Yo
Sri Lanka at war with terrorism
Racism
But most of all
Sri Lanka at war with themselves
Buddha walks
God show me the way because Sinhala road signs are trying to break me down
Buddha walks with me, with me...
UH. You know what Ceylon is? Young and restless
Well, Tamil TIGERS might snatch your necklace
And next these TIGERS might anti-tank mine your Lexus
Somebody tell these TIGERS who Asia's best is
I walk through the bus stand where the shadow of death is
Total chaos, the fumes alone will leave you breathless
*Huuuogghhhh* Try to catch it *Hyuuurrkkkk* Hard as shit
Same time getting choked by Lankan English - check the chat-chit
They be asking odd questions, harass and molest us
Saying "Do you eat papaya or jackfruit for breakfast?"
"Hey where you going? What's the basis?"
I ain't going nowhere but I've got mad buns and pastries
A backpack full of coke and a pet cockroach named Davis
The theocracy used to say only Buddha could save us
...Well homies, I know I act a fool
But I'll be gone til November, I've got legends to prove
Buddha walks
God show me the way cuz parasitic amoebas are trying to break me down
Buddha walk with me, with me
The only thing I pray is my colon don't fail me now
Ghostfaace Buuuuddhaaa waaaalks
And I don't think there's nothing I can do to right my wrongs
Ghost-face Budd-ha walks
'Cept for give these girls back their saris, bras, and sarongs
Ghostface Buuuuuuu-uuuuuddhhaaaaa
God show me the way because raging elephants are trying to break me down
GHOOOOOSSTTTTT
The only thing I pray is my taser don't fail me now
And I don't think there's nothing I can do now to right my wrongs
Ghooostface walks
I want to talk to God but I'm afraid cuz we ain't Skyped in so long
Buddha walks So long...
Buddha walks with me, with me, with me, with me
UHHH, to the hustlers, killers, tea pickers, "Fancy" dealers
Even tuk-tuk drivers Buddha walks with them
To the victims of Halal fare cuz the food taste like Hell here
Hell yeah Buddha walks with them
Now hear ye hear ye you need to hear me more clearly
And shut the Hell up before my ears get weary
Cuz heroes like me is nearly extinct
I win fights with livestock - I act, I don't think
But I'm not here to tell you about my flawless features
We're here to turn haters into believers
I'm just here to say the way the people of Judah need kosher food-ah
The way oom-pah need tuba that's the way you need Buddha
So here comes my single, dawg, don't get the hype bent
They say you can rap about anything except fo' Enlight'ment
That means guns, sex, cows, and wickets-to-take
But if I talk about the Eightfold my record won't get played, HUH??
Well you can take from my fame but you can't take from my game
Which means you can't take away from my dames
And stop the day I'm dreamin' 'bout
Up in the Indian Sub' all the ladies screaming out
Buddha, come...
God show me the way cuz palm liquor is trying to break me down
Buddha come take me, take me...
The only thing I pray is Kama Sutra don't fail me now
God show me the way because patriarchal forces trying to break me down
The only thing I pray is Kama Sutra don't fail me now
Buddha come take me...
Sep 27, 2010
Sep 26, 2010
Field Guide To Sri Lankan Cliffs
The Definitive Resource on Ceylonese Precipices
GFB exclamation of the day: "This isn't potato - it's fried fish heads!"
I have been quite slowly creeping along the southern edge of the Sri Lankan mountains, taking in the various places that are known for their natural beauty. In the Sri Lankan hills, this effectively means cliffs. I have been spending a great deal of time around precipices, which is perhaps a warning of how eating "rice and curry" every single night is making me feel about life. Anyways, I have seen such a number of cliffs on this island now that I consider myself something of an expert. So for the benefit of my readers and humanity as a whole (but I repeat myself...) I have compiled this guide, evaluating the relative merits of Sri Lanka's various planes of stone and associated vertical topography.
Each cliff will be briefly introduced, and then rated on a five-star system in four categories.
Sri Pada (Adam's Peak)
Sri Pada has already been discussed extensively in this recent post, but in short it is a very steep and very sacred mountain said to be the home of the Sri Lankan Buddhist god Saman, as well as the site of a magical footprint left by Lord Buddha, while local Muslims and opportunistic Christian's believe the footprint is that of Adam, the first man.
World's End is Sri Lanka's most famous cliff. It is approximately 800 meters straight down, and offers uninterrupted views for miles and miles across the southern plains, and over the numerous crumpled hills to the east. It also lies within a splendid national park of high-altitude grassland and cloud forest, where deer and such can be seen running around. The park is also worth a visit for what are unquestionably Sri Lanka's, if not Asia's most spectacular toilets (located at the park entrance facility at the western gate). I am not joking.
A relatively undistinguished Sri Lankan town with the usual assortment of claustrophobic vegetable shops and dubious bakeries, except for the fact that it sits right on the top of a ridge with open views both over the plains to the south, and the folds of the hill country to the north.
Named for Sir Thomas Lipton, a.k.a. the Lipton's Tea guy, this famous peak juts up from the hill country's southern escarpment in an area blanketed with immaculate fields of tea.
Falling from the same extended southern escarpment on which most of these cliffs lie, Bambarakanda Falls are the highest in Sri Lanka at 241 meters (790 feet).
A totally touristy little village at the southeastern corner of the hills, best known for its peaceful atmosphere, you guessed it, its views down large cliffs and out across open plains. The village is set around the Ella Gap, a small valley made by the local stream, stony and precipitous in some places, grassy and sometimes even terraced in others. In fact, I am in Ella right now, at one of its various overpriced tourist eateries, where actual hunger is a financial liability.
Well, I guess that about covers it for the noteworthy cliffs of Sri Lanka. I must say, all this talk of suicide is a little unusual. I'm used to talking about myself at length, and about things that intend to murder me almost as much, but the combination of the two suggests an urgent trip to a specialist. And by "specialist" I mean the liquor store. It's Sri Lanka. 4 P.M. is not too early. Good night!
GFB exclamation of the day: "This isn't potato - it's fried fish heads!"
I have been quite slowly creeping along the southern edge of the Sri Lankan mountains, taking in the various places that are known for their natural beauty. In the Sri Lankan hills, this effectively means cliffs. I have been spending a great deal of time around precipices, which is perhaps a warning of how eating "rice and curry" every single night is making me feel about life. Anyways, I have seen such a number of cliffs on this island now that I consider myself something of an expert. So for the benefit of my readers and humanity as a whole (but I repeat myself...) I have compiled this guide, evaluating the relative merits of Sri Lanka's various planes of stone and associated vertical topography.
Each cliff will be briefly introduced, and then rated on a five-star system in four categories.
- Scenery- The aesthetic quality of the cliff and its surroundings. 5 stars indicates a cliff is highly aesthetically pleasing.
- Climate- An inverse measure of the awfulness of the cliff's weather. 5 stars indicates that the weather at the cliff does not often suck.
- Bullshitlessness- An inverse measure of the amount of bullshit one most confront in order to visit the cliff. 5 stars indicates a bullshit-free experience.
- Suicidability- Fun fact: Aside from having the world's highest alcoholism rate, Sri Lanka also has the world's highest suicide rate. Since the island offers such a bevy of dangerous falls, you could even consider it a suicide destination. "Suicidability" measures the suitability of a cliff for ending one's own life. 5 stars indicates certain death.
Sri Pada (Adam's Peak)
Sri Pada has already been discussed extensively in this recent post, but in short it is a very steep and very sacred mountain said to be the home of the Sri Lankan Buddhist god Saman, as well as the site of a magical footprint left by Lord Buddha, while local Muslims and opportunistic Christian's believe the footprint is that of Adam, the first man.
- Scenery- 3/5. I have seen video evidence of the fantastic scenery occasionally visible from Adam's Peak, though if you come during the wrong half of the year, or at a reasonable hour of day, you are liable to encounter a whole lot of clouds, about which I need not repeat myself.
- Climate- 1/5. Terrible. In the best of times, it is guaranteed to be cold; at other times, well, once again I need not repeat myself.
- Bullshitlessness- 3/5. Having a half-year "season", outside of which its conveniences and infrastructure are abandoned lose it one star, while the recommended climb-starting time of 2 a.m. costs it another.
- Suicidability- 3/5. Definitely lethal, but the sacred mountain itself is too potent a reminder of the futility of the act; you'll just be reborn and have countless more lifetimes to suffer.
World's End is Sri Lanka's most famous cliff. It is approximately 800 meters straight down, and offers uninterrupted views for miles and miles across the southern plains, and over the numerous crumpled hills to the east. It also lies within a splendid national park of high-altitude grassland and cloud forest, where deer and such can be seen running around. The park is also worth a visit for what are unquestionably Sri Lanka's, if not Asia's most spectacular toilets (located at the park entrance facility at the western gate). I am not joking.
- Scenery- 5/5. Spectacular, and the surrounding parkland is lovely too.
- Climate- 3/5. High and sometimes chilly, with a tendency for clouds and mist to come ruin the views and make you unpleasantly damp well before midday.
- Bullshitless- 1/5. As a National Park, it is owned by the Sri Lankan government; ergo rapacious, piratical, and rife with bullshit. Entrance fees payable in cash or kidneys.
- Suicidability- 5/5. You won't be the first.
A relatively undistinguished Sri Lankan town with the usual assortment of claustrophobic vegetable shops and dubious bakeries, except for the fact that it sits right on the top of a ridge with open views both over the plains to the south, and the folds of the hill country to the north.
- Scenery- 4/5. Superb, and seeing both ways is an added bonus, though since we are comparing cliffs it must be said that there are others that are better.
- Climate- 2/5. Arriving at my guesthouse and looking out over the view and the village's topography for the first time, I immediately said "The weather here is going to be ass." Sure enough, perched on a near-vertical ridge with nothing but humid plains between there and the sea, Haputale sits at the top of a textbook case of "Rain Shadow". Clouds and rain at some time every day is the norm.
- Bullshitlessness- 3/5. Haputale is a functioning Sri Lankan market town, which implies a certain amount of bullshit. For instance, did you know that Sri Lankan "Book Shops" do not sell books?
- Suicidability- 5/5. It is conceivable that if you hopped from the wrong spot you might only go partway down and survive the first part of the drop, but then you would have broken legs and be lying in the middle of highway A16
Named for Sir Thomas Lipton, a.k.a. the Lipton's Tea guy, this famous peak juts up from the hill country's southern escarpment in an area blanketed with immaculate fields of tea.
- Scenery- 5/5. Fabulous views both of the plains and the mountains, with wonderful tea, tea, and tea in between. Even the walk is lovely, although rather uphill.
- Climate- 3/5. Not particularly cold, but clouds and rain virtually guaranteed by the afternoon, and it is a long way to walk back down in a rainstorm. Come very early or hire a rickshaw.
- Bullshitlessness- 4/5. Relatively devoid of bullshit.
- Suicidability- 2/5.Though you can see a great difference in altitude from the Seat, if you attempted jumping in the immediate area, you would be most likely to land shortly below, and in a tea bush, which would just suck.
Falling from the same extended southern escarpment on which most of these cliffs lie, Bambarakanda Falls are the highest in Sri Lanka at 241 meters (790 feet).
- Scenery- 3/5. Reaching the falls involves a nice excursion through rural scenery in a cleft of the mountains. The falls themselves, while certainly high, are little more than a modest mountain stream encountering the laws of gravity.
- Climate- 3/5. Fortunately, the falls are low enough down that you are unlikely to find yourself in a cloud, though you are in a rain shadow area.
- Bullshitlessness- 4/5 Not much bullshit, save for the ridiculous road signs which tell you the falls are "5km" away no matter how far you have walked.
- Suicidability- 2/5. Inconveniently for the incipiently self-destructive, one visits the falls from the bottom of the cliff. You could try drowning in the pool.
A totally touristy little village at the southeastern corner of the hills, best known for its peaceful atmosphere, you guessed it, its views down large cliffs and out across open plains. The village is set around the Ella Gap, a small valley made by the local stream, stony and precipitous in some places, grassy and sometimes even terraced in others. In fact, I am in Ella right now, at one of its various overpriced tourist eateries, where actual hunger is a financial liability.
- Scenery- 4/5. No complaints here, and there are multiple points from which to admire the usual combo of verticality, distance, and tea leaf. The majestic Ravana Ella Falls a few miles down the valley add a major aesthetic bonus to the area.
- Climate- 3/5. Lower, warmer, and less exposed to damp and awfulness than most of the other cliffs here, though that is a relative statement.
- Bullshitlessness- 2/5. They try and charge 700 SL rupees here for a rice and curry dinner (normal price is ~350), which tells you all you need to know about the mentality here. Gahhhh. Tourists...
- Suicidability- 5/5. The cliff at Ella Rock is fabulously deadly, and the one at "Little Adam's Peak" should also do. Meanwhile, in town the various establishments that serve alcohol a short distance from the Ella Gap's edge are a highly convenient option for those with easily-cooled feet.
Well, I guess that about covers it for the noteworthy cliffs of Sri Lanka. I must say, all this talk of suicide is a little unusual. I'm used to talking about myself at length, and about things that intend to murder me almost as much, but the combination of the two suggests an urgent trip to a specialist. And by "specialist" I mean the liquor store. It's Sri Lanka. 4 P.M. is not too early. Good night!
Sep 25, 2010
The Upcountry Journal of Sir Muttonchop G. Buddha
What follows is the journal of a strange and mysterious figure known only as Sir Muttonchop G. Buddha to the Sri Lankan highlands around Nuwara Eliya, ostensibly to inspect his substantial holdings in the nearby tea estates, though even this detail is considered murky. More puzzling still is the impossibility of discerning if the journal was written in 1872 or 2010, but no matter.
Sept. 22, Nuwara Eliya
Aaah! and what a lovely day it is for a sortie in the tea fields of Ceylon! The day grants us an invigorating mist to shield us from the slothful Colonial sun, and a fine steed to ride about the curling plantation byways, visiting upon my estate managers and imposing the proper image of an industriously working man upon the natives...
I'm residing for the time being in the abode of a Ceylonese lady by the name of Miss Teresa. Of course, the name she was given at birth is unpronounceable and in all likelihood barbarous, with a lamentable pagan note to it, so I've given her a Christian name and hope that a Christian heart shall soon follow. No more fit for cultured tongues is the name of this town, Nuwara Eliya. It sounds like the name of a Rajah's daughter fallen to ill repute, offering the delights of her cinnamon-hued flesh to any slobbering member of the petty gentry with a half-purse of silver. Such salacious tales as these fill the pages of the obscene and lascivious "histories" by C.W. Chesterworth, which in turn fill the uppermost of my bookshelves.
I must confess, however, that these volumes -not that I've ever browsed them with more than a catalogist's aloof eye- are opened most rarely these days, as my advancing years and the thinness of the air in these regions do make it a test upon my constitution to read of "...sweat clouding the topaz jewels betwixt the Rani's trembling bosom...". Nuwara Eliya is situated temperately, though I dare say dizzyingly, at a height of over six thousands of feet, which may be a fine altitude for the local Asiatics or an uncouth, hemp-favoring Yankee adventurer, but it is no place for the refined breath of an English gentleman, to say nothing of the English ladyfolk. Alas that such fine grounds cannot be found in lower and less Equatorial climes! Without question, the rumpled seas of verdant, aromatic, and eminently profitable beverage-bound leaf amidst the skyward-striving montane trees hereabouts is indeed most pleasing to the tropic-tired eye. No less a delight is to behold the well-tended vegetables in the coolies' gardens, looking for all the world like my Aunt Perriwin's tomato patch on the Fline of Twee. I gaze upon my estate's laborers plucking fine English cabbages from their humble (though magnanimously granted!) Oriental plots, and I thank our Saviour for shewing to me that, yes, the myriad races of the Empire may yet be Redeemed. Of course, these particular toils are beneath me. It is no place of mine to pluck a cabbage -save perhaps if I were given the chance to pluck the fresh cabbage of Miss Priscilla Upworth, if you take my figuration! But, oh! I must retire. The air remains thin, and I shall require all my energies to sustain and endure my tempestuous nightly dream of caressing Miss Priscilla's auburn locks and siring an heir.
~~Interlude of Repose~~
Up before dawn for Miss Teresa's smashing eggs and toast with jam, and I think I shall head straight to the links. Blessed are we mightily to have a golf course bisecting the very center of town. There is never a wrong time to play a few holes on such fine and spacious grounds. These open spaces, I must admit, are to me the game's only real merit. Placing the ball in the distant cup is devilish hard, but in a full morning's play you may see no more people than are typically balanced on a single Ceylonese motor-bicycle. My caddy awaits me, as he always does whether I send ahead for him or not. He knows well that my munificence is greatest immediately after a display of utmost punctiliousness. He has even abandoned the cult of Shiva at the calling of St. James, or so he told me as he listed the numerous heathen practices that he has forsworn since last I withheld his salary as tithe.
My interactions with the locals of late have been most heartwarming. It is recently reported that Ceylon is the eighth-most personable land upon the Earth, and this shows in the honest warmth of its native peoples. However, I must sadly repeat here that Ceylon is also also ranked firstly among the nations in addiction to the wicked vice of strong drink. And aye, if ever you had beheld the liquor-scented gloom and insensate brawling within a Ceylonese arrack den, you too would know how the isle's reputation for friendliness falls seven places short of its promise. I, of course, do not frequent such establishments. I prefer instead to take my gin alone, in dim candle's light, at the empty and bare tables of my hosts.
I have been staying in many a family guesthouse on this tour of the hill country, which is both comfortable and economic, though my gentle and endearing manner seems to inspire a confidence in the minds of my hosts that is perhaps unwarranted. Too often have I been made a confidant in both sides of a marital spat, or been variously subjected to long and meandering discourses on the difficulties of broken households, the "evils" (so they proclaim!) of Western society, and the obscure vagaries of Ceylonese political affairs. I have even been left to sup with orphans. Orphans, I say. Worst of all, however, my hosts place in me a strange trust they do not grant to other strangers, and leave me unchaperoned with daughters of such age that they are too youthful for any but the most stringently chaste dialog to be desirable or acceptable, yet too mature for both parties not to perceive the awkwardness of the situation. And to think that in some less advantaged corners of this country such girls would be thought to be of marriageable age...
Pardon. Again I must retire. Curse the thinness of this air.
~~Interlude of Repose~~
After this interlude follow a series of impassioned scrawlings, writ so haphazardly across the subsequent dozen leaves of the folio that it is difficult at best to extract any cogency therefrom; nor is it the task of the responsible historian to conjecture. Beyond those pages the journal seems to have fallen into disuse -save, apparently, for absorbing spillages of gin.
Sept. 22, Nuwara Eliya
Aaah! and what a lovely day it is for a sortie in the tea fields of Ceylon! The day grants us an invigorating mist to shield us from the slothful Colonial sun, and a fine steed to ride about the curling plantation byways, visiting upon my estate managers and imposing the proper image of an industriously working man upon the natives...
I'm residing for the time being in the abode of a Ceylonese lady by the name of Miss Teresa. Of course, the name she was given at birth is unpronounceable and in all likelihood barbarous, with a lamentable pagan note to it, so I've given her a Christian name and hope that a Christian heart shall soon follow. No more fit for cultured tongues is the name of this town, Nuwara Eliya. It sounds like the name of a Rajah's daughter fallen to ill repute, offering the delights of her cinnamon-hued flesh to any slobbering member of the petty gentry with a half-purse of silver. Such salacious tales as these fill the pages of the obscene and lascivious "histories" by C.W. Chesterworth, which in turn fill the uppermost of my bookshelves.
I must confess, however, that these volumes -not that I've ever browsed them with more than a catalogist's aloof eye- are opened most rarely these days, as my advancing years and the thinness of the air in these regions do make it a test upon my constitution to read of "...sweat clouding the topaz jewels betwixt the Rani's trembling bosom...". Nuwara Eliya is situated temperately, though I dare say dizzyingly, at a height of over six thousands of feet, which may be a fine altitude for the local Asiatics or an uncouth, hemp-favoring Yankee adventurer, but it is no place for the refined breath of an English gentleman, to say nothing of the English ladyfolk. Alas that such fine grounds cannot be found in lower and less Equatorial climes! Without question, the rumpled seas of verdant, aromatic, and eminently profitable beverage-bound leaf amidst the skyward-striving montane trees hereabouts is indeed most pleasing to the tropic-tired eye. No less a delight is to behold the well-tended vegetables in the coolies' gardens, looking for all the world like my Aunt Perriwin's tomato patch on the Fline of Twee. I gaze upon my estate's laborers plucking fine English cabbages from their humble (though magnanimously granted!) Oriental plots, and I thank our Saviour for shewing to me that, yes, the myriad races of the Empire may yet be Redeemed. Of course, these particular toils are beneath me. It is no place of mine to pluck a cabbage -save perhaps if I were given the chance to pluck the fresh cabbage of Miss Priscilla Upworth, if you take my figuration! But, oh! I must retire. The air remains thin, and I shall require all my energies to sustain and endure my tempestuous nightly dream of caressing Miss Priscilla's auburn locks and siring an heir.
~~Interlude of Repose~~
Up before dawn for Miss Teresa's smashing eggs and toast with jam, and I think I shall head straight to the links. Blessed are we mightily to have a golf course bisecting the very center of town. There is never a wrong time to play a few holes on such fine and spacious grounds. These open spaces, I must admit, are to me the game's only real merit. Placing the ball in the distant cup is devilish hard, but in a full morning's play you may see no more people than are typically balanced on a single Ceylonese motor-bicycle. My caddy awaits me, as he always does whether I send ahead for him or not. He knows well that my munificence is greatest immediately after a display of utmost punctiliousness. He has even abandoned the cult of Shiva at the calling of St. James, or so he told me as he listed the numerous heathen practices that he has forsworn since last I withheld his salary as tithe.
My interactions with the locals of late have been most heartwarming. It is recently reported that Ceylon is the eighth-most personable land upon the Earth, and this shows in the honest warmth of its native peoples. However, I must sadly repeat here that Ceylon is also also ranked firstly among the nations in addiction to the wicked vice of strong drink. And aye, if ever you had beheld the liquor-scented gloom and insensate brawling within a Ceylonese arrack den, you too would know how the isle's reputation for friendliness falls seven places short of its promise. I, of course, do not frequent such establishments. I prefer instead to take my gin alone, in dim candle's light, at the empty and bare tables of my hosts.
I have been staying in many a family guesthouse on this tour of the hill country, which is both comfortable and economic, though my gentle and endearing manner seems to inspire a confidence in the minds of my hosts that is perhaps unwarranted. Too often have I been made a confidant in both sides of a marital spat, or been variously subjected to long and meandering discourses on the difficulties of broken households, the "evils" (so they proclaim!) of Western society, and the obscure vagaries of Ceylonese political affairs. I have even been left to sup with orphans. Orphans, I say. Worst of all, however, my hosts place in me a strange trust they do not grant to other strangers, and leave me unchaperoned with daughters of such age that they are too youthful for any but the most stringently chaste dialog to be desirable or acceptable, yet too mature for both parties not to perceive the awkwardness of the situation. And to think that in some less advantaged corners of this country such girls would be thought to be of marriageable age...
Pardon. Again I must retire. Curse the thinness of this air.
~~Interlude of Repose~~
After this interlude follow a series of impassioned scrawlings, writ so haphazardly across the subsequent dozen leaves of the folio that it is difficult at best to extract any cogency therefrom; nor is it the task of the responsible historian to conjecture. Beyond those pages the journal seems to have fallen into disuse -save, apparently, for absorbing spillages of gin.
Sep 24, 2010
The Return Of StairMasta Killa
Once again a steep and mighty pinnacle loomed before me, taunting my impetuous nature with the call of hallowed ground and an unnecessary and grueling pilgrimage. Though in truth I could not see it with my eyes, I knew where it stood and knew that it beckoned. The pinnacle was Sri Pada, Adam's Peak. It is the home of the semi-Buddhist guardian deity Saman, and it here millenia ago that Saman himself became a Buddhist and begged Lord Buddha leave his footprint for worship. In the centuries that passed, the Muslims too came and proclaimed that the indentation at the peak was none other than the footprint Adam left when he landed after being cast out from Eden, proving once and for all the sort of ridiculousness that happens when you take "cast out" and other scriptural phrases too literally. Then the Christians came and declared "Adam? In Ceylon? Give me a break. Oh well, at least it's not heathen. We'll let it fly." The mount is also famed for its truly bizarre shadow, a phenomenon of nature that seems to defy all rational explanation, for when the sun creeps up from behind the horizon at the break of dawn, Sri Pada drops a perfectly triangular shadow on the hills beyond, despite not being itself a triangle. It is very weird. But Ghostface Buddha knows the true reason for Sri Pada's sacredness, a rationale that is, as they say, as old as the hills. Sri Pada is holy because it is a weird shape and fucking steep. Such is the the way of holy mountains. Ancient Sri Lankan man once said "Well, well, look at that thing. It must be the home of gods." The home of this god lies at the top of almost five thousand stairs, thus it was time for Ghostface Buddha to morph into another form...
From the stair-filled slums of Shaolin, StairMasta Killa strikes again. This, unedited and unaltered, is the chronicle of the stairs.
Stair 0: I'm in Dalhousie village getting ready to climb Adam's Peak. Or maybe it's "Delhousie" or "Dal House" village. Nobody is in agreement. I'm in the southeastern part of the Sri Lankan tea country, and many of the villages here still carry their utterly British plantation names. It's at least a little reassuring that the locals have as much trouble with "Norwood" and "Edinburgh" as we do with "Nallatanniya" and "Kilinochchi". The curious thing is that everybody has their own notion of how local place-names should be pronounced, and refuse to accept the interpretations of others. Thus, after I spent a minute or so testing variations of "Dalhoozie" and "Del Hose" on a bus driver, drawing squinting blanks until I hit the jackpot with "Dal House", I was rather surprised to find at the next bus station that "Dal House" got me nowhere, people looking at me like I was speaking a language from Mars until I uttered the phrase "Dellahoose". I don't know how these people go anywhere. Maybe they don't get out much.
Stair 120: Well, I'm off to a late start and the clouds are shrouding almost the entire mountain already. You're supposed to start in the middle of the night. More importantly, you're supposed to come in the dry season and not now, when everything is actually closed and nobody in their right mind would approach the peak because you can't see anything and the climb is a misty shitshow. We shall see.
Stair 250: I've lost count of the stairs already. So much for that conceit.
Stairs X...Z....
I'm at the entrance to the sacred reserve proper, looking at a giant and slightly cheesy stone structure called the "Dragon Arch". I know its name thanks to the latest of a series of large and informative billboards about local pilgrim culture brought to you by the fine people at the Lifebuoy soap company and their wonderfully pale-skinned and happy-looking collection of unknown Sinhalese actors pretending to be a family. This one is particularly marvelous. I quote: "This massive and intricate gateway was designed and constructed to seek divine intervention to resolve a technical glitch in the Laxapana power station, commissioned in 1950." So apparently obtaining a Sri Lankan engineering degree largely revolves around oracles and beseeching gods with the smashing of coconuts. You won't see me lingering on any local bridges.
I'm still not really on the mountain itself, just following the pilgrim trail up into the dale. I just got approached by the local Buddhist monk. My guesthouse hosts warned me about him. Sure enough he asked for money right away. Word on the street is he has mad cash, has various mistresses, and uses the proceeds of pilgrim donations to hire a mercenary priest to run his temple for him -and to support his lavish, import-favoring drinking habit.
A bit further up the trail, almost at the end of the cleft. I'm looking up at yet another Japanese "peace pagoda", identical to the several of the same sect I have seen in Nepal and India. I don't know quite why they do it, but I do appreciate turning around random corners in the woods in the Indian subcontinent and suddenly finding myself confronted with a flashy slab of Japanese runes.
I've now gone up quite a few steep stairs, and ahead of me is a team of laborers lugging sacks of cement mix up the hill for repairing the stairs ahead. The mountain bends sharply up at a sudden angle here. I can't see a damn thing above me in these clouds, but I must be at the base of the final slog. Based on the pictures I've seen it's gonna be tough but at least I should be near the top.
Nope, that wasn't near the top. Fuuuccckkkk.
On either side of me is lush, green, and very shadowy cloud forest falling down the slopes. I am becoming acutely aware that this path is too steep to run on and I don't have the energy for carrying a large stick everywhere I go. Fight or flight might be necessary, because everyone I've spoken to within a hundred miles of the peak has warned me that climbing in the off-season carries a (so they claim) extremely high risk of being attacked by wild pigs. Please.
I've been pushing up a staircase for quite a while now. I don't mean a stepped path like you tend to find on pilgrim trails, taking you a step up every other pace or so. I mean the way up this bitch is an actual, soul-shattering staircase like climbing to the top of a tall building when the elevator's busted. I can't see shit and all I can say about this mountain is that its contours are, to put it mildly, memorably unhorizontal.
Well, I'm slightly higher now and completely immersed within the clouds. There's an all-pervading mist on all sides and above and below me. To make things worse, there is some cheery-looking dog bounding up ahead of me like these godforsaken steps ain't no thang. Yeah, try doing this bipedally, you smug little bitch.
All the way up I've been passing the refuse of a seasonally abandoned pilgrim trail. Hundreds of times have I passed little shut-up tea shops where I could have stopped for a chat and a snack or taken a moment's shelter from the wind and the rain with twinkling lights and cheery little Buddhist ladies asking me what country I'm from. Now it's so desolate I almost want to see these pigs.
Another Lifebuoy soap ad posing as pilgrim info. Apparently this is the spot where Lord Buddha mended his robe on the way up the trail, and now pilgrims mark the area by buying white thread and tangling it everwhere for the next few hundred yards. Now, months after the pilgrims have gone, all that remains of this jumble is a rather forsaken-looking mess of fading threads trapped in the edges of the encroaching bush. It looks like a sail got mauled by the world's largest kitten and left here to rot.
Good lord, but this is steep. I've been on this same staircase for over an hour, and the side of the path is now so steep and exposed that even the tea-shop frames have faded out. It's just too treacherous here even for selling tea. I think I actually am near the top this time.
Walking through the clouds is an exercise in suffering intermittent drizzles and bursts of large-dropped rain. In cycles lasting anywhere from two to fifteen minutes I am repeatedly treated the the various climatic offerings of being soaked gently, indifferently, or furiously, though invariably coldly. This is some miserable crap BUT I AM GOING TO THE TOP AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME.
OK, I'm definitely, like really, near the top now. The stairs now, which have somehow become even steeper than they were before, are now on a completely exposed rock face getting pummeled by the wind. I have to grasp onto the railings just to avoid being blown back down the stairs. People imagine Heaven floating about on fluffy, cozy clouds. I have news for you, people. Clouds are HELL.
The cloud moisture is flooding the ink in my notes all over the page like a bleeding roadkill fractal. This raises important questions, like Why am I trying to write this?
I'm at the top!!! And, oh, look, the temple's closed. Could have seen that coming.
I can see 100 feet in any direction. From the locked gate I can see the front of the shrine but not the back. Needless to say, there are no mountain vistas. My spasming, near-gelatinous legs are the only proof I have that this little circle of fog I occupy is actually on top of a big, sacred, fuck-off mountain.
I'm in a small dormitory now having tea with the peak's caretakers, a man and two boys. They are laypeople, with no monks in sight. Where are the monks? I ask. "Monks don't like it here so they hire us." So no priest or monk at so holy temple? "Sri Lankan monks don't do any religious. They just like the comfort life."
Sri Pada is an excellent illustration of my crypto-Hindu theory (my belief that the island's Buddhists are hardly Buddhists at all). Consider Sri Lanka's most important places of pilgrimage. One is the temple of a talismanic, kingmaking tooth relic passed down through the ages. The other is a giant pointy mountain where some strange, protective hill-god with oracular tendencies supposedly asked Buddha to leave a footprint because the locals need some sort of weird little relic to worship (never mind that Buddha explicitly forbid worship of himself and, having experience in lecturing to deities, would have thoughtfully instructed Saman in the lapses of his understanding). It's a culture of random gods and relic-praise, with a big Buddha veneer thrown all over the top of it, stripped of all ideology, but retaining the outward forms enough for the Sinhalese nation to think of itself as almost chauvinistically Buddhist. So there's my spiel on Sri Lankan Buddhism. Now I'm going to walk back down this motherfucker.
I haven't gotten too far down, and I've been slowed by walking on the wrong side of the divided path, where the plants have overgrown over half the trail. Wet leaves keep streaking my face and dripping branches somehow keep sliding up my sleeves. It's still raining.
So, made a lot of progress and stopped for a moment to rest my ankles. I was running my hands down my legs when I felt some weird lumps in the vicinity of my socks. I take a peek and what do I see...blood spots? What the fuck? I roll down my socks and... oh my god
LEECHES
WORMY BLOODSUCKING FUCKBAGS I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. Actually, no. Plucking them just makes it worse. But, clever me! I brought a lighter! I seem to remember you can harmlessly send them off with heat and flame. How very convenient.
Oh, wait, no. Lighter no make fire. I'm inside a fucking cloud. Just going to have to keep walking until the leeches drop off on their own. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
I'm still on an unrelenting staircase in the middle of an unrelenting shitstorm getting soaked through and through while I'm covered in blood that's dripping out of strange parts of my body. You know what I am? I'm a fucking tampon in a toilet bowl. This is bullshit.
I repeat, this is bullshit.
This same dog has been trailing me all the way back down the mountain and it seems to think my leg smells odd. I can't imagine why.
Finally, bottom of the "staircase" part. Now I can take a few paces between stairs. No, I can't, because I now have the knees of a shaky old grandpa. I want aspirin and meatloaf.
Last leech dropped off sometime back. Didn't stop to write because I was impelling my worthless frame to the bottom of the hill with unseemly haste, shuffling down all jazzy-legged like a senile old swing dancer with a big fresh accident in my suspender pants. I'm making a very intense show of concentration on my notebook right now because I can't run and I don't want my eyes to give away how unsettled I am by the three men approaching me with banana-sickles and pickaxes.
Well, that was unnerving. I'm now in the company of four jumpsuited sanitation workers and an odd little Japanese man who spends all of his meager vacation allotments every year making miserable, off-season Buddhist pilgrimages and the globe, always without his highly skeptical wife. She may be on to something.
At long last, I reached again the bottom of the trail and stumbled into my guesthouse. Sweet, sweet repose.
Then I was attacked by wild pigs and died. The End.
From the stair-filled slums of Shaolin, StairMasta Killa strikes again. This, unedited and unaltered, is the chronicle of the stairs.
Stair 0: I'm in Dalhousie village getting ready to climb Adam's Peak. Or maybe it's "Delhousie" or "Dal House" village. Nobody is in agreement. I'm in the southeastern part of the Sri Lankan tea country, and many of the villages here still carry their utterly British plantation names. It's at least a little reassuring that the locals have as much trouble with "Norwood" and "Edinburgh" as we do with "Nallatanniya" and "Kilinochchi". The curious thing is that everybody has their own notion of how local place-names should be pronounced, and refuse to accept the interpretations of others. Thus, after I spent a minute or so testing variations of "Dalhoozie" and "Del Hose" on a bus driver, drawing squinting blanks until I hit the jackpot with "Dal House", I was rather surprised to find at the next bus station that "Dal House" got me nowhere, people looking at me like I was speaking a language from Mars until I uttered the phrase "Dellahoose". I don't know how these people go anywhere. Maybe they don't get out much.
Stair 120: Well, I'm off to a late start and the clouds are shrouding almost the entire mountain already. You're supposed to start in the middle of the night. More importantly, you're supposed to come in the dry season and not now, when everything is actually closed and nobody in their right mind would approach the peak because you can't see anything and the climb is a misty shitshow. We shall see.
Stair 250: I've lost count of the stairs already. So much for that conceit.
Stairs X...Z....
I'm at the entrance to the sacred reserve proper, looking at a giant and slightly cheesy stone structure called the "Dragon Arch". I know its name thanks to the latest of a series of large and informative billboards about local pilgrim culture brought to you by the fine people at the Lifebuoy soap company and their wonderfully pale-skinned and happy-looking collection of unknown Sinhalese actors pretending to be a family. This one is particularly marvelous. I quote: "This massive and intricate gateway was designed and constructed to seek divine intervention to resolve a technical glitch in the Laxapana power station, commissioned in 1950." So apparently obtaining a Sri Lankan engineering degree largely revolves around oracles and beseeching gods with the smashing of coconuts. You won't see me lingering on any local bridges.
I'm still not really on the mountain itself, just following the pilgrim trail up into the dale. I just got approached by the local Buddhist monk. My guesthouse hosts warned me about him. Sure enough he asked for money right away. Word on the street is he has mad cash, has various mistresses, and uses the proceeds of pilgrim donations to hire a mercenary priest to run his temple for him -and to support his lavish, import-favoring drinking habit.
A bit further up the trail, almost at the end of the cleft. I'm looking up at yet another Japanese "peace pagoda", identical to the several of the same sect I have seen in Nepal and India. I don't know quite why they do it, but I do appreciate turning around random corners in the woods in the Indian subcontinent and suddenly finding myself confronted with a flashy slab of Japanese runes.
I've now gone up quite a few steep stairs, and ahead of me is a team of laborers lugging sacks of cement mix up the hill for repairing the stairs ahead. The mountain bends sharply up at a sudden angle here. I can't see a damn thing above me in these clouds, but I must be at the base of the final slog. Based on the pictures I've seen it's gonna be tough but at least I should be near the top.
Nope, that wasn't near the top. Fuuuccckkkk.
On either side of me is lush, green, and very shadowy cloud forest falling down the slopes. I am becoming acutely aware that this path is too steep to run on and I don't have the energy for carrying a large stick everywhere I go. Fight or flight might be necessary, because everyone I've spoken to within a hundred miles of the peak has warned me that climbing in the off-season carries a (so they claim) extremely high risk of being attacked by wild pigs. Please.
