Sri Lanka: Natural beauty and unresolved tension

enero 29, 2019

The view from the path to Little Adam's Peak in Ella

My time in Sri Lanka is now over and I am back in South India. I still haven't fully digested my experience and I find it difficult to compare to the earlier stages of my journey or the one beginning now. Perhaps the reason is that India, and especially its Southern part, is, after all, very similar in culture and also in terms of landscape. As a result, Sri Lanka somehow doesn't feel like a separate experience.

It is inevitable to compare the island country with its bigger northern neighbour because of their inseparable history: the constant Indian invasions in the past, the shared religions, similar experience of colonialism, and recently also the importance of India in Sri Lanka’s politics and economy. In Sri Lanka I couldn’t help comparing it to India, and now in India I will be constantly reminded of ‘Lanka’.

I began my Sri Lankan trip in the company of my friends Michal, Agnes and Paula. We enjoyed the southern beaches, visited the Udawalawe National Park and saw a bit of the hilly centre of the island. Visiting Sri Lanka's tea plantations was perhaps one of the most revealing experiences. Lipton's Seat is a viewpoint nearby Haputale in the Uva province from which the Scottish tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton used to supervise his plantations. The patched plantation landscape extends itself up to the horizon on all sides of the hill. The famous Ceylon tea sold across the globe is originally from this part of the island.

The way to the viewpoint is filled with ecological messages written on the stone walls which border the road. I felt it was very cheeky of the owners to give lessons on ecology when they have destroyed enormous forest areas in order to plant tea and export it. I also felt a bit guilty, since, as a consumer, I certainly contribute to such disasters. The forests were wiped out because demand for tea in the more affluent countries grew and the business proved to be a lucrative one. It reminds me of the current palm oil crisis in Indonesia, where whole forests are burnt down in order to create space for palm tree plantations. As much as I was impressed by the view of the plantations from Lipton's Seat, I couldn't help feeling sad for the plants and animals wiped out from these lands to make space for tea...

Tea plantations near Lipton's Seat (Uva province)

After Lipton's Seat we visited a couple of historical sites of Sri Lankan Buddhism such as Dambulla, and the second ancient capital of Lanka, Pollonaruwa. Finally, after an intense week and a half of traveling with my friends, it was time to take separate routes. When the bus dropped us off in Dambulla, more or less in the centre of Sri Lanka, we didn’t even have time to say goodbye as our respective buses were already about to leave. Michal and Agnes had decided to return to the south for some more surfing, Paula went on to climb the famous Sri Pada mountain while I went to the ethnically Tamil north mostly driven by my interest in the political conflict and social issues in Sri Lanka.

Tense silence in Jaffna ten years after

As I was in the bus moving further and further away from Dambulla, I felt slightly sad about having left my friends behind, but finally the adrenaline took over and I started feeling excited about what lay ahead of me. After reaching Anuradhapura, the first ancient capital of Lanka, I took a fast train to Jaffna in the far north of the country. It zoomed past thick jungles of the Tamil majority Vanni region and after two hours it reached the so-called ‘Elephant Pass’, where the Jaffna Peninsula begins. It was getting dark and the sunset over the lagoon extended to my left made me feel melancholic, especially as I recalled the tragic history behind the name of the place. The Dutch invaders of Sri Lanka named this narrow pass leading to the peninsula ‘Elephant Pass’ since it was a crucial point of an important elephant trade route. In the past elephants captured in other parts of the country were shipped from here to the Karaitivu island and then to other parts of the world. I felt sad imagining the hundreds, if not thousands, of elephants ambushed and separated from their herds, and then enslaved for the rest of their lives. Their fate was never to see the lush green of the Sri Lankan jungles again as they were subject to a lifetime of misery and exploitation.

Nallur Kandaswamy Hindu temple in Jaffna, founded in the 10th century

I reached Jaffna already late into the evening and I was rather surprised to find the streets dark, silent and almost deserted. Only later it occurred to me that the silence was perhaps not a peaceful absence of sound but an unresolved tension after years of conflict.

Jaffna, the ancient capital of an old Tamil kingdom is perhaps my favourite place in Sri Lanka, with its colonial era bungalows and quiet streets. The old Hindu temple, Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil is undoubtedly one of the most impressive places to visit, with its typical pyramidal towers, which are also very common in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and other southern regions. On my second day I went to the Neduntheevu island, off the Western coast of the Jaffna Peninsula. It is a scarcely populated place, where wild horses and several species of birds can be seen away from the human settlements.

However, I came to Jaffna mostly for another reason. I knew the story of the civil war, which had ended just ten years before and I had read that Jaffna had seen some of the worst fighting. I thought it was perhaps the best place to learn what the Tamil perspective on the conflict is. I had the pleasure to meet journalists of two of the biggest Tamil-language newspapers Uthayan and Thinakkural and also of the Tamil television channel IBC. I listened to their stories about human rights abuse and saw some of the physical signs of the oppression suffered by the journalists. The room of the Uthayan office where I was talking to their journalist had bullet holes in the wall after a night time raid by goons suspected to have been sent by the army, which controlled Jaffna when the attack occurred in 2006. Two people were killed in the attack which was meant to intimidate the staff. However, I will write more about my meeting with the journalists in a separate text.

