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.