Sojourn in Sri Lanka

First published in The Bangkok Post August 28 1988

Night prowler in Mount Lavinia

I woke in the dark with the bottle of Beefeaters gin considerably lowerand a fierce thirst. Ever since Don Muang Airport, where the security guard took the battery out of my alarm clock, I’d been at sea about time. I went down through the empty Palm Beach Hotel, its only guest, along the edge of the pool and out into the street. The security guard was asleep but he woke with a jolt and told me that it was half past midnight. Mount Lavinia lay at my feet.

I proceeded up De Saram Road to the barking of the bourgeoisie’s dogs. A few of these were out – not the skinny pariah dogs of Negumbo – but well-fed animals, forgotten about after the second gin fizz. I imagined the bourgeoisie asleep in their king-sized beds, dreaming of ideal republics, antique furniture and their children’s end of term reports. If I shut my eyes I could hear the soft flick of the wives’ fashion magazines in the bedroom dark.

Up on Galle Road the night trucks raced to Colombo, 11 kilometres north. The only lights came from an antique and curio shop, full of cracked pots, decanters and willow-patterned china. There’s a great go on colonial bric à brac in Sri Lanka: the upper classes usurping the trappings of the previous regime. The Romans had imitation Greek statuary. If this were Britain you’d have bootboys, skinheads and revamped mods doing their level best to dinge the glass, taking swipes at each other round the local all-night chipper. But in Mount Lavinia there wasn’t a delinquent in sight.

The road was deserted and from the beach the sound of the toiling breakers of the Indian Ocean. The sand shelved sharply, the undertow treacherous. To the right was the glow of the city and a few twinkling lights from the shantytowns. Fiddler crabs were having a field day. Awnings flapped between beach huts where there was a plethora of those polysyllabic German words. Hertzliche Wilkommen and the like. The air was bracing, the gin haze thinning.

Up ahead, the Mount Lavinia Hotel, former residence of the British Governor when they had land in these parts. The British always had a knack for picking choice sites. I scouted round the rocks at its base. This was the way petitioners must have approached His Majesty’s representative, clambering and sliding through the seaweed and cockles.

After suitable poetic contemplation of the Indian Ocean my stomach took over again. I climbed up to the landscaped garden and a startled security guard emerged from the shrubbery. It was past 2 a.m. in the off-season and a monsoon was blowing. He pointed me in the right direction, past the cellar works where cogs, valves and motors were going hell for leather to keep the few somnolent tourists supplied with sufficient quantities of hot water and conditioned air.

There is a certain satisfaction which comes over an Irishman when he enters a place as august and colonial as the Mount Lavinia Hotel. My Bangkok flip-flops sprayed sand all over the marble lobby. I asked the night clerk if there might be a sandwich on the premises, something easy to prepare, like an egg sandwich, or cucumber even. Nothing fancy.

He directed me through the palatial, high-ceilinged rooms to the coffee shop. A sleepy waiter came from behind the cutlery and with the dashing manner of someone who has just pushed through a crucial contract over the phone to New York, saving millions in the process, I ordered the celery soup, the macaroni carbonara and lashings of Mount Lavinia spring water.

One of those made-in-heaven couples went by, weaving through the poolside furniture, their brown and white fingers interlocked: a mixed-race romance. Somewhere up in the turrets of the Governor’s ex-residence disco music throbbed. Was this where the jeunesse dorée of Mount Lavinia went for nocturnal amusement? I went out through the swing doors sated, a prowling Irishman headed for his bed. Mount Lavinia could sleep easy once more.

On touts

Hikkadua presents all the clapboard wonder of a tourist boomtown circa 1980. To right and left a dazzling array of signs advertising rooms, hotels, guesthouses, surfers’ dens. You can have yoghurt, fritters, smoothies and brownies. A surfeit of those flimsy cotton designer hippy clothes flaps from the stalls.

The touts here have PhDs. in tourism and public relations. They leave the Patpong variety sleeping at the post. Maybe they bone up on Linguaphone tapes at home, to get an edge on the market. Since you’re the only tourist on their patch, they present angry, glaring propositions or sweet-talk comments on the weather. They’re fizzing over with avarice. There’s a permanent nervy dyspepsia about them: unshaven, astraddle old Dutch bicycles or much tinkered with motorcycles. On my second day there I bought a plastic fly switch (Made in Korea) and a big golfing umbrella with a vicious point. I adopted an aristocratic stance, taking to Main Street Hikkadua as if empire had never fallen and the last war was the Boer.

