Trip to Tangalle

For a full day of traveling, the trip wasn't too bad. We left before dawn, enjoyed the view from the train in the mountains and then by the sea, became surprised and concerned when the train seemed to go the wrong direction out of Galle (but missed the moment when it mysteriously changes direction again to go towards Matara), drank and ate young coconuts, rode the bus to Tangalle during the after-school rush hour and fell asleep despite being pressed into my seat and holding the handbag of the woman standing next to me, and went swimming almost immediately after arriving in Tangalle. The trip back was much worse - the morning buses into Matara were viciously crowded, and we stood up the whole way, and then had to ride a flooded and muddy train to Colombo. But I feel somehow initiated now - it must have been the fact of surviving a two hour standing bus ride in the heat. I'm not exactly looking forward to the bus rides to and from Kataragama, but I feel capable of handling them now. Of course the time actually spent in Tangalle made it worth it - a weekend of swimming, running, drawing, and fresh fish-eating was just what I needed, and the persistent headache that I'd been fighting all week blissfully evaporated (and didn't return on the ride back, as I'd feared).






A couple of observations from the trip: the impression you get of Sri Lanka while taking the train is completely different from the impression you get from the bus, especially on the Colombo-Kandy stretch. The Colombo-Kandy road is like a giant strip mall - the pineapple town gives way to the cane furniture town which gives way to the cashew town, etc, and there's never more than 100m between kades and billboards (after one trip on the road you feel quite informed about the various mobile phone service providers: Mobitel is the cheapest, Dialog has the best coverage, Hutch has the best graphic design). But on the train you never see any advertisements except where the tracks intersect the Colombo-Kandy road, and you can get the impression that Sri Lanka is much more pastoral than it is, from all the views of the the hills and paddy fields. I thought that was especially true in the mountains south of Kandy, where there are lots of little trails through the woods that cross the tracks and the hillsides, often being used by schoolchildren and their parents hurrying them along.
This was also my first visit to the south since the tsunami. From such a short visit (having not been there for the past two years) it's difficult to give any incredibly insightful observations about how reconstruction is going, though some things gave me a more visceral response, like seeing boats washed up far inland (near Tangalle town, for instance, where the water came in 3km from the shore), or the mixture of intact, rebuilt, and partially built houses, with the occasional shell of a dead house with crumbling walls or just a single crumbling wall standing.

Ambitious weekend plan

It's amazing how the stuff I pack manages to expand to fill whatever bag I've decided to use. Even though I'm only going to be gone for a long weekend, two of those days will be spent mostly on trains, so I had to make sure that I packed enough work and entertainment - reading for my project ("Religion, Art, and Visual Culture"), pleasure reading ("Love in the Time of Cholera"), music, camera, sketchbook, flash cards (which I could be making even more of now, but I'm writing this instead). And of course I will need snacks, since it's a long ride. I am planning to go all the way to Tangalle tomorrow, which will involve a six hour train ride to Matara (leaving at 5am), followed by a two hour bus ride. I was even advised against making the trip only for the weekend, but I had gotten the idea into my head, and when I found out that my Tamil teacher wasn't going to be able to make it for lessons on Friday or Monday I needed to console myself somehow. I'm looking forward to the train ride - it's long but incredibly beautiful, especially in the mountains just outside Kandy, and then when it follows the coast. And by god, I am going to take advantage of the fact that I am living in a tiny country where it's possible to get almost anywhere in a day (currently excluding Jaffna by land).

Mayfly Invasion!

After coming back from lunch with Peter in town I found myself locked out of the annex and so I hung out at Sarah and Chris’ place for most of the afternoon. We decided to go for a walk, and were intercepted by Peter in a three-wheeler, so I joined him going home. I had left some things at Sarah and Chris’ annex and had borrowed their keys to get in, and by the time they came over to get them, Peter had left and I was home doing laundry. By the time they arrived at the gate it was dark and Peter had left the porch light on, but unfortunately it was a night when swarms of mayflies spawned, and when I did the typical procedure of darting out the door I walked through a cloud of buzzing, fluttering creatures. I gave the keys back to Sarah, but getting back into the annex was the problem – the flies were all around the door, and I had to walk right through them to unlock the door and get in. I tried twice, but the disgusting soft fluttering on my neck and face forced me to run away and shake off the flies that had gotten stuck in my hair or on my shirt. On the third try I made it, but even though I slammed the door after me, about thirty flies came in and immediately went to the lamp on the wall of the living room. At this point I had visions of Peter coming home and seeing a swarm of flies and freaking out – maybe he has a hatred of mayflies similar to that of his hatred for mosquitoes. I ran around the house turning off lights and closing doors, trying to contain the invasion, and waiting for their inevitable death. Mayflies are fairly grotesque creatures – on occasional evenings they spawn out of piles of leaves and flutter around light and water sources until their wings fall off and they slither around, doing who knows what, until they die. So about twenty minutes later there were about thirty mayfly corpses slithering around, radiating out from the pile of wings. I managed to contain the slithering ones (presumably trying to find suitable place to reproduce), and then swept the pile of them out the door, and this time there was no swarm around the door since I turned the light off, and since the flies had all lost their wings by that point anyway. And Peter never got word of it.


