Category: Sri Lanka

Today I saw my first dead body…

Our train shunted with the kind of metallic impact that previously had me clinging to the arm rests and awaiting the derailment.
Now though, with two solid days of solo-traveller experience, I already felt calmer about these things.
So this time, the noise barely made me flinch. When the train ground to a halt, as it frequently would, I merely leant out the window for some air.
Just at the end of my carriage, about 10 feet away, were the legs of a man who moments earlier had been alive, but wished to be, no longer.
Despite some relatively rough years of late. Enough inner turmoil at least, to compel me to quit the life I knew, and circle the Earth in search of resolution. I still could not fathom the beliefs that had led this man to such an ending.
As the crowds gather, they pick at what remains of the man. Trying, in their own way, to understand.
But in my time alone in Sri Lanka I’ve encountered more, like those still, untelling legs, which will remain a mystery to me.

The Abandoned Capital

Anuradhapura’s sights sprawl like the ancient branches of the Sri Maha Bohdi. A sacred tree brought from India with the Buddha’s teachings and guarded continuously for over 2000 years. They curl and curve like the fluent arches of the Shinhalese script. Or the fingers of an open palm, cradling the faithful who visit three times each and every day.

I take a bike with good brakes, and with a deep breath, funnel in to the multiverse of lanes unmarked but understood by Sri Lankan road users alike.
Fortunately, it is a quieter time for the island. When I pass in to the Citadel it becomes quieter still. I thought I might know when I’d arrived but the ruins are not imposing fortifications, but ancient relics.

Plaques and pictures help paint a scene of 5000 monks filing in to receive alms from the giant stone trough that remains.

More cycling through unassuming park, reveals a royal palace. Though columns and guardstones were the only features not reclaimed by the jungle when this once great capital was abandoned.

Then, in Abhayagiri, an explosion of ruins. An exquisitely carved moonstone, twin ponds with cobra-headed guardians and the monumental Dagoba.

This great dome, said to enshrine the spot where Buddha left his footprint, once stood as fifth tallest of the ancient monuments at 100 metres tall. The Great Pyramids of course are the first three. After that Abhayagiri is second to only Jetavanarama, another Dagoba a short cycle away.

These giants have no entrance. They merely sit, protect, and embody the devotion of centuries past. Like the million bricks I saw in Ferrara, such effort both beguiles and disturbs me.
I lay the flower, given to me by a kind local, at the foot of the ancient tree. But I do not pray.

The Lizard’s Lung

Incense burns in a great cloud from the gilded temple pyre. The smell familiar and yet alien all at once. A thousand candles burn but what do they illuminate? In the temple, a carpet of lotus flowers is laid, but whose feet do they cushion? A glimpse of a golden casket containing a sacred tooth, before being quickly ushered past, leaves me no more enlightened.

The Kandyan temple is vast and beautiful, and the glistening lake nearby teems with elegant Heron and formidable Monitor Lizard. I do find one mote of recognition in these places in among the crowds of devotees. Beauty seems to draw in the pious. Like the deep restful breaths of those lakeside lizards, people and their passions are unerringly consumed by the sights here.

The Lion’s Back

I see the same perched atop the magnificent “Lion Rock” Sigiriya. The huge pool below me was painstakingly hewn into the bare rock of the lion’s back. The water gives form to the ceaseless but cooling wind. Over the edge and over 600 feet below, beneath the polished Mirror Wall and mesmerizing frescoes that cling impossibly to the island-mountain side. There a great dark moat of wild green trees surrounds. Walled in by distant mountains that seem to stare in like an invading horde. Still green, but with envy of the beauty here.

The structures here are built from those same bricks again, rising like the undying history here, red as the earth that surrounds them. This place is a true labour of devotion, but the question remains as to why?

The sun beats down, slowly turning me the colour of the bricks and I see the same thing I saw in Kandy. Palace or Monastery, Kings or Gods. Those who sought either would have surely felt what they came for here. Not necessarily because that power is real or true but because such beauty as in the Lion rock, elegance within the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, or the ingenuity of the cave temples in Dambulla, makes them feel real and true.