Reaching out to India from the West coast

One of the old, one-storey bungalows in Jaffna

After three full days in Jaffna I took a 5 AM bus to Mannar in order to reach Talaimannar at the very end of the Mannar Island, hoping to see Adam’s Bridge: the supposed remains of a mythical bridge which used to link the ancient country of Lanka with India according to the holy Hindu book of Ramayana. Unfortunately I couldn’t reach the peninsula where the rocks can be seen from as it is too far from any road. I will attempt to see the bridge from the Indian side soon, but in the meantime I returned to Mannar and took a bus even further south to yet another Tamil city: Puttalam.

The bus went through the Wilpattu National Park, one of the biggest parks in Sri Lanka. For two hours I was on a free safari. Quite understandably none of the residents of the park appeared to delight us, with the exception of a sambar deer and an enormous elephant crossing a marshland some two hundred meters from the road. The dirt road was full of holes and the ride was an extremely rough one. On the more flat stretches, the driver put his foot down and I could only hope that no animal would suddenly jump onto the road and get run over. I finally reached Puttalam when it was getting dark, and caught another bus to Kalpitiya, one of the most popular places in the country among kite surfers. I hadn’t booked any accommodation and only relied on my offline mobile map to find the nearest guesthouses. In the first one I went to they were overbooked but the Czech owner of the place was very kind and let me sleep in an additional bed he had placed in the corridor.

Kitesurfing in Kalpitiya

As for Kalpitiya, it is an enjoyable place with picturesque beaches and few tourists at this time of the year, except for a number of kite surfers. I was in doubt whether to stay there for an additional day, however, as always, I felt restless. As soon as I saw what I was hoping to see, my mind was already focused on the East coast of Sri Lanka: the one currently hit by the monsoon. On my second day after breakfast I decided to return to Puttalam, which is located at the base of the peninsula. The tuktuk (auto rickshaw) drivers there tried to convince me to pay thousands of rupees for a ride to Anuradhapura by telling me that the bus would take three hours to reach its destination. The bus journey actually lasted an hour and a half, which reassured me in my distrust towards them. In Anuradhapura another tuktuk driver was even more adventurous: According to his calculations I needed at least three hours to get to Horowupotana and then change for another bus which would take another three hours: six hours for roughly a hundred kilometres. “Why don’t you take a tuktuk?”, he asked boldly, but I refused his offer. Finally both buses combined made it in three hours, and I was in Trincomalee before sunset.

The grey skies of the East coast

The Trincomalee Bay seen from Fort Frederick

Trinco, as many people call it, was clouded and melancholic the following day. I rented a scooter and went North to see the Pigeon Islands from the Nilaveli beach, and then to the town centre. I liked the relaxed atmosphere of the streets: busy but never too noisy or overwhelming. The long Uppuveli beach and the Trincomalee bay must be very attractive for water sports in the summer, however this time the waves seemed slightly too wild for swimming. I was impressed by the Koneshwaram Hindu temple on the hill overlooking the town. There were also several temples dedicated to the goddess Kali, as well as some Buddhist pagodas and a couple of mosques.

I greatly enjoyed the stay in my guesthouse, where I got a very comfortable room for a low, off-season price. Even though I was feeling relaxed there, I decided to leave after a day in Trinco. My stay in Sri Lanka was slowly coming to an end and there were still places I wanted to visit. Before I left Trincomalee, I woke up at 5:30 AM to participate in the Thai Pongal festival, celebrated mostly by the Tamil Hindus. All the local Hindu families prepared their traditional sweet rice dish called pongal in front of their houses and shared it with whoever wanted to try some. Each Hindu household had a cauldron with the pongal and a traditional decorative symbol drawn on the floor. Eating the sweet rice was a pleasant way of concluding my stay, and some time later I was already boarding the bus bound for Batticaloa.

Kali Kovil in Trincomalee - the temple dedicated to the goddess Kali

The journey was yet another crazy ride on one of the indestructible Ashok Leyland buses: the real kings of the Sri Lankan motorways and their fastest vehicles, which inspire respect and even fear in some drivers. Their strategy is infallible: Approaching cars, motorbikes, trucks and other buses at great speed and bullying them off the road with the help of the loudest horn on the planet. If you’re driving and suddenly hear its sound right behind you, you might have a heart attack or end up in a ditch.

After just a little more than two hours we reached our destination. Batticaloa has approximately the same population as Trincomalee, and is also mainly Tamil. I saw very little of the town as I arrived late in the afternoon and left shortly after breakfast the next day. In the evening I went to the Kallady beach, filled with families and groups of young people. The sky was clouded and it was getting dark but the people didn’t seem to mind it and enjoyed their time on the beach. The chants from a nearby Hindu temple and the repetitive sound of waves created an atmosphere of peacefulness. Before I embarked on my last journey to Kandy and the Sri Pada peak, I briefly visited the Batticaloa centre and saw a few temples and churches. However, there was no more time as one of Sri Lanka’s most exciting places was waiting!

Some more photos below: