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.