Whatever reasons people came to these places, they, like I, found themselves captives of them. Staring at the infinite panorama, all questions answered. Devoted to something that could not be understood.

Here I am, stretched out on a comfy wooden sunbed in a hotel whose, eager to please staff, outnumber us about 4 to 1. Palms top a frame of creeping flowers, surrounding the glass-like pool. My hands are cushioned by Buffalo Grass.

The aptly named hotel Serenity, Tissamaharama got me thinking about the contrast of this to my first day in Sri Lanka.

The Gulf of Discomfort

“I was so desperately seeking some comfort in my first few days of travel,” I’d written. But to be honest it was more than that. There had been a moment when I thought about just staying on the plane. Sri Lankan Airlines had been comfortable and I knew this comfort would become scarce outside the cabin. “So maybe a few more movies, another nice meal and just call the whole thing off,” I thought.

Before me was a gulf of 100 days and over 40,000 kilometres to be travelled, and at the time I was fixating on something as trivial as the taxi from the airport to my accommodation.

I know I’m a traveller at heart. I knew it when camping in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. When the horn of a late night freight train was the only sound in the world. Its echoes from the mountain haunted my dreams and all around our electrified site were animals that could have been our ending. However much this had felt right, I was still obsessed with keeping my comfort zone. But why, when the most uncomfortable days in Sri Lanka had yielded the most amazing sights?

The Cycle of Unchange

I’m learning that it is an anxiety about doing things wrong. Very specifically being seen to do things wrong. So, being duped by a taxi, or sounding like an idiot while getting one, terrify me much more than the time I jumped off a bridge with a bunch of guys holding the rope I was hooked to.

My mind refuses to change in light of my experiences. I survived the jump (despite having to catch a plummeting counter weight with my feet). I survived a night in a ditch in Spain. And, after stone-walling the first few touts in Sri Lanka, walking outside and thinking “I’m not really going to walk out to the main road am I?” I swallowed hard and ended up bartering about 50% off the first price I’d been quoted. So I’d survived that too. But it hadn’t changed me. I was still seeking the correct procedure for everything.

I’d awkwardly fumbled through introductions with my deaf guesthouse host. Then I was immediately bitten by what I concluded was Sri Lanka’s biggest and most disease-filled mosquito. I resolved to retreat into the mosquito net to research “the procedure” for imminent death by malaria. This was despite having previously read Sri Lanka had been declared malaria-free since 2016! So the cycle continues.

Calcite Eyes

Before I departed the UK I spent a day looking round the Natural History Museum. It’s easy to find yourself searching for the meaning of things when confronted with the bones of 65 million years ago.

But strangely it was crystals from deep with in the Earth that triggered it in me. Calcite double refracts the light passing through it so there are two distinct images offset from one another. The crystals in my mind do the same. One view of truth and logic knew I wouldn’t die of malaria and tomorrow I’d try some basic sign language much to my host’s glee. The other distorted view was always the worst case scenario. It could not be dispelled, merely lived with.

Better Days

We are always changing. Whether you believe that seven year cell cycle that supposedly renders you an entirely new person, or that experience and age imperceptibly shift you toward new ways of thinking. There are great examples of conquering your anxieties such as in Lauren Juliff’s inspiring travel memoir How Not To Travel The World. But as for me, I think I will always be this way to some extent.

Some days are better though, like in Mirissa, sipping Lion Lager from a chilled glass. Thunderous waves like nothing I’ve seen are on steep ascent to the shore. The climb reduces them to tickles at your feet as you eat grilled squid from your sun lounger. Maybe later I’ll climb Parrot Rock… if I feel like moving.

Strip all the detail of the world back to three stark bands of sky, sea and sand and there in between it all you sit. Suddenly, it becomes so much easier to simply be yourself.