Travelling feminists and beach gigolos

Great lumbering German women were to be seen in the streets at mid-morning, heading for coffee. They exuded a terminal feminism, bovine and moneyed. They wore slingy, stringy clothes, all tied up and rucked at the extremities in case some gland should slip out. Their enormous calves were unshaven.

One imagined them decades ago burning bras, squatting over herbal teas in condemned houses, the windows blacked out with Ban the Bomb posters, the kitchen full of muesli and the bathroom full of contraceptives. By the bed the Germaine Greer and the Kate Millet. They were studying anthropology or carpentry. There were holes in the ears where the earrings had been, a hole in the nose from the time in the ashram and a kind of blitzed area in the brain which corresponded to the Eighties. Now they were off the Pill and onto the Tagamet. They strode out into clapboardsville in the evenings for their Kartofflen and Bratwürst and Gurkensalat, with the beachfront gigolos at their heels, avid as daschunds, their bootbrush mustaches and shelled-eggs eyes - John Travoltas with oriental jewellery in the chest hair. The New Male of the end of the century, kept in clover. What do they talk about at night?

Around them the wind from the Indian Ocean eddied and swirled the street sand. The black gulls cawed, skimming the road. Designer hippy clothes blatted against macramé shoulder bags and leather money pouches. The sand got into everything.

The New Oriental Hotel at Galle Fort

The New Oriental Hotel at Galle, unlike its namesake, doesn’t rise to the literary kitsch of a Barbara Cartland suite. You’d be lucky to find a minor Irish poet huddled in the corner over a pot of tea, or a failed detective novelist - nothing quite as chic or rose-tinted as Dame Barbara.

In the dining room, Queen Elizabeth in her regalia overlooks the great seaborne chesty furniture, the silver platecovers and the brass gongs. The walls are adorned with old nautical maps from the time this used to be the Dutch Garrison Officers’ mess, back in 1984. Galle, thought to be the ‘Tarshish’ of the Old Testament and trading port for King Solomon, has a wonderful, antiquated atmosphere and fine buildings. The Groote Kerke is the oldest protestant church in Sri Lanka (a Mrs Crutchley is commemorated there in stone). From all the fine wide windows of the upper floor suites you can see the Indian Ocean stretch away to Antartica.

The dining room floor trembles with the barefoot,  aproned waiters. My key is six inches long. Scattered throughout the rooms are portraits of the British Royal family.

Queen Elizabeth and I have the dining room all to ourselves. Halfway through the meal the District Commissioner descended from his room with a stern face and tennis shoes under his white club attire. We ignored each other across a tundra of napped dining tables. In the silence the tinkle of silver cutlery has an eerie effect.

The town was quiet. Against the bastions – Aeolius Bastion, Clippenberg Bastion, Triton Bastion and Point Utrecht – the endless perfect waves exhausted their energy. There was a rout of mad dogs in the lower town outside the Fort. I had the treacle and curd and went for an inspection walk on the ramparts. The psittacine touts had made an early night of it.

In all the rooms there are copies of News From Bulgaria. Riveting articles on sessions in the national Assembly of Bulgaria. Fruitful Insights from Beyond the Iron Curtain on ‘New Approaches to the Realities of Our Time’. ‘The developing of laser technology in Bulgaria.’ Palpitating.

New dictionary

Bought the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words in da Silva’s bookstore in Kandy today – a find. Synonyms for tout: SCROYLE (rapscallion, scoundrel, cad, cretin); JOBBERNOWL (a blockhead, a clodplate); LODY (clumsy, a clod, a klutz). Find myself waking up in the middle of the night from dreams of touts climbing the balcony, touts taking extra credit courses in English for Special Purposes.

The Hill Club at Nuwara Eliya

Under the Queen and the Duke again, with president Junius Jayewardene completing the triumvirate.

