with market demand. People buy and sell tea futures. The product's price is no longer set by true demand or intrinsic value but by money market speculators. And if your cost of production is higher than, say, Kenya you've only got so long before a move in the market punishes you to bankruptcy.

The way out of this would be to produce tea as a value added rather than primary product - take your tea to market by creating branded produce and a distribution chain, products such as iced tea and other tea drinks. The government's even identified that - in a framework that calls for some nice workshops and study committees to take place.

Probably around a lovely cup of tea.

So behind the British-sounding name with '160 years of tradition' stretching back to the very first planters is a mess of mismanagement and wickedness, corruption and cronyism, abusive labour practices, rapacious short-termism and wilful profiteering in the face of the industry's decline and almost certain collapse.

Two sugars, please...

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 Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel, Nuwara Eliya

Scotland? Nope, Sri Lanka. Exotic tropical flowers rub shoulders with fuschia 

and pink roses in the rich gardens of Nuwara Eliya's Warwick Gardens Hotel.

Jetwing, often for some reason called Jetwings, is a major Sri Lankan conglomerate with interests in the travel and tourism industry and ownership of a large number of hotels across the country. The company's hulking luxury buses ply the tourist routes, the Eddie Stobart of Sri Lankan tourism. I had past experience of one of those hotels, Galle's achingly beautiful Lighthouse Hotel, a building designed by much-celebrated Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa.

Bawa's extraordinary architectural vision places the Lighthouse Hotel in every coffee table book of 'funkiest hotels in the world' and it's always to be found in collections of 'lovely hotels' - the camera loves its clean lines mixed with visionary statuary and yet the truth is, when you get up close to it, the hotel is at best unkempt and at worst shabby. It is also home to the mind-numbingly beautiful Cinnamon Room - the restaurant at which, readers will by now be weary of being reminded, I had The Worst Meal Of My Life.

We had also endured a week of public school-like misery at the hands of a 'boutique small hotel' in Sri Lanka, the dubious, woeful and rat-piss spattered charms of Galle's Sun House Hotel.

So booking the Jetwing Warwick Gardens Hotel - a boutique small hotel - as our overnight stay in the lush, cool highlands of Nuwara Eliya was something of a leap of faith. Or lunacy. You tell me.

On paper it looked stunning - C19th planter's house restored check, different out of the way experience check, uniquely stylish way to spend a Nuwara Eliya night check. But still there was a niggle. What if it were, you know, just not very good after all that? What if the TripAdvisor reviews were all so starry-eyed at the splendour of the place they missed the things that make somewhere truly special, not just decoratively exceptional?

We approached the hotel from the Ambewela Dairy Farm side, a dumb move that we only had ourselves to blame for. We're hooning around in a charcoal Lexus minibus and the increasingly precipitous road through the mountains starts to become no laughing matter as the daylight begins to fade. There are yawning chasms inches away to our right as we negotiate the narrowing single track mountain road which becomes barely road and mostly track. Still it wends up through the misty hills and we've stopped talking. Everyone's nervous as Duminda skillfully wrestles with the wheel and guides us past those awful drops and crumbling margins.

The silence bears down on us, the engine becomes something to focus on as its note rises and falls.

Finally we come across a sign. It's a right turn off the track. We take it and meet an even narrower track. There's no tarmac, this is compressed mud and pothole. We bounce and judder down into a valley only to see another track leading upwards, two concrete runners have been laid down, but they're smashed and cracked. White-painted rocks mark the route of the narrow, precipitous track upwards. The Lexus strains as Duminda tries to slow for the potholes and yet maintain enough momentum to take us up the rain-slicked incline. The edge seems very near indeed and then we hit a tight hairpin. It's too much, we have to reverse and re-take it. Bouncing and creeping, we negotiate the iniquitous track and finally draw up outside the old plantation house that is the Warwick Gardens.

It's glorious.

As far as I understood the story told me by the house's factotum as we stood on the lawn looking out over the mountains the next morning (there is a guest-facing staff of three, said factotum, a housekeeper and a chef), a Scottish planter by the unlikely name of Lemon (we tried looking up Lennon, but both come up blank) built his home from home here up in the temperate hills of Nuwara Eliya in the 1880s. He thrived here, with a massive plantation estate of some 10,000 acres.

The family stayed until 1940, selling up to a Sri Lankan chap by the name of Fernandes and he ran the estate until the nationalisations of 1971-2. This was a black period in Sri Lankan history, when the government took to its own any and all plantations over 50 acres, particularly focusing on foreign-owned estates but, it seems, even Sri Lankans weren't safe. His proud mountain kingdom reduced to 50 acres, Fernandes had a heart attack and died of grief.

Thirty years later, the house - a ruined shell in the hills - was discovered by Jetwing chairman, Hiran Cooray and he, his wife and architect Channa Daswatte took to restoring the house to its original glory. Every bit of woodwork is new, the furnishings, fixtures and fittings all selected tastefully to recreate the glory of that 'Grand highlands house in a foreign land' the original owner had set out to create in the middle of his lush plantation.

The result is a very special small hotel indeed.

The living room gives into the formal dining room. Can't stand eating with other guests? 

Find a hotel for the socially inadequate, then...

Two dining rooms (the formal dining room with a ten-seat table and the pantry with a smaller table) and a drawing room and study form the 'front of house' downstairs (there's also a pantry and kitchen).

Informal dining in the Pantry...

There's a ceiling-high tapestry on the dogleg of the stairs and then a landing leading to the other rooms. Behind the tapestry is a secret staircase to the glorious 'White Room' - originally called the Netherleigh Room. This is where we stayed - a minimalistically stylish room with an equally stylish bathroom attached to it, complete with walk-in shower and claw-footed bath. If you ever go to this hotel, book this room. Just do it. The views out over the stepped country-house lawn and peaks beyond alone are worth it.

Dinner consists of no menu. What sort of thing do you like? Sri Lankan? European? Chicken? Fish? What floats your boat? We plumped for Sri Lankan and settled down for drinks in the living room. Our host pours a serious G&T.

A long while later we wandered over to the dining table and enjoyed a meal of rare finesse, a chicken curry, vegetable curry, breadfruit curry, dal and string hoppers together with a spiced coconut sambal were subtle, spicy and served piping hot. A dessert of set yoghurt and a traditional Sri Lankan set pudding followed by coffee (from the estate's own plantation) and a battering, flashing thunderstorm whipped up almost to order, with rainwater cascading off the house. There's magic in the air.

The post-storm night is noisy. All sorts of things bump, croak witter and caw through the dark hours. And it's majestic. The morning sunlight floods the white room as we pull open the heavy curtains.

Walking in the Warwick Gardens' gardens is a morning delight...

Breakfast ("What would you like for breakfast?") was an omelette for Sarah and, for my part, bacon, sausages and eggs. With toast, home made preserves (including jam from the strawberries grown on some of the 30 acres of land remaining to the house) and more of that excellent coffee. Then a walk around the grounds, fresh from the night's rain, the channeled streams muddy with the night's run-off.

The staff are knowledgeable, charming and couldn't do more to help. The water in the bathroom is hit and miss - really not consistent with the rest of the experience on offer. There's nothing quite like standing, freezing and covered in suds waiting for the other room to turn off the tap to make you count quite how much you're paying for your boutique small hotel experience room. That's my only complaint - apart from the mad track to the house.

But, by golly, this is a special place made more special by its staff. I have no hesitation recommending it heartily to anyone who wants to do something outstanding and memorable at least once in their lives. I'd rank it alongside Ballymaloe, The Clarence and Auchterarder House as one of my favourite hotel experiences ever.

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...

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.