Some informational reading about the insects

Colombo/Kandy

I knew I had arrived in Sri Lanka when the previously mild-mannered passengers of Sri Lankan flight 142 instantly jammed themselves into the aisle of the plane and began pushing towards the exit. The situation could just as easily have been on a rush-hour train in the Fort Railway Station in Colombo. The flight arrived in the early morning, and I spent the rest of the day fighting to stay alert enough not to look the wrong way while crossing streets in Colombo (the cars drive on the left here). I spent the next few days in Colombo doing mostly official stuff: two days of orientation lectures and activities at the Fulbright commission followed by a reception for the current Fulbrighters, the Sri Lankan alumni of the program, and the US embassy people. On the whole, the orientation was quite interesting and useful. The highlights: listening to Colombo University Law professor Rohan Edirisinghe talk about the current political situation, and then during the tea break, hearing one of the state department officials shout into his cell phone “This isn’t diplomacy, this is the truth!”

After all of that was over I made the great trip to Kandy. It was as pleasant as a Colombo-Kandy trip can be: fast, with appropriately crazy driving (which happened to involve crossing the divider to get around a slow-moving bus, and continuing on the wrong side despite there being oncoming cars), and stops for pineapple, rambutans, and rice and curry lunch. The trip through Dangolla (the neighborhood between Peradeniya and Kandy where I used to live, along with most of the other ISLE students) was giddy and breathtaking – it so closely resembled the way I remember it that I almost doubted whether it was real.

It turned out that it is real. In the couple of days after I arrived I dealt with enough frustrations to remove some of the rosy nostalgia. The day after I arrived I went back to Dangolla to look at a couple of annexes and meet up with Toby and Peter, and then spent the afternoon wandering around in a sleep-deprived daze, trying to accomplish errands that can’t be accomplished in Kandy on a Sunday, and feeling increasingly dejected. I went back to my guest house to nurse a slightly upset stomach, and after that was soothed with a cup of ginger tea I began to feel seriously restless and uncomfortable. Finally I worked up the nerve to call my old host family. Appachchi picked up the phone, and immediately invited me over for tea. I frantically dug through my suitcase trying to decide what to wear, and since none of my clean shirts matched any of my nice skirts, I settled on the rather ornate shalwar that Amma had picked out for me the last time I was there. I didn’t want to seem like a slob when I came to see them for the first time in two years, but then I felt a bit silly when Appachchi opened the door wearing a sarong and t-shirt.

After the initial shock of first seeing them (which consisted of a long chat with Appachchi about what happened while I was gone, and then an aggressively warm hug from Amma when she came home), and the inevitable tea and sweets, the evening settled into something similar to evenings when I lived there: the Bandaras came over and chatted with me and then left after a while (but Bandara Uncle kept popping in, as usual), I hung around Amma while she threw together a quick dinner of red rice, dhal, green papaya, and pol sambol, we ate (this part was a little different: Dhanasri, now 13, didn’t whine about eating and just fed herself a decent portion), then hung around and chatted some more, half-watching the news in Sinhala. Dhanasri’s room is now messy like a teenager’s, but most of the house looks the same. They also have a new fishtank in the living room which was supposed to have eight goldfish and one black fish (which according to Amma is an auspicious feng shui thing), but has evened out at nine goldfish and one black fish since several died and several others reproduced. Seeing them suddenly made me feel comfortable in Sri Lanka again - when I was in Dangolla before that I was constantly looking over my shoulder in case someone I knew would see me and be incredibly shocked. Now I can walk around Dangolla and actually start to feel at home.

Feeling at home in Dangolla is good, because that’s where I’m living now. The search for an annex had been going quite badly – everything I saw was either way too far away from places I need to go in the Kandy area (Peradeniya University, the ISLE center library), or was lacking in basic things that I think I might need, like hot water, ceiling fans, or a refrigerator. There was one place that I thought was going to be perfect – it had two bedrooms and was on Meda Bowala road (where I used to live), close to Peradeniya road and the bus, and Phil and Flynn had described it as really great (though Phil had decided to take a different place in the end). Toby and I went to see it in the middle of the day, and the place was like an oven – the ceilings weren’t finished and the one ceiling fan (in the living room) was attached right to the corrugated metal roof, and there was no hot water. Over tea with the owner I realized why Phil and Flynn had talked the place up so much: the woman was incredibly charming and sweet, and talked about how sad she was that Phil hadn’t decided to take the place. Later on when I called her to decline, she made me promise to tell any other students about it who might be looking for a place, and I’m sure that Phil must have made the same promise.

But then Peter (another Fulbrighter) offered to let me and Toby stay with him and then take over his place after he leaves in December. The place is perfect, and Peter seems really excited to have some company after living alone for several months. He also harbors an extreme hatred for mosquitoes, which means that there are screens over most of the windows, and that special care must be taken when going in or out – you unlock the door and then leap through and slam it behind you. (slamming it is the only way to shut it sufficiently quickly) Also, at any time Peter might leap up and go into a frenzy of chasing and clapping if he spots one. Moving involved taking my suitcase in a three-wheeler in the rain, but happened not a moment too soon – the night before I was stuck in my guest house room without company except for a brief visit from Damayanthi, the owner, who came to apologize that the hot water had been turned off earlier. I must have looked absurd when she came to the door: I was wearing pajamas and had tears streaming down my face from the takeout packet of chicken biriyani that I had been eating (which I only ordered medium-spicy). I spent the rest of the evening doing some reading for my project but mostly letting my attention wander to listen to the layered rhythms of the rain, the dripping from the tiled roof, the chanting and Kandyan drumming from the monastery next door, and the occasional drone of a three-wheeler going by on the road around the lake (sometimes also punctuated by a honk or the ridiculous melody of a bus horn). My first night in Dangolla felt deafeningly quiet – just the soft rain and the wind in the leaves.