On the Road again
It is disappointingly easy to adjust to being back. Already, the journey seems like a colourful dream. Now and then, when I close my eyes, I see flashes of sunlight so bright it is dazzling, silhouettes of palm trees against a blue sky, radiant white teeth flashing a smile, the bright colours of a sarong against chocolate brown, muscular legs — there were some fine specimens among those men… But when I open my eyes again to the familiar gray of the Scottish sky, it is as if I had never been away.
*****
The first morning back at our friends’ place in London had been almost pleasant, despite the cloudy sky. Standing on the balcony in my short-sleeved T-shirt, the cold metal of the railing against my skin, looking down into their garden with the dwarf bamboo and evergreens and a palm shrub vaguely reminiscent of a ground coconut, it felt like nothing so much as an unusually and blissfully cool morning in the hill country. John must have felt the same as he stood smoking next to me, sheepishly wearing a coat over his sarong and flip-flops. It didn’t sink in then that the heat and the radiant sun would not come back. Not for a long time.
That morning, it seemed ironic that Londoners were wrapped up against the cold in coats, hats and scarves while I was wearing a light jacket over my T-shirt. It was mid-morning (it felt more like mid-afternoon) and I was on my way to catch a bus to Angel to have a look at the travel section of the Borders bookshop. The bus driver shot me a disdainful glance and pushed the coin I had placed on the counter straight back at me — it was a 5 rupee piece. I had been taken in by my own scheming. The Sri Lankan 5 rs coin looks almost like a £1 coin so I had kept a few back to see whether they would work in cigarette machines, but they turned out to be too big. It had not been my intention to pay my bus fare with them. Embarassed, I put the thing away and found that I only had 60p change. Irritated, I disembarked and went back to the flat to get more money.
S handed me a handful of change from his pocket.
“I’m only 10p short”, I said.
“Its’ £1 for the buses now,” he replied: ” it’s gone up.”
“What?! 170 rupees? I could go all the way from here to Kand…” I caught myself: “Maybe not from here to Kandy…” I conceded lamely.
S gave me a wide grin:” I’ll be wondering how long you will keep saying that!”
It had been another world we had just returned from.
*****
Three months previously, we were making plans for Chistmas. S suggested that we accompany him and A on their annual visit to see her relatives in Sri Lanka. He and John had embarked on a software project together and it would be a good opportunity to get some work done without constant distractions from students or colleagues. I jumped at the chance.
I longed to hit the road again after what had been a number of difficult years and a hellish time back in Scotland. It was not just that I longed for sun and tropical beaches. It was not even the exotic alure of Sri Lanka, the ‘Pearl in the Ear of India’. It was far more than that. Sri Lanka was holding a special promise, the fulfilment of a life-long dream: a chance to see the great whales!
I have been obsessed with cetaceans since I was a little kid, a wholly inexplicable fascination growing up, as I was, in the interior of Germany, far from the sea. Sri Lanka was ringing a bell. It turned out that over 20 years ago, James R. Donaldson III and two camera men, Chuck Nicklin and Gordy Waterman, had produced a documentary about sperm whales and, for the first time, blue whales in the wild entitled Whales Weep Not (1982). The title is misleading as cetaceans secrete a protective mucus to lessen the diffusion of salt into their eyes, so they can be said to weep very thick tears indeed, but the movie caused a sensation. It swept the board of international awards and helped to alert people to the need to protect these magnificent creatures. The film was shot within 2 weeks in the area around Trincomalee. Moreover, all the sperm whale footage had been recorded right inside Trincomalee harbour, which is situated in a natural bay.
The movie was shot over 20 years ago, but every indication is that the whales are still there. As Donaldson said in a recent interview in the Island newspaper: “Some day I would love to see a hotel overlooking where we first saw the whales with underwater rooms to watch them and mini submarines. Everyone should be able to enjoy this beauty.” In fact the waters around Sri Lanka so teem with cetaceans that they were described by the crew of the research vessel Odyssey, which passed the island in 2003 on a 5-year whale research expedition, as “probably the greatest concentration and diversity of large and small cetacean species the crew has encountered since the Galapagos Islands”.
John’s initial scepticism about this trip was brushed aside. Between S and me, the poor guy never stood a chance. I was not to be held back by such trifling matters as not having any money. (“So? You have a credit card and an overdraft limit, don’t you?”) and S loaned us the cash for the flights, in fact, he personally booked the tickets. John is a very good programmer.
