The Honorable Lanka

Living in Penang you see the word 'Sri' all the time in front of a group of other words and for the longest time I had no thought really about what it meant, if it meant something, or it was something else. It took our visit to Lanka in October to settle things. The word 'Sri' is an honorific which I take to mean something like 'the honorable' or something like that. As the pre-Colonial name for the country was Lanka, that is what they first named the country after 'Ceylon' was ditched after independence adding the 'Sri' only a little later. Claro?

I used Chris' wonderful app Track My Tour for the day to day stuff and if you want to follow that you can do so here but wanted to add some other bits that I didn't write about or thought about after.

First up, great country. Lovely people. Hopeless infrastructure. My goodness, does it rain. Animals everywhere.

OK that's it all done.... well not quite. Any people that do read my posts know that I probably drone on at too much length so a post this short and sweet just isn't going to happen. So here it is, the memories that will stay with me in no particular order.

1. Elephants

Nothing more to add, just that it was fabulous to see them in the wild

2. History

In a later post I will refer to Malacca in Malaysia as part of a recent road trip that Viv and I did with some friends from Bermuda. It bears striking similarities to Sri Lanka as it was the Portuguese who were the first colonial settlers and it was they who were summarily kicked out by the next settlers, namely the Dutch, who in turn were removed by the British who then never left and generally fixed the things that the others hadn't.

The Portuguese settlements were very much at the fringes, seaside settlements in the south with just the one in the pointy bit at the top, which is Jaffna. So easy meat for the Dutch who came in force over 100 years later and kicked them out. They tried to take over the entire island but couldn't manage the middle section (which was where Buddha's tooth ended up, Kandy) and made a big mistake by not preventing the British from settling Trincomalee (sort of top right, below Jaffna but above the middle fat bits on the right hand side) and creating a naval base there opposing the French in Madras. The British liked the place so when the French marched into Holland in 1792, the Dutch presumably much against their will and definitely their better judgement asked the British to care of things for a while. Until the French left. No problem, thanks. Trouble was when in 1815 they asked for it back (as they did in Malacca and other places further east) the British said no thanks, we like it here. Oh yes and if you want to try and take it back, let me introduce you to the Duke of Wellington who just thrashed Boney up and down Europe... and some of his friends in red jackets.

Well that wasn't going to work so getting the best deal out of a pretty poor situation was all they had left so the Dutch said OK you can have Ceylon (they called it Ce-lun apparently, a corruption of a misheard Portuguese word) and Malacca and if you must Singapore, but we wouldn't mind having back Java and Sumatra. Probably don't fit in with your imperial plans. The Brits had no imperial strategy of course, only the East India Company, a bunch of penny pinching capitalists and absolutely no desire to take on anything else after that ruinously expensive 30 year war against the French so said thanks and generally history moved on.

Having acquired the new territories though meant actually doing things with them and in general the British did fairly well by Ceylon, as it was now called. Or so it seems to me. Certainly when we visited the big historical and archaeological sites, it was the British who 'discovered' them. Apparently even the locals had forgotten about these places as they were abandoned centuries beforehand and the previous colonizers being typically inefficient and generally useless had walked right past them.

3. Tea

I suppose if you don't much care for tea, then this bit will be irrelevant for you, but as a tea lover I was totally taken with the tea plantations. Even today, the tea industry is the single largest industry in Sri Lanka. 

This picture tells you all you need to know about when, where and how tea came to be in Sri Lanka. Apparently the original plants were not from the already entrenched Indian plantations but came straight from original Chinese plants which is what gives Ceylon Tea its distinct flavor. We bought loads!

4. Infrastructure

The subtext to the above note on tea is actually a very sad one as reliance on a tea industry as the number one component of the economy means that that economy is not very developed. It isn't. One of the key reasons why stems from the 30-year civil war between the majority Sinhalese (mostly in the south) and the minority Tamils (in the north). Add religion into the mix too: Buddhist vs Hindu, and the mix was very toxic indeed.

I read a little about it from my first point of contact for most things these days, Wikipedia, and what was written was sad enough but you just know the reality was worse.

So to dates. Independence finally in 1972, add 30 years and a few before and after the civil war and you come to now. The war itself ended within the last 5 years so there simply has been no time to repair or even build any infrastructure. Also factor in the unforeseen catastrophe that was the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 which absolutely devastated the southern part of the island particularly around Galle, and this is the situation Sri Lanka finds itself in. You can see it or rather the lack of it everywhere however all the people we met were some of the nicest, friendly, most optimistic people I have ever met. 

The tuk tuk is the solution!

5. The Weather

People in England talk about the weather all the time, particularly the rain and the deadly grayness of the country between November and March. That is true of course and I personally think it is the greyness that is the worst thing. After weeks of it, things are so depressing. My birthday is in February and it always rained.  Ugh. But not like Sri Lanka.

My goodness does it rain. I had to chuckle that the England cricket team were touring Sri Lanka just about at the same time as us and I really wondered if anyone that did the schedule actually bothered to ask what the weather would be like around then because it is in one of the many rainy seasons here and when they say rainy, they do mean rainy.

Facing a broadly similar issue in Penang about determining exactly when the seasons start and end I asked Fernando, our guide, and he told me that now was the rainy season. He may have said it was the North West monsoon but could also easily have said the South East one for apparently there are many rainy seasons here. Our time until December for one, then becomes dry for the month of January. After that comes the different direction (maybe SW) monsoon season for Feb-March and then another month of comparative dry before the NE monsoon season kicks in during May and which lasts to the end of July. August is most likely relatively dry but then you get the slow drag that is the beginning of the NW monsoon season that really gets going in October again and ....

So the island is very green and you often see scenes like this where only the day before was dry land.

Love the water buffaloes though!

Loved it. Ready to return at any time! And I didn't even get to talk about the dogs and cows ...