Just What I Needed (Sri Lanka)

I was already fighting back tears when Kumari pointed to Nirol, her husband, and said, “Crying because goodbye sad.” 

“Yes. Good people,” Nirol said quietly as he navigated out of the airport drop-off. “Very good people,” he said.

The statement was simple and true; the kind of true that fills you up far too quickly to control. I nodded and turned to the window, staring into the endless green of Sri Lanka and letting myself feel the extent of my gratitude and the love I had for each of my new friends that I had spent the last week traveling with. 

I couldn’t have felt much happier in those moments. 

I know it sounds dramatic, but I have spent a lot of the last few years battling profound loneliness while living in the bay area, so I’ve learned to really appreciate when I have the quality of community and connection I look for, even if it is had for only one conversation, one day, or one week. 

Since I was a teenager, I’ve often said that the purpose of my life is to get to know as many people on a real level as possible, because I believe it is there that the greatest beauty is found. When we can be our honest selves with someone else, we give and we gain so much. This is what gives me the greatest happiness, hence why I have such a hard time I think. 

While it isn’t hard to meet fun, friendly people, it is very hard for people (myself included) to feel safe enough or even know how to break through the masks and surface levels we are all trained to operate under. Additionally, so much of our daily interactions occur in the types of environments where individuality, honesty, and openness are often discouraged, exploited, manipulated, or even punished, so cultivating the type of interaction I value is often near impossible just based on context alone. Most normal people are able deal with it and compartmentalize; viewing this a necessary evil. I’m not quite so strong. I have learned that I am not capable of functioning that way for very long. 

In my experience, authenticity is often met with sarcasm, judgment, lies, negativity, argument, dismissiveness,  discomfort, or change of subject. It is incredibly damaging. It is heartbreaking. It is lonely.

And so my gratitude was great. It’s not like we were sitting around in the dark, spilling our deepest darkest secrets and crying into one another’s arms . . . Our little group not only got along, never got sick of one another, and had a total blast, but we were able to be genuine with one another. I felt at home. It was a beautiful thing. I couldn’t get over it all week. 

I met them at the Colombo Fort train station, where on my first full day in Sri Lanka I was trying to find a ticket to Kandy for the next day, but I was told that all of the trains were full for four days because it was Sinhalese & Tamil New Year.

Considering changing my plans and going to another city instead if it would only get me out of Colombo ASAP, I went to the tourism desk, where I was engaged by a group of guys from Kuwait (two Americans, one Canadian - Tony, Jamison, and Joe) who were also trying to get to Kandy and wouldn’t you know it, but the tourism office had a “special deal” where we could actually get train tickets if we also got a driver for the rest of the week as well. (Ah, yes . . . Gotta get your daily dose of corruption!)

Though it was a brief ten or so minutes that I had known them, my instincts told me they were good guys, and the ability to split the cost four ways for a few days and see a bunch of places in a short amount of time seemed like a no-brainer. And so we decided to meet up the next day in Kandy.

First Stop: Sigiriya

Sigiriya was a several hours drive from Kandy, especially considering the holiday traffic. We spent the time getting to know about one another’s families, backgrounds, favorite movies & books. We arrived to the park around closing time, so after madly searching the various trails and parking lots around the area for the boys’ friend, Adam, who was waiting for us, we finally reread the texts and discovered him at a small cafe outside of the park area. Adam had befriended the owner, and negotiated a stay in his two bedroom treehouse for 2,000 rupees, ($15.34), a price which didn’t change once we added four more people to the guest list. Score!

We enjoyed a large dinner of our first taste of kottu rotti and Lion beers, settled into the treehouse, and then ventured to the “wine store” to get more beer. Alcohol is sold mostly only by liquor/beer stores, usually called “wine” stores. All of the alcohol and employees are behind bars.

This one in Sigiriya even had tables outside of it, making it a nice cozy place for us to stay there to drink for a while instead and mix with some locals including the chief of police who wanted to smell and fondle all the men, and a feisty New Zealander who later came back to our treehouse and got all upset at Tony when they disagreed about when “Nevermind” came out, certain he had to be right because he was older and he “was THERE”. (Sorry dude, it was 1991!!) It was a rowdy evening with little sleep and a fair amount of beer . . . 

Which may have resulted in a fatality . . . I’m not pointing any fingers . . . JAMISON!

But no worries. It now has a place of honor on-site in commemoration of our visit. The owner took a real shining to us, particularly after we spent a small fortune on breakfast and let him take some pulls off the vodka behind the van.

Sigiriya is a site of where an old King built a palace on top of a large rock after fleeing because he was afraid of his older brother who wanted to take back the throne. After visiting both, I’m pretty sure that the setting and folklore surrounding the site of the space elevator in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Fountain’s of Paradise” are based on a combination of Sigiriya and Sri Pada (Adam’s Peak). It turns out that Wikipedia thinks so too. 

Sigirya was in my top three favorite places and things I did in Sri Lanka. The climb is at that “refreshing” level of strenuous, there are lots of interesting ruins, some beautiful frescoes painted on the site of the rock, and from the top are the most beautiful views in Sri Lanka:

There are some pretty scary ascents/descents along the rock. Fear of heights could be a problem.