My quest for the whales of Trincomalee had begun.
*****
A’s family home is in Negombo, not far from the international airport at Katunayake where her father had worked in his time. Apart from their occasional visits, the house is empty. For the last year, A had let it to the next-door neighbours who were renovating their own house, turning it into a palatial building with gleaming white walls, intricate woodwork, tiled floors and large ceiling fans. I took all this in as we sat in their lounge, sipping tea and exchanging pleasantries. Periodically, I slapped at the fat black mosquitoes which appeared promptly at dusk and seemed little deterred by our insect repellants.
The neighbours asked about our friends. We were several days ahead of them as they had booked the last remaining seats on a cheaper but more cumbersome flight, which included several changes. For that reason, we had taken S’s cello on our direct flight with Sri Lankan. This provided an interesting topic of conversation with some eminent Colombo residents who waited with us in the queue at the check-in counter. They assumed we were internationally acclaimed concert musicians, scruffy backpack and worn-out holdalls nonwithstanding. John with his wild hair looks like a maestro, but he stated gruffly that he was a mathematician, not a musician which may have left the guys even more intrigued. I had been through a phase of listening to classical music in my youth, but that was 20 years ago, so I decided not to bluff it. Shame, really.
At last, it was time to go over to what would be our home for the following weeks. The neighbours’ servants escorted us: a girl of maybe 16, holding the neighbour’s baby, her mother and an old man in his seventies. He unlocked the door and handed us the keys with a smile. We thanked him but he cocked his head questioningly; he did not understand English. We should have left it at that but I had to complicate things by trying out the limited Sinhala vocabulary which I had gleaned from my useless guidebook on the flight over. It only caused more embarrassment all around. In the end we were left to shrug and smile at each other and that would be the extend of our communication until A got here.
After a final wave we turned around and looked at the house. The place was dilapidated, gloomy and filthy. It was clear that the neighbours had not spent any money or effort on even the most basic maintenance of their temporary quarters. Dusty cobwebs hung from the ceiling beams and the kitchen was crawling with ants which emerged from the crumbling shelves. When John opened a cupboard under the stairs, the whole back of the door was heaving with cockroaches. He quickly shut it and stepped back, not saying anything.
In all my travels, cockroaches are one of the things I have never grown used to, a fact John remembers well from our honeymoon in Venezuela (we were on a university expedition to study river dolphins in the Orinoco. We were the only two members). I still shudder to this day when I think back to one of my Zoology practicals. We had to apply a dollop of wax to the thorax of a cockroach, which had been anaethsetized with (CO)2, and suspend the insect from a wire loop in order to study it in flight. I forget the point of the excercise, the thing was that the seals were too weak and, one by one, the cockroaches worked themselves loose and whizzed through the air before splattering onto the ground where they proceeded to scurry about in all directions. I remember standing on a chair, screaming and flailing my arms, before making a dash for the door. It didn’t do my marks any good, although I wasn’t the only one. On that day, I decided to give entomology a miss. I am not proud of my weakness, insects are fascinating and important creatures, but it is an phobia that cannot be reasoned with. It probably goes back to my infancy. I imagine lying in my cradle when a moth fluttered into the room and flew into my face. I might have bawled my head off but then I was in the habit of doing that anyway and nobody would have come to check. For as long as I can remember, I have had a fear of large insects. Spiders do not scare me nearly as much, a fact I like to point out to arachnophobes who think it fit to laugh at me. I steeled myself.
“Cockroaches?”
John nodded.
I sighed resignedly. It wasn’t going to be a big deal, we would be sleeping upstairs, where we had not seen any. Besides, in my experience, cockroaches come out only after dark and, outside the laboratory, I had never seen them fly. It wouldn’t be a problem. So I thought.
*****
We were tired and hungry from the flight and went across the road for some fried rice. We had not taken in much of our surroundings as yet. I was aware of a lot of palm trees, the air was heavy with the familiar, heady mix of decay and diesel fumes and we learned quickly that the vehicles on the road would not stop just because there was a pedestrian crossing in front of the shops. In short, we were back on the road. I could hardly wait until the next morning.
Just as we were ready to crawl into bed, two cockroaches emerged from underneath the cupboard door. John squashed them with a slipper. We took this as a signal to retreat upstairs, leaving the ground floor to the creatures of the night.
Tags: The Whales of Trincomalee, Tag Index
Denni