I've been pushing up a staircase for quite a while now. I don't mean a stepped path like you tend to find on pilgrim trails, taking you a step up every other pace or so. I mean the way up this bitch is an actual, soul-shattering staircase like climbing to the top of a tall building when the elevator's busted. I can't see shit and all I can say about this mountain is that its contours are, to put it mildly, memorably unhorizontal.
Well, I'm slightly higher now and completely immersed within the clouds. There's an all-pervading mist on all sides and above and below me. To make things worse, there is some cheery-looking dog bounding up ahead of me like these godforsaken steps ain't no thang. Yeah, try doing this bipedally, you smug little bitch.
All the way up I've been passing the refuse of a seasonally abandoned pilgrim trail. Hundreds of times have I passed little shut-up tea shops where I could have stopped for a chat and a snack or taken a moment's shelter from the wind and the rain with twinkling lights and cheery little Buddhist ladies asking me what country I'm from. Now it's so desolate I almost want to see these pigs.
Another Lifebuoy soap ad posing as pilgrim info. Apparently this is the spot where Lord Buddha mended his robe on the way up the trail, and now pilgrims mark the area by buying white thread and tangling it everwhere for the next few hundred yards. Now, months after the pilgrims have gone, all that remains of this jumble is a rather forsaken-looking mess of fading threads trapped in the edges of the encroaching bush. It looks like a sail got mauled by the world's largest kitten and left here to rot.
Good lord, but this is steep. I've been on this same staircase for over an hour, and the side of the path is now so steep and exposed that even the tea-shop frames have faded out. It's just too treacherous here even for selling tea. I think I actually am near the top this time.
Walking through the clouds is an exercise in suffering intermittent drizzles and bursts of large-dropped rain. In cycles lasting anywhere from two to fifteen minutes I am repeatedly treated the the various climatic offerings of being soaked gently, indifferently, or furiously, though invariably coldly. This is some miserable crap BUT I AM GOING TO THE TOP AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME.
OK, I'm definitely, like really, near the top now. The stairs now, which have somehow become even steeper than they were before, are now on a completely exposed rock face getting pummeled by the wind. I have to grasp onto the railings just to avoid being blown back down the stairs. People imagine Heaven floating about on fluffy, cozy clouds. I have news for you, people. Clouds are HELL.
The cloud moisture is flooding the ink in my notes all over the page like a bleeding roadkill fractal. This raises important questions, like Why am I trying to write this?
I'm at the top!!! And, oh, look, the temple's closed. Could have seen that coming.
I can see 100 feet in any direction. From the locked gate I can see the front of the shrine but not the back. Needless to say, there are no mountain vistas. My spasming, near-gelatinous legs are the only proof I have that this little circle of fog I occupy is actually on top of a big, sacred, fuck-off mountain.
I'm in a small dormitory now having tea with the peak's caretakers, a man and two boys. They are laypeople, with no monks in sight. Where are the monks? I ask. "Monks don't like it here so they hire us." So no priest or monk at so holy temple? "Sri Lankan monks don't do any religious. They just like the comfort life."
Sri Pada is an excellent illustration of my crypto-Hindu theory (my belief that the island's Buddhists are hardly Buddhists at all). Consider Sri Lanka's most important places of pilgrimage. One is the temple of a talismanic, kingmaking tooth relic passed down through the ages. The other is a giant pointy mountain where some strange, protective hill-god with oracular tendencies supposedly asked Buddha to leave a footprint because the locals need some sort of weird little relic to worship (never mind that Buddha explicitly forbid worship of himself and, having experience in lecturing to deities, would have thoughtfully instructed Saman in the lapses of his understanding). It's a culture of random gods and relic-praise, with a big Buddha veneer thrown all over the top of it, stripped of all ideology, but retaining the outward forms enough for the Sinhalese nation to think of itself as almost chauvinistically Buddhist. So there's my spiel on Sri Lankan Buddhism. Now I'm going to walk back down this motherfucker.
I haven't gotten too far down, and I've been slowed by walking on the wrong side of the divided path, where the plants have overgrown over half the trail. Wet leaves keep streaking my face and dripping branches somehow keep sliding up my sleeves. It's still raining.
So, made a lot of progress and stopped for a moment to rest my ankles. I was running my hands down my legs when I felt some weird lumps in the vicinity of my socks. I take a peek and what do I see...blood spots? What the fuck? I roll down my socks and... oh my god
LEECHES
WORMY BLOODSUCKING FUCKBAGS I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU. Actually, no. Plucking them just makes it worse. But, clever me! I brought a lighter! I seem to remember you can harmlessly send them off with heat and flame. How very convenient.
Oh, wait, no. Lighter no make fire. I'm inside a fucking cloud. Just going to have to keep walking until the leeches drop off on their own. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
I'm still on an unrelenting staircase in the middle of an unrelenting shitstorm getting soaked through and through while I'm covered in blood that's dripping out of strange parts of my body. You know what I am? I'm a fucking tampon in a toilet bowl. This is bullshit.
I repeat, this is bullshit.
This same dog has been trailing me all the way back down the mountain and it seems to think my leg smells odd. I can't imagine why.
Finally, bottom of the "staircase" part. Now I can take a few paces between stairs. No, I can't, because I now have the knees of a shaky old grandpa. I want aspirin and meatloaf.
Last leech dropped off sometime back. Didn't stop to write because I was impelling my worthless frame to the bottom of the hill with unseemly haste, shuffling down all jazzy-legged like a senile old swing dancer with a big fresh accident in my suspender pants. I'm making a very intense show of concentration on my notebook right now because I can't run and I don't want my eyes to give away how unsettled I am by the three men approaching me with banana-sickles and pickaxes.
Well, that was unnerving. I'm now in the company of four jumpsuited sanitation workers and an odd little Japanese man who spends all of his meager vacation allotments every year making miserable, off-season Buddhist pilgrimages and the globe, always without his highly skeptical wife. She may be on to something.
At long last, I reached again the bottom of the trail and stumbled into my guesthouse. Sweet, sweet repose.
Then I was attacked by wild pigs and died. The End.
Bridge On The River Kwickie
I've now been up in the hills of Sri Lanka for over a week, mostly undertaking hikes to various scenic vistas at painful hours of the morning and then returning to slump in my bed soaked in rain and sweat. It's in this state of fatigue that I only recently mustered the strength to start penning my thoughts on this region, which began with a detour so brief and devoid of lunacy that I almost forgot about it entirely, but recount now for the benefit of those who wish to know about such places.
My first trip in the hill country actually involved riding a bus halfway out of the hills, down the winding highway to the west coast, and stopping in the not-so-remarkable village of Kitulgala. There's a handful of tourist joints there where people go to arrange whitewater rafting trips on the river that flows by, but that's really it as far as the village goes, unless you have a peculiar interest in hens. The reason I spent an afternoon trudging around half-obscured footpaths in that forgettable hamlet was my mild curiosity to see the famous scenery at one particular point on the riverside, known to cinema fanatics as the place where they shot the scenes featuring the titular span in the classic film Bridge On The River Kwai. So, yeah, you can go around and peer at familiar-looking mountains and even stand on a boulder where some jutting steel bars are all that remains of the movie's celebrated bridge. Of course, one wouldn't actually expect to be able to see the bridge standing there, because if you've seen the movie you'll know [SPOILER] it gets blown to shit at the end.
Anyways, it's a pleasantly scenic place, though rather annoyingly wet in the afternoon, and the river levels made approaching the banks hard and obscured many of the clusters of low rocks on which certain key scenes take place. However, I was to find that "pleasantly scenic though annoyingly wet" is, though understated, an apt description for just about anywhere in upcountry Sri Lanka. I warn you, bitching about rain is going to be a recurring feature in upcoming Ghostface Buddha featurettes, so get your raincoats and galoshes and keep your mouse hovering above the "Close Tab" button, because you're gonna need it.
-GFB
My first trip in the hill country actually involved riding a bus halfway out of the hills, down the winding highway to the west coast, and stopping in the not-so-remarkable village of Kitulgala. There's a handful of tourist joints there where people go to arrange whitewater rafting trips on the river that flows by, but that's really it as far as the village goes, unless you have a peculiar interest in hens. The reason I spent an afternoon trudging around half-obscured footpaths in that forgettable hamlet was my mild curiosity to see the famous scenery at one particular point on the riverside, known to cinema fanatics as the place where they shot the scenes featuring the titular span in the classic film Bridge On The River Kwai. So, yeah, you can go around and peer at familiar-looking mountains and even stand on a boulder where some jutting steel bars are all that remains of the movie's celebrated bridge. Of course, one wouldn't actually expect to be able to see the bridge standing there, because if you've seen the movie you'll know [SPOILER] it gets blown to shit at the end.
Anyways, it's a pleasantly scenic place, though rather annoyingly wet in the afternoon, and the river levels made approaching the banks hard and obscured many of the clusters of low rocks on which certain key scenes take place. However, I was to find that "pleasantly scenic though annoyingly wet" is, though understated, an apt description for just about anywhere in upcountry Sri Lanka. I warn you, bitching about rain is going to be a recurring feature in upcoming Ghostface Buddha featurettes, so get your raincoats and galoshes and keep your mouse hovering above the "Close Tab" button, because you're gonna need it.
-GFB
Sep 19, 2010
Train Trussle
Shortly before leaving the Trincomalee area, I had an experience that magnified my suspicions regarding Sri Lankan Buddhism. Basically, I have this theory that Sri Lankan Buddhist are crypto-Hindus, so thoroughly immersed in the myth that they are Buddhists and surrounded by Buddha statues that even they don't realize it. The most obvious counterargument to this theory (besides "nuh-uh") is the sheer number of Buddhist monks you see around. My counter-counter-argument is that there really isn't anything all that Buddhist about having an elitist, semi-theocratic upper crust of society that performs almost no religious function for society while simultaneously doing very little to pursue the path of Enlightenment, the task for which Sri Lankan society has basically subsidized them for the past twenty-three centuries. Now, obviously I'm not going to diss every Buddhist monk on the island, but I've gotten the impression that a great many of them are useless louts. So that's my theory; fast forward to my last night near Trinco and imagine my surprise to walk out of my beachfront hut to find three rifle-wielding policemen and two Buddhist monks sitting on the patio. I took one look at them, saw they were clearly expecting me to be filled with sudden touristic amazement at the Rexotic sight of having orange-robed monks outside my hut, and took another glance at the cops. They waited for me to speak. "I don't even care any more" is all I said, and sat down at the next table and ordered a Lion beer - an act that shows better than anything else the profundity of my indifference.
The monks, joined by a middle-aged Canadian expat of the kind you find floating around sleepy corners of the Orient of unexplained reasons, soon undertook the urgent task of "examining the truths of the Universe", by which I mean downloading various Apple products for their mobile phones. One monk, named Ananda after the Buddha's foremost disciple, patiently listened as the Canadian listed the various intermediary hacks that would be neccessary for getting streaming Sinhala pop music on 3G service outside of the Colombo broadcast area. With a sudden passion, Ananda exclaimed "I have many needs!", which is either the most Buddhist or the least Buddhist thing I have ever heard. "I have many needs." Indeed. Don't we all. If only there was some ideology at large which had at its core an elucidation of the nature of needs and desires, and if only there were individuals whose life purpose was to confront these very things...
Sri Lankan monks: I rest my case.
Anyways, I left Trincomalee and passed once again through Kandy (which I have decided is a pretty nice place) on my way to Sri Lanka's central hills, a mountainous clump of tea, jungle, rivers, tea, tea, and tea in the heart of the island. On the advice of apparently deluded individuals, I began my foray into the montane regions on the fabled upcountry line of Sri Lankan Ra... Sri Lankan Railwa... I can't stop myself.... I'm sorry but it's coming.... Sri Lank... oh god, it's so close.... SRI LANKAN FAILWAYS.
Let this be known: Sri Lankan Railways is shit. It's not that their trains are huge and miserable; indeed, they are modest in both size and awfulness. It's just that their service is so ludicrously incompetent that for a five-hour period I found myself fondly reminiscing of rolling around India for days at a time in bogeys designed for the transport of medically-quarantined, agoraphobic outcasts from the dregs of a rust-hoarding, dumpster-diving society of malnourished elves dwelling on the far side of the moon. Sri Lankan railways has none of these endearingly atrocious features, but makes up for it by being unable to manage the complexity of running a halfway-efficient service on all three-and-a-half of the country's rail lines. I wanted a simple thing: to go from Kandy to the town of Hatton by train, preferably in some amount of time approximating the two-hour printed schedule. I waited until an appropriate time when I had gathered sufficient evidence before announcing my conclusion that the Railways here are run by a bunch of jolly old chucklefucks. This moment came about half an hour after the train was supposed to have left the platform at Kandy, a delay one would have thought impossible on various logistical and philosophical levels given that Kandy was the originating station. Then, because I am generous, I reserved my judgment on whether Sri Lankan Railways' executive management were career imbeciles or just plagued by having to see the world upside-down with their pants over their heads until I had evidence for this as well. The answer, you may not be surprised to hear, was both.
I realized this when the train (labelled for Badulla on the other end of the hill country) which we were directed to stopped at Peradeniya Junction, a mere 5 kilometers down the line, and every single Sri Lankan passenger disembarked in a frenzy and transferred to a train on the opposite platform. Suspecting that the locals knew something I didn't, I followed out to investigate and found that every single passenger heading towards Badulla had been deliberately shepherded onto a train going to Colombo, and we were expected to flee towards the actual Badulla train at the proper time. I managed to squeeze myself and my bags onto the real Badulla train at the last instant, and wondered aloud why on God's Green Earth it was neccessary for us to take a special (late) train 5 kilometers to get to yet another train while at the same time risking being whisked away to the wrong side of the country on a mystery service carrying no passengers, when it would have been much simpler for all concerned if train #1 could simply approach the junction and -I dunno- turn left.
After this, matters were relatively simple, involving nothing more than crawling up the mountains and continually rolling backwards and crashing into the neighboring bogeys every time the pitifully inadequate locomotive decided to ease its journey by decelerating from going five miles per hour to going negative five miles per hour. I became more familiar than I would have liked with several clusters of pine trees between milestones 93 and 97, where the train frequently paused, presumably to make sure we wouldn't run over any of the local wildlife, such as the Ceylonese Somnambulating Boar or the Lesser Peraplegic Toad. All told we were merely two hours late to Hatton, which I suppose isn't that bad for a 250-mile Asian journey. Oh wait, it was like 60 miles. Don't ever travel in Sri Lanka by train. But if you do, make sure it's the one the local monks ride on. Shit's bound to have wireless and a minibar. Better yet, invest in some pirated softcore porn VCD's flogged by the drunk guy hanging out by the side entrance of the village music store, then get a flatscreen TV, an electrical transformer, and a car battery and mount that shit to a on the back of an elephant. It'll go just as fast, be ten times as stylish, and be a hundred times more visually edifying than watching a train engineer scratch his ass in some unnamed stretch of cloud forest.
Extravagant? What can I say? I have many needs.
The monks, joined by a middle-aged Canadian expat of the kind you find floating around sleepy corners of the Orient of unexplained reasons, soon undertook the urgent task of "examining the truths of the Universe", by which I mean downloading various Apple products for their mobile phones. One monk, named Ananda after the Buddha's foremost disciple, patiently listened as the Canadian listed the various intermediary hacks that would be neccessary for getting streaming Sinhala pop music on 3G service outside of the Colombo broadcast area. With a sudden passion, Ananda exclaimed "I have many needs!", which is either the most Buddhist or the least Buddhist thing I have ever heard. "I have many needs." Indeed. Don't we all. If only there was some ideology at large which had at its core an elucidation of the nature of needs and desires, and if only there were individuals whose life purpose was to confront these very things...
Sri Lankan monks: I rest my case.
Anyways, I left Trincomalee and passed once again through Kandy (which I have decided is a pretty nice place) on my way to Sri Lanka's central hills, a mountainous clump of tea, jungle, rivers, tea, tea, and tea in the heart of the island. On the advice of apparently deluded individuals, I began my foray into the montane regions on the fabled upcountry line of Sri Lankan Ra... Sri Lankan Railwa... I can't stop myself.... I'm sorry but it's coming.... Sri Lank... oh god, it's so close.... SRI LANKAN FAILWAYS.
Let this be known: Sri Lankan Railways is shit. It's not that their trains are huge and miserable; indeed, they are modest in both size and awfulness. It's just that their service is so ludicrously incompetent that for a five-hour period I found myself fondly reminiscing of rolling around India for days at a time in bogeys designed for the transport of medically-quarantined, agoraphobic outcasts from the dregs of a rust-hoarding, dumpster-diving society of malnourished elves dwelling on the far side of the moon. Sri Lankan railways has none of these endearingly atrocious features, but makes up for it by being unable to manage the complexity of running a halfway-efficient service on all three-and-a-half of the country's rail lines. I wanted a simple thing: to go from Kandy to the town of Hatton by train, preferably in some amount of time approximating the two-hour printed schedule. I waited until an appropriate time when I had gathered sufficient evidence before announcing my conclusion that the Railways here are run by a bunch of jolly old chucklefucks. This moment came about half an hour after the train was supposed to have left the platform at Kandy, a delay one would have thought impossible on various logistical and philosophical levels given that Kandy was the originating station. Then, because I am generous, I reserved my judgment on whether Sri Lankan Railways' executive management were career imbeciles or just plagued by having to see the world upside-down with their pants over their heads until I had evidence for this as well. The answer, you may not be surprised to hear, was both.
I realized this when the train (labelled for Badulla on the other end of the hill country) which we were directed to stopped at Peradeniya Junction, a mere 5 kilometers down the line, and every single Sri Lankan passenger disembarked in a frenzy and transferred to a train on the opposite platform. Suspecting that the locals knew something I didn't, I followed out to investigate and found that every single passenger heading towards Badulla had been deliberately shepherded onto a train going to Colombo, and we were expected to flee towards the actual Badulla train at the proper time. I managed to squeeze myself and my bags onto the real Badulla train at the last instant, and wondered aloud why on God's Green Earth it was neccessary for us to take a special (late) train 5 kilometers to get to yet another train while at the same time risking being whisked away to the wrong side of the country on a mystery service carrying no passengers, when it would have been much simpler for all concerned if train #1 could simply approach the junction and -I dunno- turn left.
After this, matters were relatively simple, involving nothing more than crawling up the mountains and continually rolling backwards and crashing into the neighboring bogeys every time the pitifully inadequate locomotive decided to ease its journey by decelerating from going five miles per hour to going negative five miles per hour. I became more familiar than I would have liked with several clusters of pine trees between milestones 93 and 97, where the train frequently paused, presumably to make sure we wouldn't run over any of the local wildlife, such as the Ceylonese Somnambulating Boar or the Lesser Peraplegic Toad. All told we were merely two hours late to Hatton, which I suppose isn't that bad for a 250-mile Asian journey. Oh wait, it was like 60 miles. Don't ever travel in Sri Lanka by train. But if you do, make sure it's the one the local monks ride on. Shit's bound to have wireless and a minibar. Better yet, invest in some pirated softcore porn VCD's flogged by the drunk guy hanging out by the side entrance of the village music store, then get a flatscreen TV, an electrical transformer, and a car battery and mount that shit to a on the back of an elephant. It'll go just as fast, be ten times as stylish, and be a hundred times more visually edifying than watching a train engineer scratch his ass in some unnamed stretch of cloud forest.
