BootsnAll Travel Network



Trincomalee (part1)

This is a brutally honest blog entry, but then it is a brutally honest blog :} — based on the actual travel journal. So here goes:

I awoke from colourful dreams, swimming with whales and dolphins in an ocean world straight out of the Nemo Universe. It made me wonder whether our drinks had been spiked.

John didn’t stir as I kissed him good-bye.

sleeping john
It was just as well that I had extracted my travel money from him the previous evening. After a lengthy negotiation, he had grudgingly handed over 7000 rupees as if he and the others would not spend a similar amount every day while I had to travel and live on that for a week. I knew that he didn’t want me to go, but he knew that he could not stop me. Handing me a relatively small sum of money was designed to cut short my trip on the pretext of ‘having to save’. It didn’t matter, I had promised to be back for Christmas anyway.

Downstairs, I found several dead cockroaches, including juveniles. We had sprayed the cupboard in an attempt to drive them out once and for all and the termites with them. One cockroach was surrounded by a crowd of tiny ants, all dead as if frozen in time. I felt a little bad about that.

The gate was closed and the key was with S and A who were asleep in their room, so I tossed my backpack over the fence and climbed through a hole in the barbed wire, to the great amusement of passers-by, and then I was free. I jumped on the next bus to Colombo which took just long enough for the sun to rise to its full potency and reached the city in time for the morning rushhour.

I had no idea which of Colombo’s three bus stations I was at and had expected to drag my backpack across the sweltering streets from one to the other to try to find the right bus amid the chaotic throng, but almost immediately a helpful man pointed me towards an air-conditioned minivan destined for Trincomalee. Thanks God for the entrepreneural spirit that ensures there usually is a minivan going my way, at least in countries where such vehicles are relatively common. It would cost twice the fare of a government bus but at Sri Lankan prices, that was still cheap and the airconditioning was a priceless comfort.

Once I sat squeezed with my backpack into a window seat, rammed in by people who had subsequently boarded the bus, I remembered that I had not brought any food along.

I was squatting over my backpack half-way under the seat in front of me, my legs resting uncomfortably on top, because the minivan did not have any storage space so lugagge travelled on the seats for the corresponding fare. In the row in front of me, a large suitcase took up 2 seats. I would feel bad to turn over a seat to my rucksack while the people we picked up on the way would have to stand, and more to the point, I was not prepared to part with the money. Sure, the ticket cost under 200 rs, cheaper than a single on the London Underground in Zone 1, but the fact that I could have travelled in comfort for the price of a hamburger was beside the point. 200 rs would buy cigarettes and food for a day or pay for an entire nights debauchery. Besides, I carry no credit cards, I had lost any entitlement to those during my student days and the Bank of Scotland had yet to wake up to the idea of international ATMs, so my cashcard was useless. I was stuck with the cash I had on me and therefore strict budgeting was in order.

I smiled at my fellow passengers and settled into my position. Behind the closed curtains, the interior of the bus was cool and dark. These proved to be ideal conditions for swarms of mosquitoes that descended on us. I rubbed on some citronella oil and was ready for the adventure to begin.

I wondered how long the journey would take. I had learned long ago that you can’t glean travel times from distances on a map as all depends on the condition of the roads, a fact any traveller in the highlands of Scotland is familiar with. The price of the ticket might be a better indication. The one hour trip to Colombo had cost 14 rs. From that I surmised that this journey would take quite a while, even taking into account the extra cost of travel in a private a/c bus.

The airconditioning provided a rarefied and cool atmosphere, but of course there was no smoking. One hour into the trip, just as we were leaving behind the belching traffic and bleak suburbs of Colombo, I discovered that along with the food, I also forgotten to take my Nicorettes with me.

But it didn’t matter. Once we were outside the city, the bus picked up speed. The suburbs gave way to coconut groves and rice paddies which were dotted with egret herons and water buffaloes, interspersed with patches of jungle. Large pendulum trees (Polyalthea longifolia) rose vertically from the ground, their branches and leaves plunging down their stems like green fountains. Small villages among the paddy fields were surrounded by mango- and jackfruit trees, lush gardens and banana plantations. Dense aggregates of elephant’s ear grew alongside streams and lotus ponds.

The pace of life here seemed relentless, but the idyll was misleading. The animals appeared lank and bony. The dogs were riddled with mange, ribs showing through their meagre, almost hairless hides. Even the buffaloes, so perfectly adapted to life in the humid tropics, had flanks like washboards. The animals were plagued by a multitude of parasites and microbes which were eating them up from inside even as they were feeding in a race to keep up. The egrets which foraged on and around the buffaloes — a scene like something out of Eden — were in fact picking out ticks and leeches which abounded on their hosts and in the paddy fields.

In the area around Kurunegala, conical mountains rose dramatically from the landscape. I was captivated by the view and when we pulled up for a rest stop near Garewela 3 hours later, I did not even feel the urge to smoke.

*****

While waiting for the bus to resume the journey, I had time to think where all this was going to take me. For the first time in over two years I was venturing out on my own. During most of this time, I had not left our flat, let alone the coutry. Now I was on my way to adventure and, moreover, I had been tempted by plans for the future.

Our neighbours in Negombo owned a prawn hatchery which had run into difficulties due to an outbreak of whitespot disease, caused by one of the many emergent viruses that curse the shrimp farming industry worldwide. The neighbours were so disgusted with it that they planned to throw it all in and emigrate to Canada. For all they cared, I was welcome to their hatchery. I had been tempted. I had studied crustacean diseases and prawn aquaculture for years. Athough I had no experience with shrimp rearing on a commercial scale, there was plenty of technical expertise available locally. My speciality was in viral diseases of crustaceans which put me in a good position. I was confident that I could manage a hatchery. I had worked in a zoo before and I figured that I had a good chance of keeping my stock healthy. However, in the end I declined. It was too soon.

A nervous breakdown had halted my zoology career two years previously. My research had taken me from one short-term contract to another, all over the country, while John was based in London where he had a lectureship. Over the years, our constant separation had become increasingly difficult and it was draining both of us emotionally. In addition, I became increasingly anxious about my work. In the fickle world of research, success is never guaranteed and with every day that passed, I felt more and more inadequate. Taken together, it was a textbook case for a psychiatric incident. Even now I was in the process of slowly recovering, with the help of antidepressants and the recalcitrant Scottish Mental Health Service. The last two years had been the hardest of my life and I was trying to draw a line under them. It would be disastrous to be sucked back in, I had to step away. Travelling was one way of doing that. — Backpacking as radical therapy.

Travelling when mentally may seem something of a handicap, but the opposite is true: being crazy is a distinct advantage. Being hyper meant I got things done before I had time to hesitate, mild mania turned the trip into a more colourful and far-out experience than it would otherwise have been without the help of recreational drugs and a slight suicidal streak gave me the devil-may-care attitude which I experienced even now as we passed, at great speed, another minibus that had overturned in a ditch.

Tags: ,



Comments are closed.