Trincomalee (part3)
The hostel was not as bad as I had feared. At dawn, I spotted only one geriatric cockroach which was slowly crawling towards the next room. It swayed and weaved because it was missing two legs on one side so it may well have flown during the night — I had felt something whizzing past my ears just before falling asleep. I could not afford to worry about that now and left the thing alone. If I killed it, it would only attract others.
The first task of the day was to buy a new pair of sandals. I was not looking forward to the transaction. Usually I learn at least a few words of the local language. It is good diplomacy and, more importantly, a great help when haggling. After four days in Sri Lanka, I could count to ten, say “yes”, “no” and “thank you” and had started to enquire about swear words in Sinhala. That was a complete waste of effort because in Trincomalee they speak Tamil, which has no relation to Sinhala at all. I fell back on the lazy habit of assuming that everyone could understand at least a little English. It had worked for me in Taiwan, but in Trincomalee there were fewer people who wanted to practise their English. I entered the first shoe shop I passed, selected a pair of sandals and prepared to haggle in sign language. The proprietor wordlessly pointed at the price printed onto the plastic sole. Relieved, I selected my pair. I was surprised that my swollen feet still warranted a size seven rather than my usual five.
The biggest frustration for whale watchers is being in a whale or dolphin hot-spot and not having access to a boat. I had to grab my observation platform wherever I could find one, so I took the 8:30 ferry across the bay to the town of Mutur where the Mahaweli Ganga flows into the sea. When I produced my enormous binoculars, judging from the looks I received from my fellow passengers they took me for a demented twitcher (by now, I had come to terms with the fact that nobody would mistake me for an international spy). I suppose you have to be demented to go out looking for an animal that can stay submerged for over an hour. Maybe whale watchers should have their own nickname, perhaps we should be called ‘splashers’. Alas, unlike bird watching, not every outing delivers a sighting, let alone of the species you would most like to spot. We saw no sign of any whales, dolphins or porpoises on our cruise across the bay.
The complete absence of the smaller cetaceans surprised me. In coastal waters this rich, dolphins and porpoises should be the top predators, apart from the fishermen, who around here still fished from tiny traditional boats. In the calm conditions on this particular morning, any sign of cetacean presence would have been unmistakable. It isn’t as if I have an untrained eye. Observing river dolphins is very good preparation.
Once, while we were puttering around a bay measuring currents during a field practical, I asked the man in charge of the boat whether he had seen many harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) in the area. “Not in the ten years I’ve been working here,” he replied gruffly. On that trip alone, I had three sightings although they may have been the same porpoise. Moreover, here on the ferry, I wasn’t the only one keeping a look-out. After I had passed the binoculars around and shown photographs of dolphins and a surfacing sperm whale, there must have been at least a dozen pairs of eyes trained on the water. Nobody saw anything during the one hour trip. The bay seemed devoid of cetacean life.
At last we reached the shore. Here there was nothing but huts with roofs made from palm fronds or corrugated metal, plus the inevitable army outpost. Mutur itself was further inland. The jetty was broken so we had to get to shore in one of the local boats. Improbably, the one that took us was named ‘River View Hotel’. Mutur did not strike me as the kind of place where you would find hotels. In fact, it did not strike me as a place which had seen tourists of any kind in the recent past. That did not deter the local tuk-tuk drivers who descended on us in their droves. I made the mistake of shaking off a particularly persistent fellow by diving into a tiny shed for a soda and a roti. Sheltered from the breeze outside, the sweat began to pour out of my every pore in torrents. I seemed to lose liquid more quickly than I could drink it.
After a while, a commotion outside and the arrival of several tuk-tuks alerted me that the ferry might be about to depart. I hurried back to the beach where a group of school children had arrived along with four or five of their teachers. They did not speak English but nodded when I asked “Trincomalee” and pointed at them, then at the ferry. Several boats were pulling up on shore so I got ready to embark, but nobody else moved. A few minutes later, the group wandered off down the beach leaving me somewhat bemused in the company of the empty boats and a dead puffer fish which had washed up on shore, inflated like a spiky balloon. It dawned on me that I too might be stranded in this strange place. Even the worms* in the sand were different here. I noticed that they had expelled sediment not in the shape of little mounds or turds we see on British beaches but in neat little balls which covered the sand.
I was certainly something of an exhibit for the locals, a sizeable crowd of whom had watched me all that time from further up the beach. Presently, two expensively dressed men walked up with a camera and took pictures of me posing with their sons. I began to suspect that I was the only Westerner to land on these shores in the last couple of years.
Eventually, one guy told me the ferry was due to leave at 10:45 so I turned back to the huts. A friendly shopowner brought out a chair and sent a boy to fetch a cigarette. Things were looking up. In the shade of a tree, surrounded by curious locals and with Brahimi kites (Haliastur indus) wheeling in the breeze overhead, I waited contently until the ferry actually left at 11:30.
There were no sightings on the way back, either. I began to wonder whether Donaldson had been exaggerating somewhat when he talked about his dream-hotel with underwater windows. I can safely say that the whales of Trincomalee are no longer that common in the harbour area. Later, I would find out why. LTTE Sea Tigers had blown up two Navy ships in the harbour some years back. The Navy had retaliated, setting off regular charges in the bay over a period of nearly a decade in an attempt to thwart further sabotage. Unsurprisingly, this had driven the whales away.
The whales were still in the area, but they were no longer in the harbour.
I decided to head out to Club Oceanic in Upuveli where the film crew had been staying back in the 80s to meet the general manager, a man who calls himself ‘Paths’. Club Oceanic, the only luxury hotel to remain open on Upuveli beach, is popular with suitcase-travellers. It would be nice not to be the only tourist for a change. With a start, I realised I had only been away for one day. It felt more like a week.
*[EDIT: not worms but tiny crabs, of course. Hell, it was all new to me!]
Tags: The Whales of Trincomalee, Tag Index
Denni