After the heat and sweat and hike, we decided to enjoy a fancier accommodation where perhaps we could sleep for real and get a hot shower, so Joe ponied up to cover most of the cost as we celebrated New Years Eve in style.

The next day we started by going to the Pinnewalla elephant orphanage where you can watch them bathe and then feed them bananas or feed the babies milk. 

Other than a ton of cute babies there was also a pregnant elephant and an elephant whose foot was blown off by a land mine in the war.

It was also the birthday of Nirol, our driver. He invited us to a birthday lunch at his home in a village outside of Kandy called Gelioya. We were excited to meet his family (Kumari and Posindu) and have an authentic Sri Lankan meal. We were not disappointed!

His son, Posindu, treated us to some of our not-so-favorite firecrackers.

After the fabulous meal, we piled back into the van with Nirol and his family, who were joining us for the rest of the trip. The drive was going to be long, taking us all of the way to Tissa, where we would wake early in the morning to do a safari into Yala National Park.

The drive was long, but the views were spectacular:

We sang along to Weezer albums, passed around a bottle of rum, and said goodbye to Adam as we dropped him off somewhere along the way. We arrived in Tissa around 10 pm, and slept until some way-too-early time. We piled into the jeep in the dark and headed into the park where we spent the morning nodding off . . . Er, I mean . . . spotting crocodiles, water buffalo, deer, mongoose, lizards, kingfishers, parrots, eagles, and peacocks. No sloth bears, no elephants, and no leopards. 

To be honest, I’m not the hugest fan of safari-type interactions with nature. I’m not even that into animals. I prefer interacting with nature through hiking or swimming/being on the water, but the views in the park were beautiful. I hate to admit it, but I think I enjoyed Tony’s sleep-deprived and delirious Australian accent more than the wildlife he was providing commentary on. It wasn’t really worth the money to me in the end. I think we each paid about $40 for entrance to the park and the jeep. (The wildlife photos aren't mine, they're Tony's)

After Tissa, we moved to the southern coast to stay for a few nights to relax on the famous beaches of Sri Lanka. We stayed in a hotel on the beach in Weligama, which is near Mirissa. 

The first night at the beach started with a little drama. Tony, Jamison, and I went out swimming in the ocean. We had a blast for a while, diving under the waves and attempting to bodysurf here and there. Eventually we got out so far there was only one break every now and again and we couldn’t touch the ground. Eventually, we got a little separated, and Jamison called to Tony and I to come back in. I started trying to get back and realized I was in a rip tide. I applied all of the knowledge I had about swimming parallel to the shore to get out of its power, but within a few minutes I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere. I couldn’t see Tony or Jamison anymore. I couldn’t really see the shore either. All of a sudden I felt exhaustion come on and I knew that while I still had energy left, it was going fast and I needed to get out of this rip tide ASAP, so I turned to try the other direction. It was then that I saw a lone surfer in the distance looking over at me. I waved towards him and he immediately waved back and yelled for me to be calm and that he was coming. 

My hero was a redheaded Israeli named Ronin. He was really great. When I got to the shore I saw that Jamison had gotten the locals to pull a boat out to come rescue me and a big crowd of locals were just standing and staring at me as I exited the water. I was embarrassed but too exhausted to be much more than just incredibly grateful.

The next day we found out from another of the boys’ friends that not only had a foreigner drowned that day, but that it was a normal occurrence; something that happens all the time because the Indian ocean is so strong and foreigners are so . . . uninformed. In fact, another person drowned that week on the same beach (Hikkaduwa). I was haunted by my “near-drowning” for the rest of the trip. I was a total mom from then on when we swam, constantly yelling at everyone to get closer to shore or move this way or that out of the rip tide. I warned parents. I told tall tales with eyes wide. 

The next day we did some early morning snorkeling and then had a long and lazy day on the beautiful but touristy beach in Mirissa. We camped out at a beachside restaurant spending the entire afternoon taking shifts drinking Lion beers and eating and swimming in the now haunted sea. The whole day of indulgence cost us each about 15 bucks. The best thing that happened, however, was free. 

Out of the back of some food stall on the beach came a ton of baby turtles that had just hatched and they were sprinting for the waves. Everyone on the beach came rushing over to take pictures and pick them up to transport them to the waves, in attempts to save as many as possible from birds. Jamison came over to me with one and let me touch it. They were super cute, it’s true.

There was another day after that which I believe we spent just being really lazy other than a stroll or two on the beach and some swimming and petting dogs and cows . . . when the dogs weren't chasing the cows, that is.

 

On the last day, we headed to Galle to see the old Dutch Fort. Galle seemed like a quaint, nice sort of place that I’d like to see again.

Then it was time to say goodbye at the airport. I was sad to see them go, but now it was time to explore on my own. I was headed back to Gelioya with Nirol and his family, who kindly invited me to stay with them for a night before I headed off to Adam’s Peak to continue my journey through Sri Lanka alone. One night turned into many, and my budding friendship with them turned into something much more profound, but that’s all for another post because this one is far too long as it is . . .