Extravagant? What can I say? I have many needs.
Sep 16, 2010
Guns N' Fishes
First, an update on an important matter. I have been following through (far too diligently) on my morbid fascination with Sri Lankan soft drinks. Here are the latest results:
I sampled most of these beverages while on a slightly pointless detour to the city of Trincomalee. Trincomalee is the main city on Sri Lanka's east coast, which is not saying all that much because the entire east coast is a semi-impassable backwater. It's spent the last 6 years recovering from being one of the places hardest hit by the tsunami, the last 25 years being a war zone torn between the government and a host of rebel armies, and the last 1000 years being the sort of place where excitement usually comes in the form of admiring freak misshapen vegetables. The one exception to this is Trinco city proper, which has spent its long history getting invaded on a regular basis by the numerous empires which have coveted its harbour, a fluke of geography ranking among the world's finest places to park a boat. In modern times, the line of ships approaching Trinco at night produces a row of shining points almost like the street lights of a distant highway. Despite the huge number of ships passing through, however, you don't see any foreign sailors around the port. This, I assume, is because Trincomalee has such a dearth of entertaining things to do that the scrungy mariners on the moored vessels don't even opt to come ashore and instead spend another night below decks gambling for cigarette butts and drunkenly assailing each other with rusting tins of engine fluids. Also, there's the fact that if they tried to come ashore uninvited after nightfall they would risk being riddled with bullets by the less-than-totally-concerned-with-human-life Sri Lankan Army.
Trincomalee was after all a hotspot in the recently-ended civil war. It being the country's most multiracial town (about 1/3 each of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims), as well as being the only place on that entire side of the country with something resembling an economy, neither side was going to let it slip away without giving the other hell. Adding to the local miseries, the UN deployed a large refugee-aid organization to the city, thus plaguing it and the surrounding villages with the maniacal engine roar of white-and-blue jeeps tearing around the district with the urgency and self-importance that only the world's most conspicuously impotent organization can carry. Now, even though the war is over, the government is still concerned about lingering resentments and the threat of terrorism, so the city's defenses are still almost fully manned. Countless little army posts line the highways into town, and machine gun toting soldiers huddle at every other intersection. Most strikingly, the beaches for miles in either direction are lined with small Army strongpoints consisting of barbed wire and sandbag-encircled barracks with the occasional concrete pillbox staring out at the beach over the tops of the thousands of beached boats and heaps of dead fish. Walking through this strange landscape, I was stopped numerous times by loitering fishers outside of sand-floored Hindu temples for a spot of conversation, which invariably began with the usual Sri Lankan curiosities and then suddenly shifted to a citation of some horrific number representing the number of people that died hereabouts when the tsunami hit. Continuing on, I beheld the somewhat disquieting sight of hundreds of fishermen pulling at nets, flopping fishes around in little plastic bags, and singing Tamil work-songs while the Army looked out with a motley assortment of automatic weapons listlessly aimed in the general direction of the sea. The long fishermen's ghetto was almost like a POW camp where the undisciplined flunkies and incurable cowards of front-line Army units were sent to be at least halfway useful and supervise the brutal, forced harvest of seer fish for the seafood-devouring war machine.
Trinco city itself isn't much to write home about (unless you happen to have a Sri Lanka-related blog and write compulsively about every sleepy dump you visit). Its main visitable feature is its fort, which is still occupied by a regiment of the Army, who very kindly and bizarrely let you wander right through the middle of their base to go up to the rocky point and visit the Shiva temple at the top. People of all sorts like to come to the army base for an afternoon stroll and I watched with intense curiosity as dozens of Sinhalese Buddhists and orhodox Muslim women walked around the temple area barefoot, pausing awkwardly at the Murugan-guarded door and visibly wondering if their curiosity about the temple inside was great enough to tread into a Shiva temple wearing a burqa. The answer, invariably, was not. Apart from the fort, there really isn't anything to see in Trinco but a few stray Hindu temples and the bizarre spectacle of spotted deer on the loose in the city center, wandering into police checkpoints and chilling next to crates of soda in the middle of the bus station.
So that was it for Trinco, and since I have absolutely no desire to go down a coast rife with creaky ferry crossings and devastated villages, so too is that it for the entire east coast. I'm off for parts of the country where one doesn't constantly have to face armed men and the stench of death, even if the dead are just tuna. You've gotta go at least a few miles inland, where fish are usually found in restaurants rather than dangling out of baskets on the back of bicycles. In them places the fish is cooked and seasoned like whoah, and the stench of death be right.
- Ole' - A beverage of the 'cream soda' variety, similar to Elephant House Cream Soda and just as vile. I now have the business cards of several Sri Lankan oral surgeons in my wallet for emergency access.
- Apple Soda - Kind of like soda, kind of like apple, entirely like the phrase "mediocre swill"
- Zingo - "Zingo" indeed. This drink is just so plain weird I can't even decide if it's fruitily awful or fruitishly palatable because the signals going to my brain are as crossed and confused as the traffic outside a rickshaw-drivers' bar at the end of happy hour.
- Smak Mixed Nectar - Ah, Smak, aside from being Sri Lanka's most fabulously named foodstuffs-manufacturing conglomerate, you have outdone yourself yet again and produced a beverage that actually tastes more like mango than mercury. Bravo, bravo.
I sampled most of these beverages while on a slightly pointless detour to the city of Trincomalee. Trincomalee is the main city on Sri Lanka's east coast, which is not saying all that much because the entire east coast is a semi-impassable backwater. It's spent the last 6 years recovering from being one of the places hardest hit by the tsunami, the last 25 years being a war zone torn between the government and a host of rebel armies, and the last 1000 years being the sort of place where excitement usually comes in the form of admiring freak misshapen vegetables. The one exception to this is Trinco city proper, which has spent its long history getting invaded on a regular basis by the numerous empires which have coveted its harbour, a fluke of geography ranking among the world's finest places to park a boat. In modern times, the line of ships approaching Trinco at night produces a row of shining points almost like the street lights of a distant highway. Despite the huge number of ships passing through, however, you don't see any foreign sailors around the port. This, I assume, is because Trincomalee has such a dearth of entertaining things to do that the scrungy mariners on the moored vessels don't even opt to come ashore and instead spend another night below decks gambling for cigarette butts and drunkenly assailing each other with rusting tins of engine fluids. Also, there's the fact that if they tried to come ashore uninvited after nightfall they would risk being riddled with bullets by the less-than-totally-concerned-with-human-life Sri Lankan Army.
Trincomalee was after all a hotspot in the recently-ended civil war. It being the country's most multiracial town (about 1/3 each of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims), as well as being the only place on that entire side of the country with something resembling an economy, neither side was going to let it slip away without giving the other hell. Adding to the local miseries, the UN deployed a large refugee-aid organization to the city, thus plaguing it and the surrounding villages with the maniacal engine roar of white-and-blue jeeps tearing around the district with the urgency and self-importance that only the world's most conspicuously impotent organization can carry. Now, even though the war is over, the government is still concerned about lingering resentments and the threat of terrorism, so the city's defenses are still almost fully manned. Countless little army posts line the highways into town, and machine gun toting soldiers huddle at every other intersection. Most strikingly, the beaches for miles in either direction are lined with small Army strongpoints consisting of barbed wire and sandbag-encircled barracks with the occasional concrete pillbox staring out at the beach over the tops of the thousands of beached boats and heaps of dead fish. Walking through this strange landscape, I was stopped numerous times by loitering fishers outside of sand-floored Hindu temples for a spot of conversation, which invariably began with the usual Sri Lankan curiosities and then suddenly shifted to a citation of some horrific number representing the number of people that died hereabouts when the tsunami hit. Continuing on, I beheld the somewhat disquieting sight of hundreds of fishermen pulling at nets, flopping fishes around in little plastic bags, and singing Tamil work-songs while the Army looked out with a motley assortment of automatic weapons listlessly aimed in the general direction of the sea. The long fishermen's ghetto was almost like a POW camp where the undisciplined flunkies and incurable cowards of front-line Army units were sent to be at least halfway useful and supervise the brutal, forced harvest of seer fish for the seafood-devouring war machine.
Trinco city itself isn't much to write home about (unless you happen to have a Sri Lanka-related blog and write compulsively about every sleepy dump you visit). Its main visitable feature is its fort, which is still occupied by a regiment of the Army, who very kindly and bizarrely let you wander right through the middle of their base to go up to the rocky point and visit the Shiva temple at the top. People of all sorts like to come to the army base for an afternoon stroll and I watched with intense curiosity as dozens of Sinhalese Buddhists and orhodox Muslim women walked around the temple area barefoot, pausing awkwardly at the Murugan-guarded door and visibly wondering if their curiosity about the temple inside was great enough to tread into a Shiva temple wearing a burqa. The answer, invariably, was not. Apart from the fort, there really isn't anything to see in Trinco but a few stray Hindu temples and the bizarre spectacle of spotted deer on the loose in the city center, wandering into police checkpoints and chilling next to crates of soda in the middle of the bus station.
So that was it for Trinco, and since I have absolutely no desire to go down a coast rife with creaky ferry crossings and devastated villages, so too is that it for the entire east coast. I'm off for parts of the country where one doesn't constantly have to face armed men and the stench of death, even if the dead are just tuna. You've gotta go at least a few miles inland, where fish are usually found in restaurants rather than dangling out of baskets on the back of bicycles. In them places the fish is cooked and seasoned like whoah, and the stench of death be right.
Sep 13, 2010
Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 2
Pardon the interruption. I didn't mean to intrude upon your time with a tale of pissing off yet another third-rate country's armed forces, but so it goes. We return now to our scheduled blog programming, specifically our discussion of piles of ancient Sri Lankan bricks, and the shapes thereof. I can't promise you any particularly compelling geometry, like say, a brick dodecahedron, but I do have some arcane and potentially amusing old Sri Lankan chronicles to relate, which involve mangoes, urinals, and other fascinating things.
So, before Anuradhapura became my week-long cultural prison, Anuradhapura was a place I was deeply interested in. As I recounted in Pt. 1, Anuradhapura was the center of Sinhalese civilization, and one of the world's great nexuses of Buddhist learning, for well over a thousand years. It was a truly enormous city for its time, considering that it was home to over 20,000 monks alone. Now of course this means that it is a truly massive expanse of land to go wandering around in, with some of its ruined monasteries covering hundreds of acres, and damn near nothing being more interesting to see than the infinite supply of two-foot-high brick walls. The exception to this rule, and the only thing that makes Anuradhapura really worth visiting, are the dagobas. The dagobas are giant Buddhist stupas, many of them over 2000 years old and painstakingly restored to their former shining glory by archaeologists backed by the Buddhist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist governments after a millennium buried in the jungle. You have to see these things to believe them. Even in their damaged states, mostly missing their pinnacles, they still stand hundreds of feet high, and (as will be recounted to the visitor at every possible juncture) were the largest structures in the ancient world after the pyramids at Giza. There actually is something compelling about schlepping through several miles of ruined bricks to get to the heart of the old sacred precinct, to find hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims visiting a massive, whitewashed dome that has been sitting there since before the rise of Rome.
There are also several good archaeological museums in the city displaying the various treasures that have been dug up, but I found I was far more interested by the demonstrations of the infrastructure of the city, by which I mean sewage management. It seems the ancient Sinhalese were much concerned with urban cleanliness, and therefore devised a sophisticated urinal consisting of a series of large pots filled with filtering stones buried in stacks underground to a depth of around eight feet. This explains a lot about the Sri Lankan national character, and illustrates the profound gap in cleanliness between this island and India. Whereas Sri Lanka apparently had proper underground sewers by the 3rd century B.C., to this day -the year 2010- seven out of ten people in India don't have any sort of toilet whatsoever and just do it in the fields or in a city drain. Now, bear in mind, "seven out of ten people in India" is a total roughly equivalent to the combined population of the Western Hemisphere. Not that the Sinhalese paid so much attention to their plumbing for purely pragmatic reasons. It is also recorded (and I love this) that many of the country's more purist monasteries, which renounced wealth and looked down contemptuously upon the monastic fat cats in the main, royally-sponsored establishments, nevertheless received fine and expensive donations that they had no philosophically justifiable use for. They solved their problem by taking their hoards of jewels and gold leaf and having these encrusted upon their urinal stones, so that they might literally piss upon gold and worldly wealth during their rigors, no doubt with a deep and smug satisfaction spelled across their faces.
Aside from the monasteries, which are now just collections of bricks, the remains of the rest of Anuradhapura are even less impressive and more pathetically bricky. The "royal palace", for instance, could just as well be the foundation of a smithy, save for the strange little carvings of incredibly obese dwarfs flanking its only surviving step. The kings of Anuradhapura (there being almost 200 of them) included some rather interesting characters. My favorite royal story by far concerns one King Yasalalakatissa, who ruled in the 1st century. Bear in mind that historians think this story is actually likely to be true. Mr. Yasalalakatissa was apparently something of an ass and liked to play pranks on the nobility. One supposes that with command of an entire kingdom at his fingertips, he had a rather dangerous imagination. Anyways, one day it was brought to his attention that a man called Subha, who was his gatekeeper, bore a remarkable resemblance to the royal personage. King Y..whatever, never letting a chance for mischief slip by, had his gatekeeper switch places with him and apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle of his various nobles deferring to a commoner by mistake. Ha! Ha.... I guess. There really is no accounting for the humor of the aristocracy. This was apparently so riotously funny to the king that he had did the whole thing again. Except this time Subha the gatekeeper had a fantastic idea and had his "gatekeeper" executed for treason. The ministers who had unwittingly been made fools of had a good laugh listening to some ridiculous royal guard protesting that he should not be killed because he was, in fact, the king. Now here's my favorite part: after the passage of some time, the absurd events came to light and Subha was revealed for who he was, except by this time he was firmly installed in the seat of power and nobody wanted to fuck with him, so they just let Subha be king.
I also visited the nearby town of Mihintale, which is revered by Buddhists as the place where Emperor Ashoka's son Mahindu brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka by converting the king. Basically, it's more of the same: numerous heaps of bricks and one gleaming white dagoba, except on a hill. According to legend, the king of Lanka successfully answered Mahindu's riddle concerning mango trees to prove he was smart enough to be a Buddhist. I really feel it is too inane to repeat here, but if you want to look up the "Mango Tree Riddle" you will have no problem finding it and presumably solving it. I did however relish the opportunity to piss off a Buddhist monk by playing a little Buddha logic of my own. You see, Sri Lankan Buddhists maintain the ridiculous belief that not only did the Buddha himself visited Sri Lanka, which is unlikely, but that he visited it three times, which is downright preposterous. I noted, however, that it took the efforts of Prince Mahindu some centuries later to bring Buddhism to the isle. "So," I offered the monk "if Lord Buddha actually did come here three times, how come he didn't bother to convert anyone to Buddhism?"
The monk gave me a long, cold stare, then raised a finger in a perfect gesture of the highest pedantry and replied "Lord Buddha did teach the dharma in Lanka. He came to climb the mountains and preach to the gods." With this he was very satisfied. "Strange...." I added, "strange that Lord Buddha, who was born in the Nepal, should need to come to Lanka to find mountains... particularly when the Indian gods all are living on top of the Himalaya, which are bigger and closer." This drew a uniquely icy form of clerical spite. "Our mountains are special" he said. And that was that. Special, indeed. We shall see about that. I'll be up in Sri Lanka's mountains in a few days and then the GhostVerdict on Lankan mountains shall be delivered.
Somehow I seem to have made Sri Lanka's cultural attractions sound more boring than they actually are. So, take my criticisms with a grain of salt and...nah, whatever. If they wanted me to treat this dump gently they shouldn't have had the whole island conspire to throw strange and miserable obstacles at me from day one. Then I might have started with "Oh! The dagobas are so fabulous!" rather than interposing qualified statements like "The dagobas, which are indeed impressive, are the only things for a hundred miles that don't suck." Them and Lion beer, the only things in Sri Lanka that don't suck. Well, OK, Lion beer sucks, but it's no worse than Indian Kingfisher. Now if you will excuse me I have to apply a figurative fire extinguisher to a strange little pseudo-romance I seem to have become trapped in. I don't predict any more such episodes after this one because now I have to walk seven miles back to my hotel past dozens of Sri Lankan Army bunkers and hundreds of thousands of dead fish, and I fully expect to arrive in my bedroom suffering from permanent psychosomatic impotence. Such are the perils of the adventurer's life. You have been warned.
So, before Anuradhapura became my week-long cultural prison, Anuradhapura was a place I was deeply interested in. As I recounted in Pt. 1, Anuradhapura was the center of Sinhalese civilization, and one of the world's great nexuses of Buddhist learning, for well over a thousand years. It was a truly enormous city for its time, considering that it was home to over 20,000 monks alone. Now of course this means that it is a truly massive expanse of land to go wandering around in, with some of its ruined monasteries covering hundreds of acres, and damn near nothing being more interesting to see than the infinite supply of two-foot-high brick walls. The exception to this rule, and the only thing that makes Anuradhapura really worth visiting, are the dagobas. The dagobas are giant Buddhist stupas, many of them over 2000 years old and painstakingly restored to their former shining glory by archaeologists backed by the Buddhist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist governments after a millennium buried in the jungle. You have to see these things to believe them. Even in their damaged states, mostly missing their pinnacles, they still stand hundreds of feet high, and (as will be recounted to the visitor at every possible juncture) were the largest structures in the ancient world after the pyramids at Giza. There actually is something compelling about schlepping through several miles of ruined bricks to get to the heart of the old sacred precinct, to find hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims visiting a massive, whitewashed dome that has been sitting there since before the rise of Rome.
There are also several good archaeological museums in the city displaying the various treasures that have been dug up, but I found I was far more interested by the demonstrations of the infrastructure of the city, by which I mean sewage management. It seems the ancient Sinhalese were much concerned with urban cleanliness, and therefore devised a sophisticated urinal consisting of a series of large pots filled with filtering stones buried in stacks underground to a depth of around eight feet. This explains a lot about the Sri Lankan national character, and illustrates the profound gap in cleanliness between this island and India. Whereas Sri Lanka apparently had proper underground sewers by the 3rd century B.C., to this day -the year 2010- seven out of ten people in India don't have any sort of toilet whatsoever and just do it in the fields or in a city drain. Now, bear in mind, "seven out of ten people in India" is a total roughly equivalent to the combined population of the Western Hemisphere. Not that the Sinhalese paid so much attention to their plumbing for purely pragmatic reasons. It is also recorded (and I love this) that many of the country's more purist monasteries, which renounced wealth and looked down contemptuously upon the monastic fat cats in the main, royally-sponsored establishments, nevertheless received fine and expensive donations that they had no philosophically justifiable use for. They solved their problem by taking their hoards of jewels and gold leaf and having these encrusted upon their urinal stones, so that they might literally piss upon gold and worldly wealth during their rigors, no doubt with a deep and smug satisfaction spelled across their faces.
