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:

• 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.