Water shortages, forest fires and whale talk
Every drop of water had to be labourously transferred to a tank on the roof and all we got was a trickle from the taps and the occasional flush of the cistern. Rob had managed to borrow a pump from the university and now there was at least enough water for a quick shower. Even better, the heater was working as normal. As I shampooed my hair, I kept glancing nervously at the electrical wiring which was installed right next to the shower head. When I turned the knob to regulate the temperature, I was sure I saw a blue spark. My nerves deserted me and I got out quickly, towelling the shampoo from my hair. The others happily took their showers and nobody ended up being electricuted.
“But it can’t be safe!” I exclaimed.
“Look at it this way,” Rob said laconically: “Nothing has happened, yet.”
“My dad came along for a visit last year” S said. “We stayed a week and he never once had a shower. He figures the wiring is lethal!”
Everybody went to bed around midnight except for John who stayed up to tackle another one of his maths problems. In the small hours, as everybody was asleep, he stepped outside for a cigarette and found the pines across the road ablaze. He watched mesmerised as flames razed between the tall trees. The fire burned itself out without jumping across the road, so John did not wake anybody up and nobody else had noticed a thing. He gave us the low-down in the morning.
“20 metre flames were licking at the branches!” he exclaimed dramatically.
“Really?” I quibbed.
“See for yourself!”
He pointed towards the forest. The vegetation was blackened right up to the curb and the tree trunks were charred. Thankfully, they were barren to high above the ground, an indication that forest fires are a regular occurence here. When I saw the damage, I shouted at John. He should have woken us up and gotten us to evacuate. Once a fire jumps, things tend to happen quickly. The safety videos I had seen during my work induction still played vividly on my mind. Within seconds, the flames could have engulfed the house. We could all have been toast, overcome by fumes and cut off by raging flames with no chance of escape.
“Besides”, I grumbled: “it would have been one hell of a show!”
Something had to be done about our clothes. There was not enough water left to even hand-wash them. I did not fancy trekking down to the stream and bashing them against the rocks to the amusement of onlookers, so we had to try and find a launderette in town. I was in a hurry, tomorrow was the latest I could leave for my rendevous with the ship.
There was no automatic launderette to be found in all of Kandy. We looked for what seemed like hours because I was certain that we had passed one when we collected the turkey. Finally I spotted a ‘laundry’ sign in one of the shopping complexes, but it was just a counter for people to hand in their washing and collect it 2-3 days later. It seemed that, if not us, then somebody else would have to wash our clothes by hand and there was not much time left. In the end, we delivered three bulging plastic sacks of clothes to the university laundry service which put everything on hold to wash our load (it helped that Rob is quite high in the academic hierarchy). As we returned to the house, I guiltily envisaged the three people working there bashing and scrubbing at our dirty garments while the clock was ticking. I handed John back his bag of dirty socks. To have other people wash them would amount to a human rights’ violation.
I was excited about the trip so naturally, over dinner, the talk turned to whales. Simon did not know much about them, so I informed him that they are not fish, but mammals. “The blue whales which you find off the coast at Trincomalee are among the largest animals that ever lived.” I lectured “They can grow to the size of a Boeing jet! And do you know, they feed on some of the smallest animals in the ocean: krill, a planktonic shrimp.”
He looked at me incredulously.
I explained further. Small countries are usually talked about in terms of the size of Wales. Whales are talked about in terms of the size of elephants.
“They take in water and expel it through fringes in their mouth that act like a sieve, keeping back the krill. They do this by pressing up their tongue which, in an adult blue whale, is about the size and weight of an elephant. With each gulp, the animal can take up to 50 tons of water. A fully grown Asian elephant weighs about 5 tons.”
“Nah!” He exclaimed.
I was on a roll. “They travel across the ocean at speeds of up to 15 knots and communicate with each other by infrasound, which is carried in the deep sea currents over thousands of miles!”
I think I had grabbed his attention now, but S kept me from getting carried away completely.
“No wonder you seduced the captain…” He began.
“What?!”
He winked: “Just lie back and think of the whales!”
I shot him a withering look. And I hadn’t even started on the sperm whales yet.
Denni