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.