Aside from the monasteries, which are now just collections of bricks, the remains of the rest of Anuradhapura are even less impressive and more pathetically bricky. The "royal palace", for instance, could just as well be the foundation of a smithy, save for the strange little carvings of incredibly obese dwarfs flanking its only surviving step. The kings of Anuradhapura (there being almost 200 of them) included some rather interesting characters. My favorite royal story by far concerns one King Yasalalakatissa, who ruled in the 1st century. Bear in mind that historians think this story is actually likely to be true. Mr. Yasalalakatissa was apparently something of an ass and liked to play pranks on the nobility. One supposes that with command of an entire kingdom at his fingertips, he had a rather dangerous imagination. Anyways, one day it was brought to his attention that a man called Subha, who was his gatekeeper, bore a remarkable resemblance to the royal personage. King Y..whatever, never letting a chance for mischief slip by, had his gatekeeper switch places with him and apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle of his various nobles deferring to a commoner by mistake. Ha! Ha.... I guess. There really is no accounting for the humor of the aristocracy. This was apparently so riotously funny to the king that he had did the whole thing again. Except this time Subha the gatekeeper had a fantastic idea and had his "gatekeeper" executed for treason. The ministers who had unwittingly been made fools of had a good laugh listening to some ridiculous royal guard protesting that he should not be killed because he was, in fact, the king. Now here's my favorite part: after the passage of some time, the absurd events came to light and Subha was revealed for who he was, except by this time he was firmly installed in the seat of power and nobody wanted to fuck with him, so they just let Subha be king.
I also visited the nearby town of Mihintale, which is revered by Buddhists as the place where Emperor Ashoka's son Mahindu brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka by converting the king. Basically, it's more of the same: numerous heaps of bricks and one gleaming white dagoba, except on a hill. According to legend, the king of Lanka successfully answered Mahindu's riddle concerning mango trees to prove he was smart enough to be a Buddhist. I really feel it is too inane to repeat here, but if you want to look up the "Mango Tree Riddle" you will have no problem finding it and presumably solving it. I did however relish the opportunity to piss off a Buddhist monk by playing a little Buddha logic of my own. You see, Sri Lankan Buddhists maintain the ridiculous belief that not only did the Buddha himself visited Sri Lanka, which is unlikely, but that he visited it three times, which is downright preposterous. I noted, however, that it took the efforts of Prince Mahindu some centuries later to bring Buddhism to the isle. "So," I offered the monk "if Lord Buddha actually did come here three times, how come he didn't bother to convert anyone to Buddhism?"
The monk gave me a long, cold stare, then raised a finger in a perfect gesture of the highest pedantry and replied "Lord Buddha did teach the dharma in Lanka. He came to climb the mountains and preach to the gods." With this he was very satisfied. "Strange...." I added, "strange that Lord Buddha, who was born in the Nepal, should need to come to Lanka to find mountains... particularly when the Indian gods all are living on top of the Himalaya, which are bigger and closer." This drew a uniquely icy form of clerical spite. "Our mountains are special" he said. And that was that. Special, indeed. We shall see about that. I'll be up in Sri Lanka's mountains in a few days and then the GhostVerdict on Lankan mountains shall be delivered.
Somehow I seem to have made Sri Lanka's cultural attractions sound more boring than they actually are. So, take my criticisms with a grain of salt and...nah, whatever. If they wanted me to treat this dump gently they shouldn't have had the whole island conspire to throw strange and miserable obstacles at me from day one. Then I might have started with "Oh! The dagobas are so fabulous!" rather than interposing qualified statements like "The dagobas, which are indeed impressive, are the only things for a hundred miles that don't suck." Them and Lion beer, the only things in Sri Lanka that don't suck. Well, OK, Lion beer sucks, but it's no worse than Indian Kingfisher. Now if you will excuse me I have to apply a figurative fire extinguisher to a strange little pseudo-romance I seem to have become trapped in. I don't predict any more such episodes after this one because now I have to walk seven miles back to my hotel past dozens of Sri Lankan Army bunkers and hundreds of thousands of dead fish, and I fully expect to arrive in my bedroom suffering from permanent psychosomatic impotence. Such are the perils of the adventurer's life. You have been warned.
Sep 11, 2010
White Tiger
On the 9th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Ghostface Buddha was treated like a terrorist. Granted, as a distinguished member of the Bush-era "TerrorWatch List", this happens to me quite a bit, but I certainly did not anticipate the blossoming feud I now have with the Sri Lankan armed forces.
It had been my plan to leave the center-north of Sri Lanka and its limitless supply of crumbling Sinhalese ruins behind me by heading into the far north of the country to Jaffna, the heart of Tamil Sri Lanka. Now, it bears reminding the reader that from 1983 until 2009, Sri Lanka was convulsed in a civil war in which the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers fought bitterly for control of the northern end of the country. None of the tourist information in print has been updated since the end of the war (which came to its conclusion with remarkable suddenness and violence), and is thus spectacularly out of date. So, I asked the locals, and everything they told me about getting to Jaffna was absolutely correct... for Sri Lankan people.
As it turns out, the army checkpost at the former Army/Tigers border still exists, and though Sri Lankan citizens can go straight through after a baggage inspection, this is not true of foreigners, because as all government beaurocrats know, Foreigners Can't Do Shit Without Stamps. So here I am at this bleak-ass army checkpost, weaseling my way out of confrontation with whichever soldier is holding my passport by playing dumb, until finally the demands of communicating the depths of their displeasure with me compells them to kick me higher and higher up the ranks until I become the personal problem of the Major-in-Command. He informs me, in a very jovial manner, that because I am a foreign dunce I cannot enter the northern zone (never mind that the final Tiger bastions were in the east...) without doing a song and dance to get some silly little stamp from the Ministry of Defence in Colombo. I remarked that this was stupid, and that the Army knew damn well foreigners are infinitely less of a security concern than, say, Sri Lankan citizens such as the ones that actually fought in the rebel/terrorist armies in aforementioned war. The Major responded that nevertheless, I needed to be accounted for. My wise-ass impulses seized control of me at yet another critical moment. "Oh, so I must be one of the White Tigers!" I exclaimed. This, I immediately realized, was massively, massively foolish. The Major gave me a look which showed my feline-subspecies witticism had flown right over his head with a dreadful whooshing sound, and as far as he was concerned I had just made a crude and somewhat nonsensical racist joke, completely devoid of zoological humor, while simultaneously identifying myself with the murderous bands of ultra-hardline guerillas that he had been fighting his entire career. The outcome, needless to say, was not to my advantage. Within a very short span of time my ass was deposited on the first bus heading in the opposite direction, with no inquiries made as to its destination.
After various peregrinations involving a fair deal of standing around in the rain at unpronounceable Tamil village intersections, I finally returned to Anuradhapura where I had started the day. Lacking anything more productive to do, I came to this very internet cafe. Much to my surprise, I ran into a fine young lady, who we shall call Deelipa, with whom I recently had a perfectly enjoyable evening of light romance. She was much more surprised to see me, given that I was supposed to be 200 kilometers away, but nevertheless informed me that she was glad I was here, and that furthermore she had sent me an email in my brief absence. This email, I discovered while she monitored my reactions, contained a considerable number of floral/botanical similes, and also discussed with remarkable certainty our meetings in past and future lives.
That, at least, was something I could work with. I now have another dinner date this evening, and another in the year 7503 A.D.
Sri Lanka is fucking weird.
It had been my plan to leave the center-north of Sri Lanka and its limitless supply of crumbling Sinhalese ruins behind me by heading into the far north of the country to Jaffna, the heart of Tamil Sri Lanka. Now, it bears reminding the reader that from 1983 until 2009, Sri Lanka was convulsed in a civil war in which the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers fought bitterly for control of the northern end of the country. None of the tourist information in print has been updated since the end of the war (which came to its conclusion with remarkable suddenness and violence), and is thus spectacularly out of date. So, I asked the locals, and everything they told me about getting to Jaffna was absolutely correct... for Sri Lankan people.
As it turns out, the army checkpost at the former Army/Tigers border still exists, and though Sri Lankan citizens can go straight through after a baggage inspection, this is not true of foreigners, because as all government beaurocrats know, Foreigners Can't Do Shit Without Stamps. So here I am at this bleak-ass army checkpost, weaseling my way out of confrontation with whichever soldier is holding my passport by playing dumb, until finally the demands of communicating the depths of their displeasure with me compells them to kick me higher and higher up the ranks until I become the personal problem of the Major-in-Command. He informs me, in a very jovial manner, that because I am a foreign dunce I cannot enter the northern zone (never mind that the final Tiger bastions were in the east...) without doing a song and dance to get some silly little stamp from the Ministry of Defence in Colombo. I remarked that this was stupid, and that the Army knew damn well foreigners are infinitely less of a security concern than, say, Sri Lankan citizens such as the ones that actually fought in the rebel/terrorist armies in aforementioned war. The Major responded that nevertheless, I needed to be accounted for. My wise-ass impulses seized control of me at yet another critical moment. "Oh, so I must be one of the White Tigers!" I exclaimed. This, I immediately realized, was massively, massively foolish. The Major gave me a look which showed my feline-subspecies witticism had flown right over his head with a dreadful whooshing sound, and as far as he was concerned I had just made a crude and somewhat nonsensical racist joke, completely devoid of zoological humor, while simultaneously identifying myself with the murderous bands of ultra-hardline guerillas that he had been fighting his entire career. The outcome, needless to say, was not to my advantage. Within a very short span of time my ass was deposited on the first bus heading in the opposite direction, with no inquiries made as to its destination.
After various peregrinations involving a fair deal of standing around in the rain at unpronounceable Tamil village intersections, I finally returned to Anuradhapura where I had started the day. Lacking anything more productive to do, I came to this very internet cafe. Much to my surprise, I ran into a fine young lady, who we shall call Deelipa, with whom I recently had a perfectly enjoyable evening of light romance. She was much more surprised to see me, given that I was supposed to be 200 kilometers away, but nevertheless informed me that she was glad I was here, and that furthermore she had sent me an email in my brief absence. This email, I discovered while she monitored my reactions, contained a considerable number of floral/botanical similes, and also discussed with remarkable certainty our meetings in past and future lives.
That, at least, was something I could work with. I now have another dinner date this evening, and another in the year 7503 A.D.
Sri Lanka is fucking weird.
Sep 10, 2010
Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 1
I have spent the better part of this week doing naught but clambering around ruined heaps of Sri Lankan bricks from a 2000-year time span. During this period, I have discovered, the art and science of brick-making did not much change. Whether they were laid in medieval times or in the days of Sri Lanka's most ancient kings, the bricks of the era looked like any damn bricks. However, I have recently realized that by strange coincidence, my itinerary thus far has taken me almost perfectly on a path backwards through time, visiting the successive centers of Sinhalese culture in reverse order. I started with the craptacular modern metropolis of Colombo, then went to the colonial-era Sinhalese redoubt of Kandy. Of these I have said enough. Most recently I have visited the medieval capital of the island at Polonnaruwa, and the mighty capital of the Sri Lankan ancients at Anuradhapura. I have thoughts, as well as judgments that could be mistaken for actual thoughts, to share on both of these. But first, time for some history.... Wooooooooooooo!!!
In the beginning there was Lanka. It was populated by shapeshifting demons, and Lord Rama came to Lanka with an army of non-demonic shapeshifters, mostly monkeys, and kicked their asses. Then a couple thousand years passed and the Sinhalese showed up. They had villages and shit. Around the 4th century B.C., they found a city called Anuradhapura, which becomes sort of important. Then Ashoka, Emperor of India, sends his son Mahindu to Lanka for the purpose of converting the people to Buddhism, which he does. Anuradhapura around this time suddenly becomes super-important and grows into one of the great cities of the ancient world, with enormous monuments, many thousands of people, and ridiculous legends. The Sinhalese make mad money trading with India and Rome. Anuradhapura is a big deal for more than a thousand years. Indian kings, who reveled in pointless conquest and also had bazillions of highly disposable Indian people for their armies, invaded Lanka like all the time. At some point the Sinhalese make the mistake of actually fucking with the Chola empire near the height of its power, and the Cholas thirst for vengeance. They take Lanka, and in 993 utterly destroy Anuradhapura, and build a new capital for their island holdings at Polonnaruwa. Then the Sinhalese somehow take Polonnaruwa and rule from there for a few hundred years. Then more wars happen and civilization in general collapses. Then whitey shows up with some boats and guns and shit gets even realer, which is as far as I am going to recount right now because while I'm typing I am also vying for the attentions of a charming young Sinhalese woman, and any time I think about history for an extended period my flirtations are interrupted by this smug-looking novice monk. I hope you understand.
So, as I said, I found myself first at Sri Lanka's medieval capital, Polonnaruwa. It is now, as are most Sri Lankan ruins, located on the edge of some hot, dry, little village with a windswept lake, no decent restaurants, and a population of mustachioed men driving around on motorcycles with heaps of vaguely Buddhist souvenirs in wicker baskets. Modern Polonnaruwa demands absolutely no attention whatsoever, unless you are particularly interested in the unusual scents carried by villagers on their way to the lake to wash off. Let us turn instead to medieval Polonnaruwa.
Medieval Polonnaruwa is much publicized as being the most fascinating old city of Sri Lanka etc., etc., due to its unique and eclectic architecture, a heritage of its founding by the Indians and later reconquest by the Sinhalese. And indeed, the various ruins do come in a remarkable variety of shapes and layouts. There are the usual gigantic dagobas (dagoba is Sri Lankan for stupa), strange circular relic-houses, towering ziggurat-style temples, and crumbling, headless Buddhas galore. However, it must be said that for all the splendor it must have once represented, it is now effectively an open-air geometry lesson conducted entirely by examining the crumbling cross-sections of various things built out of the timeless and changeless Sri Lankan brick. I shan't go into naming all the various structures I visited. That's what real tourist guides are for. If you need to know which eroded, half-toppled shrine served as the Temple of the Tooth in which long-passed decade, you can look elsewhere, because beyond a certain point even I don't care.
There is, however, a distinct category of human beings that do care about such things, and they are called the French. Polonnaruwa is crawling with French people, which is not a surprise, because this is the exact sort of thing that French people visiting in Asia love. Without fail, you will find them in large groups following some well-educated and enterprisingly French-speaking guide in front of some long-abandoned heap of rocks with faded carvings that require a short treatise on obscure episodes in the history of South Asian art to understand. I don't actually speak French, but I know enough to get the general sense of what is being said, and time after time I run into packs of squinting Gauls listening with great care to a 3-minute monologue about, say, the technological and artistic development of millstones, with particular attention being paid to the audience's Frenchness. "This millstone is a fine example of 12th-century Sinhalese agricultural technology," the guide will be saying. "This one in particular has a circumference of 273 centimeters, and weighs a full 20 kilos more than the well-known millstone at the Abbe St. Poisson-sur-Fromage!" This prompts a lot of thoughtful head-bobbing and a chorus of French whispers. "20 keelos more zan ze meelstone of Poisson-sur-Fromage! Can you belize it?"
Apart from French people, Polonnaruwa is also ovverun with other varieties of primate. Somehow, monkeys and the French just don't seem to get along. My theory is that the French object to monkeys not taking themselves seriously enough.
And now, dear readers, I am afraid I must leave you, having said almost nothing of worth about Polonnoruwa at all, and having not even begun my discussion of Anuradhapura. This will have to be Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 1 , because I've just talked my way into a dinner date and I need to scour this village for an eatery that isn't toxic enough to kill a 130-pound woman. From what I've seen of this town so far, this could mean my afternoon is booked
Prof. G.F. Buddha
Class of 323 B.C. Chair in Subcontinental Bullshit
International Institute of Thug Life
In the beginning there was Lanka. It was populated by shapeshifting demons, and Lord Rama came to Lanka with an army of non-demonic shapeshifters, mostly monkeys, and kicked their asses. Then a couple thousand years passed and the Sinhalese showed up. They had villages and shit. Around the 4th century B.C., they found a city called Anuradhapura, which becomes sort of important. Then Ashoka, Emperor of India, sends his son Mahindu to Lanka for the purpose of converting the people to Buddhism, which he does. Anuradhapura around this time suddenly becomes super-important and grows into one of the great cities of the ancient world, with enormous monuments, many thousands of people, and ridiculous legends. The Sinhalese make mad money trading with India and Rome. Anuradhapura is a big deal for more than a thousand years. Indian kings, who reveled in pointless conquest and also had bazillions of highly disposable Indian people for their armies, invaded Lanka like all the time. At some point the Sinhalese make the mistake of actually fucking with the Chola empire near the height of its power, and the Cholas thirst for vengeance. They take Lanka, and in 993 utterly destroy Anuradhapura, and build a new capital for their island holdings at Polonnaruwa. Then the Sinhalese somehow take Polonnaruwa and rule from there for a few hundred years. Then more wars happen and civilization in general collapses. Then whitey shows up with some boats and guns and shit gets even realer, which is as far as I am going to recount right now because while I'm typing I am also vying for the attentions of a charming young Sinhalese woman, and any time I think about history for an extended period my flirtations are interrupted by this smug-looking novice monk. I hope you understand.
So, as I said, I found myself first at Sri Lanka's medieval capital, Polonnaruwa. It is now, as are most Sri Lankan ruins, located on the edge of some hot, dry, little village with a windswept lake, no decent restaurants, and a population of mustachioed men driving around on motorcycles with heaps of vaguely Buddhist souvenirs in wicker baskets. Modern Polonnaruwa demands absolutely no attention whatsoever, unless you are particularly interested in the unusual scents carried by villagers on their way to the lake to wash off. Let us turn instead to medieval Polonnaruwa.
Medieval Polonnaruwa is much publicized as being the most fascinating old city of Sri Lanka etc., etc., due to its unique and eclectic architecture, a heritage of its founding by the Indians and later reconquest by the Sinhalese. And indeed, the various ruins do come in a remarkable variety of shapes and layouts. There are the usual gigantic dagobas (dagoba is Sri Lankan for stupa), strange circular relic-houses, towering ziggurat-style temples, and crumbling, headless Buddhas galore. However, it must be said that for all the splendor it must have once represented, it is now effectively an open-air geometry lesson conducted entirely by examining the crumbling cross-sections of various things built out of the timeless and changeless Sri Lankan brick. I shan't go into naming all the various structures I visited. That's what real tourist guides are for. If you need to know which eroded, half-toppled shrine served as the Temple of the Tooth in which long-passed decade, you can look elsewhere, because beyond a certain point even I don't care.
There is, however, a distinct category of human beings that do care about such things, and they are called the French. Polonnaruwa is crawling with French people, which is not a surprise, because this is the exact sort of thing that French people visiting in Asia love. Without fail, you will find them in large groups following some well-educated and enterprisingly French-speaking guide in front of some long-abandoned heap of rocks with faded carvings that require a short treatise on obscure episodes in the history of South Asian art to understand. I don't actually speak French, but I know enough to get the general sense of what is being said, and time after time I run into packs of squinting Gauls listening with great care to a 3-minute monologue about, say, the technological and artistic development of millstones, with particular attention being paid to the audience's Frenchness. "This millstone is a fine example of 12th-century Sinhalese agricultural technology," the guide will be saying. "This one in particular has a circumference of 273 centimeters, and weighs a full 20 kilos more than the well-known millstone at the Abbe St. Poisson-sur-Fromage!" This prompts a lot of thoughtful head-bobbing and a chorus of French whispers. "20 keelos more zan ze meelstone of Poisson-sur-Fromage! Can you belize it?"
