031 Green Green Paradise

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A completely uninformed traveler with a lack of historical, cultural and religious insight, like yours truly, might be forgiven for thinking that Sri Lanke is a more compact, greener and cleaner version of India. Portuguese and Dutch colonizers left clear marks on the seemingly endless shores, with fortresses dotting the coastline. The highlands, never truly subjected to these earlier alien powers, carry a more British feel to them. They brought tea plantations to the highlands, and sew the seed for the friction between the Southern Sinhalese and the Northern Tamil peoples, resulting in the civil war that was ended by the Sri Lankan army a few years back by crushing the Tamil terrorists/freedom fighters (please circle the option of your preference).

Covered in light green forest and deep green tea plantations, the hill region in the centre of the island also carries a Scottish stamp, with plantations named after Edinburgh and Inverness.  Mr. Lipton was also a Scot, who started up his tea business here. Interestingly enough, I also met some real-live Scots; first on the beach in Negombo two Scottish guys who had just returned from a scooter tour all around the country; later four volunteers who teach English (Scottish!) in a government school on the south coast (I met them during their Christmas holiday in the mountains).

I spent my first day in Negombo, a beach town with an astonishing amount of elderly European tourists (more white people in one day than I'd seen in a month in India). The town has few attractions to offer, except for the fact that it really close to the airport. It was also a good place to get my bearings. I was poorly prepared for my Sri Lankan leg of the trip. This being the only place for which I had not brought a travel guide; this left me feeling, in a peculiar way, lost. So the program for the first day was: getting a guidebook and deciding where to go. I only have two weeks here, including Christmas and New Years Eve, so it was obvious that I would only get to see half of it.

I first went to Kandy, the capital of the hill country, and the country's second biggest city. It got me on my way to the mountains, but as a destination, Kandy severely underwhelmed me. Noisy, dirty and not very pretty, I left the town after one night in a crappy guesthouse. The only thing making this stop worthwhile was my visit to the Shrine of the Holy tooth Relic, this Buddhist country's most sacred place, allegedly housing a tooth of the Buddha himself. It is believed that whoever holds this relic holds power over the island. Set in a huge complex, pilgrims and tourists shuffle by an open door granting a view on a golden shrine that houses the tooth.

After Kandy, I moved on to Nuwara Eliya, a small town higher up in the mountains. On the bus here, I met the second batch of Scotsmen (and women), with whom I spend a lazy day in this cold and rainy village set among beautiful hills. With the cold and climate, walking down the hill from the pleasant guesthouse towards the village, hearing their nice accent, a light drizzle descending on us, I could have sworn I was in the Scottish highlands in stead of the Sri Lankan ones.

When I write this down in my travel notebook, one day before Christmas, I am riding a train towards another mountain village. The ancient train, with only third class carriages and stopping at every tiny group of cottages along the way, is a riding party. At the back of my carriage, a group of girls is singing and clapping their way through the mountains with an impromptu Christmas concert; kids all over the train joining in. Passengers share food, and insist that foreign tourists sit down on the few available wooden benches. Locals tell the tourists to make pictures of their children and the absolutely stunning landscape slowly tumbling by (they do). Each time we go into a tunnel, all the kids in the train scream and yell like they are in a rollercoaster. On this four hour trip, we go through 23 tunnels, my ears are still recovering. Currently we are standing still at a tiny station named Pattipola. If they train is broken; we are waiting for another train; or if the driver is just taking an extended brake, nobody knows.