These roast beef sandwiches are very good. The Hill Club is frozen in Colonial Aspic. At 6,182 feet above sea level, it overlooks the golf course ablaze with whin bushes imported from Scotland. Low clouds drift through the town centre, undergoing rebuilding after the 1983 anti-Tamil riots. No sound except the ticking of clocks. I expect the natives are hatching some plot.

The tintinnabulation of soup spoons against good porcelain. The food bland, overcooked, elaborately named: all the effort has gone into writing the menu. Cuttle Fish in tomato sauce on toast Hors d’Oeuvres. Frank Tuohy’s comment, how the British palm off second/third rate food with a fanfare of genteel. The German table had beer. White-gloved waiters. The trouser-suited lady at the British table ordered Mateus Rosé – I knew then for sure they were charlatans. They were discussing the fairway on the ninth hole with those arch vowels that should be reserved for TEFL language laboratories. A small child sat bored at the end of the table.

The morning after

Walked round the perimeter of the town and had breakfast (awful tea) at St Andrew’s Hotel. Those excruciatingly dull, third-rate paintings the British adorn their domestic interiors with. Not even paintings, but the lighter media – prints, sketches and watercolours. ‘Olde London Town’, ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, ‘The Highland Stag’.

A table with an obese, German-accented 60-year-old in cut-down jeans and a tight t-shirt. Barefoot. He was breakfasting with two very handsome youths of 19 or 20, both nicely dressed in grey v-necked school sweaters, and shoes. There his big bulbous feet lay among delicacies. The boys had difficulty handling knives and forks. Perhaps one was his driver. Their conversation was minimal. At the other table were participants in an international conference on child abuse.

 

 

 

 

Ella Gap and world travellers

A rainbow over the gap at 1,100 metres altitude with a stunning view of the coastal plain. Sitting at a Belgian table listening to ‘travellers’ talk in Flemish

They had photocopied the relevant pages in the Lonely Planet Guidebook and underlined important bits with a day-glo pen. ‘We’re travelling round the world in one and a half years.’ ‘Oh,’ I replied, and left it at that. They had big bulky pouches tied round their waists. ‘What is Thailand like?’ they asked. ‘Are the guesthouses cheap? We’re on a tight budget.’ I practised my Sri Lankan head wobble and recommended Koh Samet. Good cakes and cookies on Koh Samet, I said. I gazed out at the 1,000-metre drop and the sun falling into it. There’s only so much you can do with a view. Plunged into my Dictionary of Interesting and Unusual words again.

Raintree and bougainvillea in life-long marriage

The 150-year-old raintree in the forecourt of the Rest House in Belihue Dye. The bourgainvillea entwined with the tree was as old. They lived – the cardinal red flower and the tree – in a symbiosis, through all the ups and downs of history. Do they think or feel about each other after 150 years? Is there a current of feeling among trees and shrubs that we don’t know about, that might help us get along?

 

 

Politics out to lunch

At lunchtime the Rest House crowded by the entourage of a minister. Security with big guns. Loutish, cocky, self-important men fingered up their curries in the dining room, their armour put aside. They ate in shifts. I could hear soft, welcoming voices coming from the protected suite and important people were coming and going. All week prospective candidates for election have been ambushed and shot. The minister had a Japanese bullet-proof car (India makes the best bullet-proof cars, the Rest House manager informed me).

From the train I saw one ‘political gathering’. Bicycles by the tracks. A reverential or a safe distance between speaker and audience. The usual gun-toting youths at the edge of the playing fields. His mannerisms and delivery were those of Hitler – arm gestures and fist gestures.

Leaving on a jet plane

Woke up at 5.30 Cup of tea overlooking Colombo harbour as dawn came up over the masts of the ships. Drive along pot-holed backstreets to the airport north of the city. Beggars waking.  Kids in the suburbs were assembling paper lanterns for Wesak Day, the streets colourful with bunting. The airport was busy with a heavy military presence.

The plane was full of French charter tourists. A 50-ish couple from Lyon sat beside me. ‘We were told not to eat salads in Bangkok.’ ‘Can you drink the water?’ Conversation gravitated towards food. The flight dinner accompanied by great rustlings of interest from surrounding French peeling back tinfoil and interrogating unrecognisable substances with their forks. Tourism? The good, the bad and the ugly.