Apart from French people, Polonnaruwa is also ovverun with other varieties of primate. Somehow, monkeys and the French just don't seem to get along. My theory is that the French object to monkeys not taking themselves seriously enough.
And now, dear readers, I am afraid I must leave you, having said almost nothing of worth about Polonnoruwa at all, and having not even begun my discussion of Anuradhapura. This will have to be Ye Olde Lankan Bricks, Pt. 1 , because I've just talked my way into a dinner date and I need to scour this village for an eatery that isn't toxic enough to kill a 130-pound woman. From what I've seen of this town so far, this could mean my afternoon is booked
Prof. G.F. Buddha
Class of 323 B.C. Chair in Subcontinental Bullshit
International Institute of Thug Life
Sep 7, 2010
Rushing Elephants
There comes a time when even Ghostface Buddha needs a reprieve from crawling about an endless succession of ancient ruins. There are but two choices: to find an activity that ignores ruins altogether, or to find some portion of civilization to destroy and so supply new ruins for posterity. I haven't yet found any part of Sri Lanka I really want to destroy, so I was forced to brainstorm alternative activities. "Now," I said to myself "I'm not in the mood for dealing with bizarre manifestations of South Asian cultures today, but I do feel like provoking something large and dangerous against my better judgment." Then I had the perfect idea: elephant spotting.
I hired a jeep and a driver named Ajay for an afternoon and we promptly rumbled off to Kaudulla National Park, Sri Lanka's newest wildlife sanctuary. Rumor had reached me via some noisome East London slags on vacation that in Kaudulla you could see "like, a hundred elephants." We approached Kaudulla via a filthy, red backcountry lane, which is actually a good sign when you're going to national parks, and before we even entered we started running across some of Sri Lanka's weird fauna. First we saw the usual peacocks, macaques, and miscellaneous little birds that you can never escape, as well as several of the enormous, vile-looking monitor lizards that are left to dart about the country probably only because Buddhism discourages wanton killing of animals. Nearing the park entrance we almost ran over what I believe was a civet. "Civets", as far as I am concerned, may be an entirely fictional category of animals created by scientists to satisfy all the raving, wild-eyed people who run into zoologists' offices at strange hours to announce they've seen some kind of hideous offspring of a cat and a giant weasel.
After much bouncing about over the potholes we arrived at the park gates. We were joined by a "volunteer guide", whose name I promptly forgot, but whose purpose was clearly to ensure that I didn't do anything too idiotic. Not every vehicle received such a guide. I suppose they profile visitors by the wicked gleams in the eyes of the ones most likely to make themselves a nuisance to a herd of elephants. He accompanied me wisely. The jeep rolled along a trail through low, shrubby forest for a while, and not long after we began we stumbled across Sri Lanka's rare national bird, the Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl. The Jungle Fowl, as the name suggests, is a glorified, technicolor chicken that scurries around in the bushes and allegedly emerges from the forests in the dark of night to make daring raids into the edges of nearby villages to rape the local poultry. It's like Sierra Leone, but with birds.
We popped out of the forests into a wide open expanse of grass around a lake, the Kaudulla tank. North-central Sri Lanka is a land of lakes, despite being the driest part of the country. Most of these lakes are actually artificial reservoirs built over a thousand years ago by the ancient Sinhalese to support their agriculture, and became one of the defining features of Sri Lankan civilization. The presence of such lakes all over the place is also much appreciated by the wildlife. During the dry season when many natural streams and ponds dry up, numerous herds of elephants converge on a handful of their favorite reservoirs, where the retreating waters leave large, level areas of grass to munch on as well. We drove over this seasonal grassland for about three minutes, and hey, presto, there was a herd of some thirty elephants. I was almost disappointed. Finding them was just so damn easy it took half the fun out of it. I was soon to abandon this gripe when two of the adolescent males in the herd promptly began sparring in that useless but highly photogenic way common to male mammals of every type. Humans are no exception. Ladies, you may think that teenage boys did really stupid macho shit to impress you 'round the high school stairwells, but believe me, you have no idea just how idiotic it would get when you weren't looking. We knew we were being damn fools and we didn't want you to see us, but there was just no way to resist the urge to hang from ceilings and kick-fight each other until our pants fell off. This, in essence, is what these two elephants were doing, though it took on a form more like a multi-ton, trunk-twisting version of "thumb wars." Elephants, of course, don't wear pants. Ever. You can put a costume on an elephant, basically draping him in carpets and strapping furniture to his back and all sorts of other indignities, but I defy you to walk up to a tusker and try to manipulate him into a pair of XXXXXXXXL slacks.
After that, we detoured to the side of the lake and enjoyed the great diversity of birds available for the spotting. Actually, our "volunteer guide" enjoyed pointing out birds and talking about them greatly, while I nodded my head and made vaguely interested comments because I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between an open-billed ibis and a white-back stork at 200 yards. I've never understood the hobby of birdwatching. I don't mean to hate on those who enjoy such things, but I personally have no desire to go trotting about the entire freaking globe to visit all of the planet's marshy wastelands and smile at the thought of having beheld two species of egret and a mating pair of obscure chickadees. Now, the greater adjutant stork, well ho, ho ho! My goodness! So glad am I to have traveled to the antipodes and see some fat winged fucker sitting on a log.
We turned back inland a short distance, and lo and behold, more elephants! Granted, on open ground near a water source, elephants are really quite impossible to miss, but since there were only two of them, Ajay and my supervisory attache apparently decided to pretend not to have spotted them until I said "Look, more elephants!". They were two wandering males, which is slightly unusual because males are loners and there isn't really any reason for them to team up. We paused for photos, and as the second one passed we became, shall we say, acutely aware of its masculinity. This elephant had what was clearly a rather rosy daydream going on in its thick elephant noggin, and this was evident by some budding excitement down yonder. "Well, now I've seen that" I said, but no; no, I had not seen that. There was so much more. As I stared in what I admit was rapt fixation, the elephant's member extended itself to truly elephantine dimensions. The thing was like a giant purple snake dangling all the way to the ground. What followed next I shall not soon forget, for the elephant began swinging and curling his unit with the apparently mighty muscles within, and quite suddenly slapped himself in the belly with it three times in succession, each collision issuing a resounding *SMACK*..... *SMACK*...... *SMACK*. It was no wonder, I thought, that the other male seemed to be studiously keeping its distance. I was still quite impressed. "That thing's bigger than my arm!" I exclaimed. And it was.... at least when I'm not flexing. Truth.
At length, we ran into yet another herd of elephants, bringing our total elephant-spotting total for the afternoon to over sixty. It was just too easy for it to even really count. This time we got quite close and the elephants responded by rapidly forming a massive defensive circle around the babies. I clambered to the back of the jeep to stand and take a bunch of pictures and apparently spent a little too much time staring one elephant, who we shall call Angry Momma, right in the eye. The elephants were clearly a bit on edge and after a while Angry Momma, the enormous, ill-tempered matriarch of the herd began advancing towards us. Guide boy took notice and gently suggested we start the engine, which promptly made a pathetic stuttering sound followed by two echoing petroleum belches, which was all it took for Angry Momma to decide we had declared war. A moment before we were able to get our rattly shitwagon into first gear, Angry Momma was rushing headlong at the back the jeep. In the nick of time we lurched ahead over the uneven lake bed, with Angry Momma no more than five feet away from completely and utterly fucking our puny little wagon. Guide boy squealed something that must have been Sinhala for "Ohhh SH...." as the jeep tripped and stumbled forwards at a pace distinctively less than the maximum speed of a pissed-off mother elephant. Angry Momma got closer again and took a swipe at the back of the vehicle with her trunk, missing by about a foot. By this time I had settled into the truck bed in such a way that our desperate flight at least didn't catapult me out of the vehicle, and began trying to get some pictures of our pursuit. Alas, when all was said and done I had some very clear shots of the sky, the jeep's rollover bars, and about half of Angry Momma's face at the moment she decided we had fled far enough and were not going to get any closer again for damn sure. So within twenty-four hours I had been chased by a furious pachyderm, and butted in the groin by an AK-47. That second item was an innocent mistake, as far as incidents involving assault rifles go, and the soldier apologized profusely, but it did happen and it was a most unusual day.
Unsurprisingly, after having seen some sixty elephants and having been the targets of attempted trampling by one, we decided to call it a day and headed back to Park HQ. On the way we saw a crocodile basking in the sun, but we didn't hop out for a closer view. I have shared my opinions on crocodiles here before. They are quite overdue for extinction, whereas I, on the other hand, am not, and therefore I don't go near large crocodiles.
Signor Volunteer Guide escorted me into the park museum and quite proudly displayed its exhibits, which were as follows: a huge collection of elephant skulls, snakes and turtles in formaldeyhde, skulls of miscellaneous livestock, macaque skeletons, and the obviously fabricated remains of a so-called "civet". The centerpiece of the tiny collection, however, was by far the most depraved: an aborted, pale-skinned baby elephant pickled in a tank. I looked at it with obvious distaste, rather put off by the fact that it looked exactly like an actual elephant but was only about two feet long, and very dead, and very much in a big-ass jar. "Baby elephant", Guide Boy helpfully added. "Mother brain damage. Abortion." Personally, I think if you're going to keep dead babies in jars you should at least not put it smack-bang center in a room with four glass walls. Ideally, there should be some sort of creepy curtain and a deformed attendant who lures visiting children with whispers of "Hey, kid, you want to see something reallllyyyy gross?", then takes them into the inner sanctum, from which they emerge permanently changed, but at least the smart ones have the chance to raise an eyebrow and say "No thanks mister, I don't actually want to see something disgusting." But maybe I'm just an idealist.
Since the evidence seems to indicate that Sri Lanka's untamed animals want me dead, I shall have nothing to do with them for a short time. Mmmmmhmmmmm, it's time for some more collapsed-civilization skullduggery, methinks. Put on your nerd goggles on go to the pharmacy for a fresh inhaler, because we are going on an adventure to not one but two abandoned Sri Lankan capitals. I'll share my knowledge and we can make an evening of it. You bring the guacamole and I'll bring the riveting tales of adventure, with cross-referenced indices and footnotes. Don't worry about the red wine. I have plenty in the fridge. Like, a lot. Nobody ever comes to my parties.
I hired a jeep and a driver named Ajay for an afternoon and we promptly rumbled off to Kaudulla National Park, Sri Lanka's newest wildlife sanctuary. Rumor had reached me via some noisome East London slags on vacation that in Kaudulla you could see "like, a hundred elephants." We approached Kaudulla via a filthy, red backcountry lane, which is actually a good sign when you're going to national parks, and before we even entered we started running across some of Sri Lanka's weird fauna. First we saw the usual peacocks, macaques, and miscellaneous little birds that you can never escape, as well as several of the enormous, vile-looking monitor lizards that are left to dart about the country probably only because Buddhism discourages wanton killing of animals. Nearing the park entrance we almost ran over what I believe was a civet. "Civets", as far as I am concerned, may be an entirely fictional category of animals created by scientists to satisfy all the raving, wild-eyed people who run into zoologists' offices at strange hours to announce they've seen some kind of hideous offspring of a cat and a giant weasel.
After much bouncing about over the potholes we arrived at the park gates. We were joined by a "volunteer guide", whose name I promptly forgot, but whose purpose was clearly to ensure that I didn't do anything too idiotic. Not every vehicle received such a guide. I suppose they profile visitors by the wicked gleams in the eyes of the ones most likely to make themselves a nuisance to a herd of elephants. He accompanied me wisely. The jeep rolled along a trail through low, shrubby forest for a while, and not long after we began we stumbled across Sri Lanka's rare national bird, the Sri Lankan Jungle Fowl. The Jungle Fowl, as the name suggests, is a glorified, technicolor chicken that scurries around in the bushes and allegedly emerges from the forests in the dark of night to make daring raids into the edges of nearby villages to rape the local poultry. It's like Sierra Leone, but with birds.
We popped out of the forests into a wide open expanse of grass around a lake, the Kaudulla tank. North-central Sri Lanka is a land of lakes, despite being the driest part of the country. Most of these lakes are actually artificial reservoirs built over a thousand years ago by the ancient Sinhalese to support their agriculture, and became one of the defining features of Sri Lankan civilization. The presence of such lakes all over the place is also much appreciated by the wildlife. During the dry season when many natural streams and ponds dry up, numerous herds of elephants converge on a handful of their favorite reservoirs, where the retreating waters leave large, level areas of grass to munch on as well. We drove over this seasonal grassland for about three minutes, and hey, presto, there was a herd of some thirty elephants. I was almost disappointed. Finding them was just so damn easy it took half the fun out of it. I was soon to abandon this gripe when two of the adolescent males in the herd promptly began sparring in that useless but highly photogenic way common to male mammals of every type. Humans are no exception. Ladies, you may think that teenage boys did really stupid macho shit to impress you 'round the high school stairwells, but believe me, you have no idea just how idiotic it would get when you weren't looking. We knew we were being damn fools and we didn't want you to see us, but there was just no way to resist the urge to hang from ceilings and kick-fight each other until our pants fell off. This, in essence, is what these two elephants were doing, though it took on a form more like a multi-ton, trunk-twisting version of "thumb wars." Elephants, of course, don't wear pants. Ever. You can put a costume on an elephant, basically draping him in carpets and strapping furniture to his back and all sorts of other indignities, but I defy you to walk up to a tusker and try to manipulate him into a pair of XXXXXXXXL slacks.
After that, we detoured to the side of the lake and enjoyed the great diversity of birds available for the spotting. Actually, our "volunteer guide" enjoyed pointing out birds and talking about them greatly, while I nodded my head and made vaguely interested comments because I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between an open-billed ibis and a white-back stork at 200 yards. I've never understood the hobby of birdwatching. I don't mean to hate on those who enjoy such things, but I personally have no desire to go trotting about the entire freaking globe to visit all of the planet's marshy wastelands and smile at the thought of having beheld two species of egret and a mating pair of obscure chickadees. Now, the greater adjutant stork, well ho, ho ho! My goodness! So glad am I to have traveled to the antipodes and see some fat winged fucker sitting on a log.
We turned back inland a short distance, and lo and behold, more elephants! Granted, on open ground near a water source, elephants are really quite impossible to miss, but since there were only two of them, Ajay and my supervisory attache apparently decided to pretend not to have spotted them until I said "Look, more elephants!". They were two wandering males, which is slightly unusual because males are loners and there isn't really any reason for them to team up. We paused for photos, and as the second one passed we became, shall we say, acutely aware of its masculinity. This elephant had what was clearly a rather rosy daydream going on in its thick elephant noggin, and this was evident by some budding excitement down yonder. "Well, now I've seen that" I said, but no; no, I had not seen that. There was so much more. As I stared in what I admit was rapt fixation, the elephant's member extended itself to truly elephantine dimensions. The thing was like a giant purple snake dangling all the way to the ground. What followed next I shall not soon forget, for the elephant began swinging and curling his unit with the apparently mighty muscles within, and quite suddenly slapped himself in the belly with it three times in succession, each collision issuing a resounding *SMACK*..... *SMACK*...... *SMACK*. It was no wonder, I thought, that the other male seemed to be studiously keeping its distance. I was still quite impressed. "That thing's bigger than my arm!" I exclaimed. And it was.... at least when I'm not flexing. Truth.
At length, we ran into yet another herd of elephants, bringing our total elephant-spotting total for the afternoon to over sixty. It was just too easy for it to even really count. This time we got quite close and the elephants responded by rapidly forming a massive defensive circle around the babies. I clambered to the back of the jeep to stand and take a bunch of pictures and apparently spent a little too much time staring one elephant, who we shall call Angry Momma, right in the eye. The elephants were clearly a bit on edge and after a while Angry Momma, the enormous, ill-tempered matriarch of the herd began advancing towards us. Guide boy took notice and gently suggested we start the engine, which promptly made a pathetic stuttering sound followed by two echoing petroleum belches, which was all it took for Angry Momma to decide we had declared war. A moment before we were able to get our rattly shitwagon into first gear, Angry Momma was rushing headlong at the back the jeep. In the nick of time we lurched ahead over the uneven lake bed, with Angry Momma no more than five feet away from completely and utterly fucking our puny little wagon. Guide boy squealed something that must have been Sinhala for "Ohhh SH...." as the jeep tripped and stumbled forwards at a pace distinctively less than the maximum speed of a pissed-off mother elephant. Angry Momma got closer again and took a swipe at the back of the vehicle with her trunk, missing by about a foot. By this time I had settled into the truck bed in such a way that our desperate flight at least didn't catapult me out of the vehicle, and began trying to get some pictures of our pursuit. Alas, when all was said and done I had some very clear shots of the sky, the jeep's rollover bars, and about half of Angry Momma's face at the moment she decided we had fled far enough and were not going to get any closer again for damn sure. So within twenty-four hours I had been chased by a furious pachyderm, and butted in the groin by an AK-47. That second item was an innocent mistake, as far as incidents involving assault rifles go, and the soldier apologized profusely, but it did happen and it was a most unusual day.
Unsurprisingly, after having seen some sixty elephants and having been the targets of attempted trampling by one, we decided to call it a day and headed back to Park HQ. On the way we saw a crocodile basking in the sun, but we didn't hop out for a closer view. I have shared my opinions on crocodiles here before. They are quite overdue for extinction, whereas I, on the other hand, am not, and therefore I don't go near large crocodiles.
Signor Volunteer Guide escorted me into the park museum and quite proudly displayed its exhibits, which were as follows: a huge collection of elephant skulls, snakes and turtles in formaldeyhde, skulls of miscellaneous livestock, macaque skeletons, and the obviously fabricated remains of a so-called "civet". The centerpiece of the tiny collection, however, was by far the most depraved: an aborted, pale-skinned baby elephant pickled in a tank. I looked at it with obvious distaste, rather put off by the fact that it looked exactly like an actual elephant but was only about two feet long, and very dead, and very much in a big-ass jar. "Baby elephant", Guide Boy helpfully added. "Mother brain damage. Abortion." Personally, I think if you're going to keep dead babies in jars you should at least not put it smack-bang center in a room with four glass walls. Ideally, there should be some sort of creepy curtain and a deformed attendant who lures visiting children with whispers of "Hey, kid, you want to see something reallllyyyy gross?", then takes them into the inner sanctum, from which they emerge permanently changed, but at least the smart ones have the chance to raise an eyebrow and say "No thanks mister, I don't actually want to see something disgusting." But maybe I'm just an idealist.
Since the evidence seems to indicate that Sri Lanka's untamed animals want me dead, I shall have nothing to do with them for a short time. Mmmmmhmmmmm, it's time for some more collapsed-civilization skullduggery, methinks. Put on your nerd goggles on go to the pharmacy for a fresh inhaler, because we are going on an adventure to not one but two abandoned Sri Lankan capitals. I'll share my knowledge and we can make an evening of it. You bring the guacamole and I'll bring the riveting tales of adventure, with cross-referenced indices and footnotes. Don't worry about the red wine. I have plenty in the fridge. Like, a lot. Nobody ever comes to my parties.
Sep 6, 2010
Elephant Beer, Buddhist Vampires, And Other Sri Lankan Horrors
Dambulla, being right in the middle of the "historical" part of Sri Lanka, is a good place for visiting many of the old ruins, statues, and the like scattered around Sri Lanka's "dry zone". It's also a good place to find strange insects crawling in your bedsheets, but let's not talk about that.
Near to Dambulla is the historic city of Sigiriya, which tourism-related people will tell you is the Most Amazing Thing In Sri Lanka. I beg to differ. The most astonishing thing in Sri Lanka are its soft drinks, which so far constitute the sole field in which I consider Sri Lanka to be infinitely more awful and backwards than India. For the most part Sri Lanka has the upper hand when comparisons with India are concerned. For starters, they keep beating India in cricket, which is considered extremely important here, despite overwhelming evidence that cricket is goddamn ridiculous. They also must have better minimum wage laws, because you don't see institutions with large lawns hiring 15 scrawny, baby-carrying women for a dollar a day to shuffle about hacking at the grass with 3rd-century farming imlpements. The Sri Lankan approach, which is economic and solves other problems to boot, is to get a cow, chain that motherfucker to a tree in the vicinity where you want the grass shortened, and leave the bastard there until he's mowed the lawn. On the other hand, you don't see cows being used as a means of urban merchandise transportation. In Sri Lanka they firmly believe in the virtues of the internal combustion engine, and have even developed an extremely economic little contraption for use by its poorer rustics. I don't know what this thing is called, but it is essentially about a third of a tractor. It's a little engine on two small wheels with a trailer hitch and two long handlebars allowing the operator to control the vehicle from whatever he's sitting on, which is usually a wooden bench on his wagon but could also just be a four-foot pile of potatoes in a cart. You see these things, which must cost almost nothing, everywhere, while you see archaic wooden carts being pulled by oxen or camels or donkeys nowhere. What a lovely, elegant, and egalitarian approach to development and modernity, I say.
Which brings us back to the soft drinks. It would be worth dragging the Sinhalese kicking and screaming back into the Middle Ages just to ensure that Elephant Ginger Beer ceases to exist. My goodness, Elephant Ginger Beer (which is not beer) is awful. It tastes like the bottom of a barrel. It has a ginger flavor, but one that suggests the ginger has been immersed in some rancid, fermenting cauldron of slime prior to bottling. It sort of tastes like really lousy, watered-down whiskey, the sort of shit that would result if (and I pray this never happens) Jim Beam decided to compete in the bitch-drinks market with Smirnoff Ice. Actually, no, I'm being generous. Elephant Ginger Beer is well below the taste-quality of Jim Beam. It tastes more like some horrid concoction devised in an unmarked shack in West Virginia, made of two parts moonshine, three parts bong water, one part lemonade, and an electrifying "bluegrass" mixture of roofies and methanphetamines.
Shortly after trying Elephant Ginger Beer I tried Elephant House Cream Soda, which is just unspeakable.
OK, so I had originally intended to say something about Sigiriya, but matters of greater priority seized hold of me. Sigiriya, in its essence, is a big-ass rock. Starting around the 3rd century BC, people said "Hey, what an interesting rock. Perhaps we should build a monastery there." And so they did, but who cares. It was later, in the 5th century AD when a civil war -younger prince kills father, makes war on brother, you know the drill- led to the rebel prince, one Kassapa, deciding that he was going to build his palace on top of a big-ass, unassailable rock. Fortunately, he also was possessed by the flights of grandeur neccessary for him to realize that when you do something so ridiculous you have to go all the way and make your rock-palace awesome. Kassappa was the sort of man who would say "Ok, so my palace is on top of this giant, sheer-sided rock, and the only way up is this absurd staircase we've attached to the rock face, but we've got this semi-useful ledge about halfway up. You know what we should do? Make the bottom of the upper staircase a massive stone fucking lion that you have to enter the palace by ascending into its roaring mouth. Now go down the rock and fetch me some wenches." Sadly, the precarious ancient stairs and most of the lion have collapsed, but you can still see the lion's fearsome feet and it is obvious that the place used to be seriously cool. High up on the walls of the rock, another absurd staircase leads you to a section of the rock face where Sri Lanka's most famous paintings have lingered for centuries, never declining in popularity because they depict a series of half-naked, very round-breasted women serving platters of fruit. Books have been published of the artful comments medieval visitors left on the rock after being moved by this spectacle, so for the interests of posterity I will leave my own thoughts unpublished because they were highly unpoetic, had nothing to say about the sensual beauty of the maidens, but did concern my strange and sudden desire for mouth-watering mangosteens, and I really don't know what that says about me.
Going back to Dambulla I had to wait at Sigiriya's village bus stop, which was a concrete bench entirely occupied by a sleeping bus driver, no sign of any village to speak of, and small cacti I discovered by leaning back from the stone I had sat on. Finally I just said the hell with it and climbed onto the empty bus nearby, assuming that wherever it was eventually going it would be more useful than being in Sigiriya, and fell asleep across an entire row of seats. I awoke to a loud trumpeting noise followed by a shuffling of chains and a massive form looming directly outside the window. I bolted upright, shocked by what seemed to be a massive eye lumbering past. And oh it was. It's Sri Lanka. There just be elephants walking down the road, dreaming of throwing off their shackles and trumpeting at sleeping people in buses. It's how they do.
The next day I hired a rickshaw to take me to a bunch of remote historical monuments because I actually do like creeping around the jungle and stumbling over vine-strewn piles of rocks that no other tourists can be assed to visit. First place I went was called Ritigala, which was an ancient "forest monastry", so called because it's way the hell in the middle of the jungle and getting from place to palce involves folowing a sinuous stone path through a darkness resounding with the calls of obscure birds and the neck-spinning sound of suddenly-rustled leaves where you will just catch a glimpse of a lizard or a snake slipping into the undergrowth. The ruins themselves tell you little more than that ancient Ritigala's buildings had four sides and were made of stone, but the jungle is the real fun. Beyond the ruins themselves, which stretch on through the trees for a surprising distance, you end up in the nature reserve that covers Ritigala mountain. The mountain isn't very big but it is steep and covered in thick plant growth, so after some dedicated scrambling you can get well up the sides to a rocky clearing where you can look out across the jungle and to the Sri Lankan plains in one direction, and up to the peak which Hanuman is said to have used as his jumping-pad on the way back to India in the other. I rather wonder what that scene must have looked like, since at the time he was jumpnig off this mountain, he was also carrying another mountain, which I have seen, and it is approximately twenty times as big, a proper snow-capped Himalayan affair. So in summary, if you were there, you would have seen a gigantic Himalayan mountain apparently balancing on a small, jungly mountain, being held in place by a speck that upon closer examination turns out to be a giant, muscular, mace-wielding monkey. As is so often the case, I feel I have been placed in this world at the wrong time.
From Ritigala, my driver, a chap named Ugama, led us off in search of the Aukana Buddha, which is a giant Buddha statue in some wee, extremely provincial village. On the way we got rather hungry and couldn't find a place to eat at any price. We would pull up at a cafe-looking place in some somnolent village and ask for rice or whatever, only to be informed that the food was "finished". It seems to me that Sri Lanka could really use a school of Restaurant Management, which small entrepeneurs can attend for a minimal fee, and where the first lesson is called 'Things You Need At A Cafe: Food". Finally we found a place, and the owner told us that though she was more or less out of food (why???), she was able to offer us some -quote- "lake fishes". Ugama and I exchanged a glance that revealed we were of one mind when it came to sampling some villager's "lake fishes", a term that usually means "horrid, shrivelled little beasts that have evolved in splendid isolation to adapt to our village pond's unique composition of sewage, psychoactive algae, and discarded tractor batteries." We circled the nearby villages in increasing desperation until eventually we conceded we had no choice but to take our chances with the lake fish. We returned to the cafe, and for some reason Ugama asked if they had eggs, perhaps hoping would scurry off to buy some to spare us the horrors of the fish. To our surprise, eggs were quite suddenly on the menu and we sat to eat. Within moments, a full, elaborate meal of rice, fried eggs, and curried vegetables was laid before us with hot tea and not a fish in sight. This suggests a title for the second lesson at the Ceylon Institute of Restaurant Management, "What To Do If You Do Have Food: Offer It To Paying Customers Without Sending Them On Some Bizarre Wild Goose Chase With Threats Of Your Village Lake Fish".
We finally arrived at Aukana, and found that the giant Buddha there was indeed a giant Buddha. 'Twas about twelve meters tall and well carved, in a style reminiscent of the Greco-Afghan Buddhist statues (you read that right) I have seen in Indian museums. The best thing about the statue, however, was that the Buddha was standing in the formal "Blessing" stance, which looks an awful lot like he's about to pimp-slap that shit out of somebody. Needless to say, I was deeply inspired and an image of this statue will grace this blog in the coming days.
From Aukana we drove on to see another giant Buddha at Sesseruwa, an ancient little monastry in a village so pathetic and obscure that even the people two villages over couldn't really tell us which convoluted series of dusty, one-lane country roads we had to take to get there (the answer, it turned out, was "All of them.") When we got there, I was directed into the care of a fat, orange-robed monk so dedicated to the pasttime of betel-chewing that his gums appeared to be dripping with blood like some sort of deranged Buddhist vampire. He hobbled towards me with betel-dribble trickling out of his mouth and a giant, twelve-inch metal key in his hand. He led me to a series of small cave temples that have been sitting in this sorry little place for over a thousand years, and finally showed me to the Sesseruwa Buddha, which he proudly told me was four inches taller than the Aukana Buddha. Speaking for myself, I felt the four inches did not compensate for the Aukana Buddha's superior artistry, but I admit I was distracted by my intense focus on keeping the monk ahead of me at all times, lest I be torn apart in a vampiric feeding frenzy and my body left to be discovered in mysterious circumstances, sparking wild (and correct) Buddhism-related vampire rumors that would ultimately be incorporated as an incredibly shitty device to shoehorn Asian people into the Twilight series. "We are the Doomed Reborn... born in this life to repay our sins in lives past.... and cursed to be immortal! Being a teenager sucks, and also we're Asian!"
It's too awful to contemplate further. You should never have to see such a thing. From now on I'm carrying suicide pills and blood coagulants in my day pack. I'm doing it all for you. Never forget me.
Near to Dambulla is the historic city of Sigiriya, which tourism-related people will tell you is the Most Amazing Thing In Sri Lanka. I beg to differ. The most astonishing thing in Sri Lanka are its soft drinks, which so far constitute the sole field in which I consider Sri Lanka to be infinitely more awful and backwards than India. For the most part Sri Lanka has the upper hand when comparisons with India are concerned. For starters, they keep beating India in cricket, which is considered extremely important here, despite overwhelming evidence that cricket is goddamn ridiculous. They also must have better minimum wage laws, because you don't see institutions with large lawns hiring 15 scrawny, baby-carrying women for a dollar a day to shuffle about hacking at the grass with 3rd-century farming imlpements. The Sri Lankan approach, which is economic and solves other problems to boot, is to get a cow, chain that motherfucker to a tree in the vicinity where you want the grass shortened, and leave the bastard there until he's mowed the lawn. On the other hand, you don't see cows being used as a means of urban merchandise transportation. In Sri Lanka they firmly believe in the virtues of the internal combustion engine, and have even developed an extremely economic little contraption for use by its poorer rustics. I don't know what this thing is called, but it is essentially about a third of a tractor. It's a little engine on two small wheels with a trailer hitch and two long handlebars allowing the operator to control the vehicle from whatever he's sitting on, which is usually a wooden bench on his wagon but could also just be a four-foot pile of potatoes in a cart. You see these things, which must cost almost nothing, everywhere, while you see archaic wooden carts being pulled by oxen or camels or donkeys nowhere. What a lovely, elegant, and egalitarian approach to development and modernity, I say.
Which brings us back to the soft drinks. It would be worth dragging the Sinhalese kicking and screaming back into the Middle Ages just to ensure that Elephant Ginger Beer ceases to exist. My goodness, Elephant Ginger Beer (which is not beer) is awful. It tastes like the bottom of a barrel. It has a ginger flavor, but one that suggests the ginger has been immersed in some rancid, fermenting cauldron of slime prior to bottling. It sort of tastes like really lousy, watered-down whiskey, the sort of shit that would result if (and I pray this never happens) Jim Beam decided to compete in the bitch-drinks market with Smirnoff Ice. Actually, no, I'm being generous. Elephant Ginger Beer is well below the taste-quality of Jim Beam. It tastes more like some horrid concoction devised in an unmarked shack in West Virginia, made of two parts moonshine, three parts bong water, one part lemonade, and an electrifying "bluegrass" mixture of roofies and methanphetamines.
Shortly after trying Elephant Ginger Beer I tried Elephant House Cream Soda, which is just unspeakable.
OK, so I had originally intended to say something about Sigiriya, but matters of greater priority seized hold of me. Sigiriya, in its essence, is a big-ass rock. Starting around the 3rd century BC, people said "Hey, what an interesting rock. Perhaps we should build a monastery there." And so they did, but who cares. It was later, in the 5th century AD when a civil war -younger prince kills father, makes war on brother, you know the drill- led to the rebel prince, one Kassapa, deciding that he was going to build his palace on top of a big-ass, unassailable rock. Fortunately, he also was possessed by the flights of grandeur neccessary for him to realize that when you do something so ridiculous you have to go all the way and make your rock-palace awesome. Kassappa was the sort of man who would say "Ok, so my palace is on top of this giant, sheer-sided rock, and the only way up is this absurd staircase we've attached to the rock face, but we've got this semi-useful ledge about halfway up. You know what we should do? Make the bottom of the upper staircase a massive stone fucking lion that you have to enter the palace by ascending into its roaring mouth. Now go down the rock and fetch me some wenches." Sadly, the precarious ancient stairs and most of the lion have collapsed, but you can still see the lion's fearsome feet and it is obvious that the place used to be seriously cool. High up on the walls of the rock, another absurd staircase leads you to a section of the rock face where Sri Lanka's most famous paintings have lingered for centuries, never declining in popularity because they depict a series of half-naked, very round-breasted women serving platters of fruit. Books have been published of the artful comments medieval visitors left on the rock after being moved by this spectacle, so for the interests of posterity I will leave my own thoughts unpublished because they were highly unpoetic, had nothing to say about the sensual beauty of the maidens, but did concern my strange and sudden desire for mouth-watering mangosteens, and I really don't know what that says about me.
Going back to Dambulla I had to wait at Sigiriya's village bus stop, which was a concrete bench entirely occupied by a sleeping bus driver, no sign of any village to speak of, and small cacti I discovered by leaning back from the stone I had sat on. Finally I just said the hell with it and climbed onto the empty bus nearby, assuming that wherever it was eventually going it would be more useful than being in Sigiriya, and fell asleep across an entire row of seats. I awoke to a loud trumpeting noise followed by a shuffling of chains and a massive form looming directly outside the window. I bolted upright, shocked by what seemed to be a massive eye lumbering past. And oh it was. It's Sri Lanka. There just be elephants walking down the road, dreaming of throwing off their shackles and trumpeting at sleeping people in buses. It's how they do.
The next day I hired a rickshaw to take me to a bunch of remote historical monuments because I actually do like creeping around the jungle and stumbling over vine-strewn piles of rocks that no other tourists can be assed to visit. First place I went was called Ritigala, which was an ancient "forest monastry", so called because it's way the hell in the middle of the jungle and getting from place to palce involves folowing a sinuous stone path through a darkness resounding with the calls of obscure birds and the neck-spinning sound of suddenly-rustled leaves where you will just catch a glimpse of a lizard or a snake slipping into the undergrowth. The ruins themselves tell you little more than that ancient Ritigala's buildings had four sides and were made of stone, but the jungle is the real fun. Beyond the ruins themselves, which stretch on through the trees for a surprising distance, you end up in the nature reserve that covers Ritigala mountain. The mountain isn't very big but it is steep and covered in thick plant growth, so after some dedicated scrambling you can get well up the sides to a rocky clearing where you can look out across the jungle and to the Sri Lankan plains in one direction, and up to the peak which Hanuman is said to have used as his jumping-pad on the way back to India in the other. I rather wonder what that scene must have looked like, since at the time he was jumpnig off this mountain, he was also carrying another mountain, which I have seen, and it is approximately twenty times as big, a proper snow-capped Himalayan affair. So in summary, if you were there, you would have seen a gigantic Himalayan mountain apparently balancing on a small, jungly mountain, being held in place by a speck that upon closer examination turns out to be a giant, muscular, mace-wielding monkey. As is so often the case, I feel I have been placed in this world at the wrong time.
From Ritigala, my driver, a chap named Ugama, led us off in search of the Aukana Buddha, which is a giant Buddha statue in some wee, extremely provincial village. On the way we got rather hungry and couldn't find a place to eat at any price. We would pull up at a cafe-looking place in some somnolent village and ask for rice or whatever, only to be informed that the food was "finished". It seems to me that Sri Lanka could really use a school of Restaurant Management, which small entrepeneurs can attend for a minimal fee, and where the first lesson is called 'Things You Need At A Cafe: Food". Finally we found a place, and the owner told us that though she was more or less out of food (why???), she was able to offer us some -quote- "lake fishes". Ugama and I exchanged a glance that revealed we were of one mind when it came to sampling some villager's "lake fishes", a term that usually means "horrid, shrivelled little beasts that have evolved in splendid isolation to adapt to our village pond's unique composition of sewage, psychoactive algae, and discarded tractor batteries." We circled the nearby villages in increasing desperation until eventually we conceded we had no choice but to take our chances with the lake fish. We returned to the cafe, and for some reason Ugama asked if they had eggs, perhaps hoping would scurry off to buy some to spare us the horrors of the fish. To our surprise, eggs were quite suddenly on the menu and we sat to eat. Within moments, a full, elaborate meal of rice, fried eggs, and curried vegetables was laid before us with hot tea and not a fish in sight. This suggests a title for the second lesson at the Ceylon Institute of Restaurant Management, "What To Do If You Do Have Food: Offer It To Paying Customers Without Sending Them On Some Bizarre Wild Goose Chase With Threats Of Your Village Lake Fish".
We finally arrived at Aukana, and found that the giant Buddha there was indeed a giant Buddha. 'Twas about twelve meters tall and well carved, in a style reminiscent of the Greco-Afghan Buddhist statues (you read that right) I have seen in Indian museums. The best thing about the statue, however, was that the Buddha was standing in the formal "Blessing" stance, which looks an awful lot like he's about to pimp-slap that shit out of somebody. Needless to say, I was deeply inspired and an image of this statue will grace this blog in the coming days.
From Aukana we drove on to see another giant Buddha at Sesseruwa, an ancient little monastry in a village so pathetic and obscure that even the people two villages over couldn't really tell us which convoluted series of dusty, one-lane country roads we had to take to get there (the answer, it turned out, was "All of them.") When we got there, I was directed into the care of a fat, orange-robed monk so dedicated to the pasttime of betel-chewing that his gums appeared to be dripping with blood like some sort of deranged Buddhist vampire. He hobbled towards me with betel-dribble trickling out of his mouth and a giant, twelve-inch metal key in his hand. He led me to a series of small cave temples that have been sitting in this sorry little place for over a thousand years, and finally showed me to the Sesseruwa Buddha, which he proudly told me was four inches taller than the Aukana Buddha. Speaking for myself, I felt the four inches did not compensate for the Aukana Buddha's superior artistry, but I admit I was distracted by my intense focus on keeping the monk ahead of me at all times, lest I be torn apart in a vampiric feeding frenzy and my body left to be discovered in mysterious circumstances, sparking wild (and correct) Buddhism-related vampire rumors that would ultimately be incorporated as an incredibly shitty device to shoehorn Asian people into the Twilight series. "We are the Doomed Reborn... born in this life to repay our sins in lives past.... and cursed to be immortal! Being a teenager sucks, and also we're Asian!"
It's too awful to contemplate further. You should never have to see such a thing. From now on I'm carrying suicide pills and blood coagulants in my day pack. I'm doing it all for you. Never forget me.
Sep 4, 2010
The Gaping Maw Of Absurdity
There are some places that just refuse to be normal. They aren't full-out insane all the time, and the places that you are likely to think of as being perpetually "off" probably have had some very average, nondescript periods in their history. This is not so with the town of Dambulla. It has for centuries been a place where people have tried odd ideas, and all evidence points that it's only getting loonier.
Dambulla is located pretty much smack center in the island, and exhibits to a small, Sri Lankan extent the attributes commonly found in the interior of Asian landmasses, namely heat, dust, and tedium. I happened to be stopping in Dambulla for a couple of days because its central location is convenient for visiting many places in the north-center of the island, and because Dambulla has a few sights of its own. For instance, the Gaping Maw of Absurdity. The Gaping Maw of Absurdity's popular name is the "Golden Temple", though given the number of Golden Temples in this part of the world and the Dambulla temple's.... unique attributes, it seems they could have been a little more creative. It's not every temple in the world that rises three stories from the ground, with each successive layer being fringed by giant, pink concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temple in the world that has an enormous, 20-meter sitting Buddha on top of said pile of concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temle, or indeed any other temple, that has Lord Buddha sitting directly above an enormous golden lion's mouth large enough to devour any elephant that might stroll up the steps to visit the library. All around this temple, where Buddha ponders the cosmos astride a ravenous lion face, there are fake rock faces topped by rows of bright orange statues of Buddhist monks and miscellaneous other figures forming a queue to pay homage to the Buddha in all his lion-squatting glory. In Dambulla, weird as this seems, it is not entirely without precedent.
I do not mean to suggest that there is another massive lion-Buddha combo in town (if there was I might have to move there permanently). I merely suggest that the people of Dambulla have taken the common inspiration that Buddhism offers and have repeatedly leapt off with it into unexpected directions. Dambulla is best known for what is apparently my favorite thing in the whole damn universe: cave temples. "Woooo boy! Cave temples!" I thought. "It has been too long since I walked amidst eroding statues in poorly-illuminated shrines with a suffocating atmosphere of bat poop. I shall visit Dambulla forthwith." Dambulla's cave temples turned out, however, to be much cooler than expected, because it was clear to me that those who designed and decorated them were just ever so slightly deranged.
There are five cave temples all in a row, and as you walk along they get bigger and more intricate. The small ones are walkable rooms carved out of the stone, with perhaps a large sleeping Buddha and a half dozen seated figures scattered around. The larger caves are a whole 'nother kettle of Enlightened Beings. Unlike the makers of the Indian cave temples, the Sri Lankan masters decided (correctly, in my view) that it would much cooler if they didn't bother really finishing the ceilings into any particular shape, and that the effort expended cutting away at stones to make the cave, say, rectangular would be better spent painting the irregular ceilings to look like something out of a carnival funhouse. The walls and ceilings ripple with the folds and crevices of natural stone, reminding you that you are without a doubt in a cave, yet for some reason the Buddhist murals and plethora of semi-random Buddhist statues are accompanied by a background of painted-on black and white "tile work", not entirely unlike a claustrophobic European toilet stall. You'll be following one natural fold in the rock past a large depiction of Buddha preaching Enlightenment to the gods, only to suddenly come across a surface design apparently picked out from a Parisian home decor catalogue circa 1953. This somehow has the effect of giving the caves remarkable atmosphere, with the strangeness of the ceilings and walls in the darkness drawing you in almost as if you expect to find yourself in an illusion, like if you cross your eyes and stare for long enough, a 3-D image of the Cocoa Puffs toucan will seem to bend out of the wall at you. It's hard to explain, but this effect was highly dignified, and I left the caves thinking that their unlikely jumble was one of the more inspired collections of ancient art I had yet seen.
I sat outside the caves and cracked my guide to Sri Lankan cultural sites to try and make sense of what I had just seen, when a voice hovering above me asked what I was reading.
"Oh, just an explanation of these temples." I responded as helpfully as I could. The girl who had asked the question seemed a bit perplexed by this but made a gesture of acceptance and moved on. I myself returned to one of the temples to make sure I had good pictures of some of the stranger details (a mural wherein a demon points a firearm at Lord Buddha, for example). I then took some photos of the general scenery and began descending the rock into which the temples are cut. I then heard the same voice again.
"Hello? Hello! Hi! Hi! I was trying to talk to you!"
There were two of them, but the one in yellow was doing all the talking. "Well then you have succeeded" I said, though I don't know why. This caused another contemplative pause.
"My name is Samobi" was the uncontemplative response. "What you are doing here?"
"Oh just visiting temple" I said.
"Oh, very good. What is your age?"
"Twenty-three"
"Oh, good! We are same age!" And on it went. At this time a particular instinctive suspicion was beginning to creep into my mind. Conversation turned to where I had seen in Sri Lanka so far, how long I had spent in each place, and so on."
".... well I was only in Colombo because I was sick so I had to stay." I explained quickly. Perhaps too quickly to be properly understood. Though as it turned out this was just quickly enough.
"In Colombo you were sex?" Samobi asked with a certain eager puzzlement. Ah. So there it was. Girl had something on her mind. And that something wasn't on the outside of my clothes.
"No, sick" I clarified, but hastened to add "I am completely better now. Very healthy. Fully strong."
The three of us had reached the bottom of the hill and Samobi and friend had to turn off towards their homes. Samobi fished for a phone number, but ha! Ghostface ain't got no phone. It was instead agreed that I give her some online contact (this blog, heh) and that we would meet in the same place at seven that evening for further conversation, which seemed like it was going to be extremely stimulating.
In the meantime I had errands, such as visiting a museum on the history of Sri Lankan painting (I'm still hoping of getting some stray money out of this trip) and walking down the interminable baking road along which Dambulla is built to reach the banks on the far side of town. On the way I noticed a commotion at the market and peeked in to see what it was all about. People were congregating around a line of pickup trucks that had palm trunks balanced in them, giving an appearance akin to siege engines. I then noticed that there were people dangling from these trunks as the trucks moves, and that furthermore, these people were suspended from the trunks by numerous small strings which were attached to them by metal hooks passing through their flesh. One truck passed carrying a man in standing position, suspended Christ-like in a horrific web of ropes that tugged at him in every direction as he dimly gazed out of some sort of terrible trance that kept him from screaming in horror at the dozens of hooks sinking into his skin. Trumpets started blaring and the trucks moved ever so slightly faster forwards. Behind them a mob of locals headed by a child in a priestly loincloth pulled a tower-like chariot piled high with palm leaves and coconuts. I took in the entire scene. "Definitely the local Hindus" I mused. And indeed, so they were. From the darkness of their skin you could guess it was the Tamil populace of Dambulla, and when I asked about the nature of the festival I was given a great deal of evasion. The closest I could pinpoint was that it was in honor of a Tamil version of Kali, though nobody would give me the godess's actual Tamil name. As the procession moved along more men came out of the woodwork to submit themselves to various hook-related horrors, and the men dangling from hooks in the sky began swooping low like angels to touch and give blessings to the ecstatic crowd below. Every time they swooped down the hooks pulled at their flesh making stomach-churning tent shapes on their skin, and the men definitely had the appearance of people who were controlling their breath and other bodily rhythmns with intense concentration and a deep awareness of how goddamn awful they would feel if they fucked up and lost control of their yogic abilities just then. Common folk began dancing like crazy people, but they're Tamils so especially with the young men it's hard to tell if this was something unusual. Women began waving giant leaves around and shrieking religious chants to which the men responded. One woman thrust her way into the crowd dancing in a three-foot hat the shape of a temple tower of delicious fruits. Finally, things settled down a bit and people remembered that processions are actually supposed to go somewhere, so they made less with the madness and more with the processing.
Like I said, Dambulla is very, very strange.
I returned to the bottom of Dambulla Rock promptly at seven. Samobi was waiting and had evidently spent much more of the intervening time preparing for the moment. She had strings of small red flowers in her hair and had picked out a fine folk skirt to match. She was also wearing a local form of cotton blouse with some sort of string mechanism on the front that performed a lifting function, which she was putting to good effect, if I am any judge. She had on perfume - too much, but this was a fault I was willing to overlook. On the other hand, I looked (not coincidentally) like I had just walked four miles around a dusty shithole, pausing now and then only to take pictures of crazy people. Fortunately, "world-beaten wanderer" is a look I wear well. We went up and over the hill to a grassy slope on the other side and spoke. I learned (through the fine art of conversation, of course) that she tasted like soft and sugary fruit, though I couldn't place which one. I had oppurtunity to consider this at length but came to no definite conclusion, perhaps because I am easily distracted, especially by women clawing at my clothes. For the purpose of closure, let's just say she tasted like mango.
For the record, I taste like cannabis, tequila, and chocolate chip cookies. You're doubtful now, but you'll never know just how damn good it is until you try it.
edit: It turns out I was wildly misinformed by the locals re: the divinity in question at the "Kali" festival. It was in fact the local celebration of an island-wide Kataragama festival, Kataragama being a semi-Buddhist god who the Sri Lankan Tamils believe is the same entity as Skanda a.k.a Murugan a.k.a. Karkkiteya, the peacock-riding god of war, second son of Shiva. So there you go.
Dambulla is located pretty much smack center in the island, and exhibits to a small, Sri Lankan extent the attributes commonly found in the interior of Asian landmasses, namely heat, dust, and tedium. I happened to be stopping in Dambulla for a couple of days because its central location is convenient for visiting many places in the north-center of the island, and because Dambulla has a few sights of its own. For instance, the Gaping Maw of Absurdity. The Gaping Maw of Absurdity's popular name is the "Golden Temple", though given the number of Golden Temples in this part of the world and the Dambulla temple's.... unique attributes, it seems they could have been a little more creative. It's not every temple in the world that rises three stories from the ground, with each successive layer being fringed by giant, pink concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temple in the world that has an enormous, 20-meter sitting Buddha on top of said pile of concrete lotus petals. Nor is it every temle, or indeed any other temple, that has Lord Buddha sitting directly above an enormous golden lion's mouth large enough to devour any elephant that might stroll up the steps to visit the library. All around this temple, where Buddha ponders the cosmos astride a ravenous lion face, there are fake rock faces topped by rows of bright orange statues of Buddhist monks and miscellaneous other figures forming a queue to pay homage to the Buddha in all his lion-squatting glory. In Dambulla, weird as this seems, it is not entirely without precedent.
I do not mean to suggest that there is another massive lion-Buddha combo in town (if there was I might have to move there permanently). I merely suggest that the people of Dambulla have taken the common inspiration that Buddhism offers and have repeatedly leapt off with it into unexpected directions. Dambulla is best known for what is apparently my favorite thing in the whole damn universe: cave temples. "Woooo boy! Cave temples!" I thought. "It has been too long since I walked amidst eroding statues in poorly-illuminated shrines with a suffocating atmosphere of bat poop. I shall visit Dambulla forthwith." Dambulla's cave temples turned out, however, to be much cooler than expected, because it was clear to me that those who designed and decorated them were just ever so slightly deranged.
There are five cave temples all in a row, and as you walk along they get bigger and more intricate. The small ones are walkable rooms carved out of the stone, with perhaps a large sleeping Buddha and a half dozen seated figures scattered around. The larger caves are a whole 'nother kettle of Enlightened Beings. Unlike the makers of the Indian cave temples, the Sri Lankan masters decided (correctly, in my view) that it would much cooler if they didn't bother really finishing the ceilings into any particular shape, and that the effort expended cutting away at stones to make the cave, say, rectangular would be better spent painting the irregular ceilings to look like something out of a carnival funhouse. The walls and ceilings ripple with the folds and crevices of natural stone, reminding you that you are without a doubt in a cave, yet for some reason the Buddhist murals and plethora of semi-random Buddhist statues are accompanied by a background of painted-on black and white "tile work", not entirely unlike a claustrophobic European toilet stall. You'll be following one natural fold in the rock past a large depiction of Buddha preaching Enlightenment to the gods, only to suddenly come across a surface design apparently picked out from a Parisian home decor catalogue circa 1953. This somehow has the effect of giving the caves remarkable atmosphere, with the strangeness of the ceilings and walls in the darkness drawing you in almost as if you expect to find yourself in an illusion, like if you cross your eyes and stare for long enough, a 3-D image of the Cocoa Puffs toucan will seem to bend out of the wall at you. It's hard to explain, but this effect was highly dignified, and I left the caves thinking that their unlikely jumble was one of the more inspired collections of ancient art I had yet seen.
I sat outside the caves and cracked my guide to Sri Lankan cultural sites to try and make sense of what I had just seen, when a voice hovering above me asked what I was reading.
"Oh, just an explanation of these temples." I responded as helpfully as I could. The girl who had asked the question seemed a bit perplexed by this but made a gesture of acceptance and moved on. I myself returned to one of the temples to make sure I had good pictures of some of the stranger details (a mural wherein a demon points a firearm at Lord Buddha, for example). I then took some photos of the general scenery and began descending the rock into which the temples are cut. I then heard the same voice again.
"Hello? Hello! Hi! Hi! I was trying to talk to you!"
There were two of them, but the one in yellow was doing all the talking. "Well then you have succeeded" I said, though I don't know why. This caused another contemplative pause.
"My name is Samobi" was the uncontemplative response. "What you are doing here?"
"Oh just visiting temple" I said.
"Oh, very good. What is your age?"
"Twenty-three"
"Oh, good! We are same age!" And on it went. At this time a particular instinctive suspicion was beginning to creep into my mind. Conversation turned to where I had seen in Sri Lanka so far, how long I had spent in each place, and so on."
".... well I was only in Colombo because I was sick so I had to stay." I explained quickly. Perhaps too quickly to be properly understood. Though as it turned out this was just quickly enough.
"In Colombo you were sex?" Samobi asked with a certain eager puzzlement. Ah. So there it was. Girl had something on her mind. And that something wasn't on the outside of my clothes.
"No, sick" I clarified, but hastened to add "I am completely better now. Very healthy. Fully strong."
The three of us had reached the bottom of the hill and Samobi and friend had to turn off towards their homes. Samobi fished for a phone number, but ha! Ghostface ain't got no phone. It was instead agreed that I give her some online contact (this blog, heh) and that we would meet in the same place at seven that evening for further conversation, which seemed like it was going to be extremely stimulating.
In the meantime I had errands, such as visiting a museum on the history of Sri Lankan painting (I'm still hoping of getting some stray money out of this trip) and walking down the interminable baking road along which Dambulla is built to reach the banks on the far side of town. On the way I noticed a commotion at the market and peeked in to see what it was all about. People were congregating around a line of pickup trucks that had palm trunks balanced in them, giving an appearance akin to siege engines. I then noticed that there were people dangling from these trunks as the trucks moves, and that furthermore, these people were suspended from the trunks by numerous small strings which were attached to them by metal hooks passing through their flesh. One truck passed carrying a man in standing position, suspended Christ-like in a horrific web of ropes that tugged at him in every direction as he dimly gazed out of some sort of terrible trance that kept him from screaming in horror at the dozens of hooks sinking into his skin. Trumpets started blaring and the trucks moved ever so slightly faster forwards. Behind them a mob of locals headed by a child in a priestly loincloth pulled a tower-like chariot piled high with palm leaves and coconuts. I took in the entire scene. "Definitely the local Hindus" I mused. And indeed, so they were. From the darkness of their skin you could guess it was the Tamil populace of Dambulla, and when I asked about the nature of the festival I was given a great deal of evasion. The closest I could pinpoint was that it was in honor of a Tamil version of Kali, though nobody would give me the godess's actual Tamil name. As the procession moved along more men came out of the woodwork to submit themselves to various hook-related horrors, and the men dangling from hooks in the sky began swooping low like angels to touch and give blessings to the ecstatic crowd below. Every time they swooped down the hooks pulled at their flesh making stomach-churning tent shapes on their skin, and the men definitely had the appearance of people who were controlling their breath and other bodily rhythmns with intense concentration and a deep awareness of how goddamn awful they would feel if they fucked up and lost control of their yogic abilities just then. Common folk began dancing like crazy people, but they're Tamils so especially with the young men it's hard to tell if this was something unusual. Women began waving giant leaves around and shrieking religious chants to which the men responded. One woman thrust her way into the crowd dancing in a three-foot hat the shape of a temple tower of delicious fruits. Finally, things settled down a bit and people remembered that processions are actually supposed to go somewhere, so they made less with the madness and more with the processing.
Like I said, Dambulla is very, very strange.
I returned to the bottom of Dambulla Rock promptly at seven. Samobi was waiting and had evidently spent much more of the intervening time preparing for the moment. She had strings of small red flowers in her hair and had picked out a fine folk skirt to match. She was also wearing a local form of cotton blouse with some sort of string mechanism on the front that performed a lifting function, which she was putting to good effect, if I am any judge. She had on perfume - too much, but this was a fault I was willing to overlook. On the other hand, I looked (not coincidentally) like I had just walked four miles around a dusty shithole, pausing now and then only to take pictures of crazy people. Fortunately, "world-beaten wanderer" is a look I wear well. We went up and over the hill to a grassy slope on the other side and spoke. I learned (through the fine art of conversation, of course) that she tasted like soft and sugary fruit, though I couldn't place which one. I had oppurtunity to consider this at length but came to no definite conclusion, perhaps because I am easily distracted, especially by women clawing at my clothes. For the purpose of closure, let's just say she tasted like mango.
For the record, I taste like cannabis, tequila, and chocolate chip cookies. You're doubtful now, but you'll never know just how damn good it is until you try it.
edit: It turns out I was wildly misinformed by the locals re: the divinity in question at the "Kali" festival. It was in fact the local celebration of an island-wide Kataragama festival, Kataragama being a semi-Buddhist god who the Sri Lankan Tamils believe is the same entity as Skanda a.k.a Murugan a.k.a. Karkkiteya, the peacock-riding god of war, second son of Shiva. So there you go.
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