Based on a promise made eight years ago, we returned to Sri Lanka this winter, visited some old haunts and some new ones, and got to say goodbye to both the land and the people, for another visit seems unlikely, although I “never say never.”
A lot seems to have happened in the eight years: a barbaric Easter Sunday bombing, a change of government, a pandemic, a bankruptcy and a runaway president, the return of an old veteran to the helm—one associated with Easter Sunday—to place the country under the IMF, and a landslide election win for the Marxist party that previously launched two failed but bloody revolutions over the last 50 years. There are glimmers of hope that the corruption of the post-Independence period could finally be left behind. We shall see…
That there had been economic harm from eight years ago was obvious. In terms of consumer prices, what had been Rs. 200 then was now Rs. 300, but it was still one dollar to us tourists, so we know who the losers are. That said, everyone seemed to be going on with renewed optimism and confidence, for they had wrested a country back from a gang of thieves and put honest but rookie politicians to work on their behalf. The city of Colombo had a crush of new buildings since our last visit: the Shangri La Hotel (one of the Easter Sunday bomb targets but now fully restored), the ITC Ratnadipa, and Cinnamon Life were massive luxury hotels just in the Galle Face Area, and the One Galle Face Mall took me back to the malls of Dubai for its scale and variety. The pile of landfill that had been the proposed Port City extension was also now showing commercial activity with a Duty-Free Shop and a Beach Club in operation at either end of the extension, with active construction of other commercial enterprises going on between those two bookends.
Older properties looked faded now- the Galadari and the Hilton – while the Galle Face Hotel (GFH), where we stayed, still maintained its colonial charm despite the onslaught of new competition. In fact, at the urging of the front-office manager, we visited the hotel’s museum, and after navigating around Prince Philip’s second-hand 1935 Standard Nine car sitting at the entrance, which he had owned when stationed in Ceylon during WWII, we got a photo exhibition of the various international personalities who had graced the GFH: Lord Mountbatten, Indira Gandhi, Sir Lawrence Olivier, David Lean, Roger Moore, Richard Nixon, Steven Spielberg, Che Guevara, and various foreign kings and queens. Imagine, I may have even been sleeping in the bed used by Ursula Andress or Bo Derek!
Another promise I had made myself was to scale Sigiriya. Three prior attempts (made since the age of 21) had failed for various reasons: wasp attacks, muscle cramps, and bad weather. We set out early (6 a.m.) this time, before the sun got too hot, to visit this top ranked among the Top 25 International Tourist Attractions to visit in 2025, and the crowds were already building. So was the price – what had been marked as $30 per tourist by Google was $35 when we arrived. But it was well worth it. After making it past the lion’s paws (the highest I had been on previous occasions) it was only a few more staircases to the top, and I staggered over the last rock feeling the trip had been worth it just for this milestone alone. The AI-created simulation I saw later at the Cinnamon Lodge resort completed the picture of what this magical kingdom and its enigmatic king would have looked like in the day, and about whom I had written my first novel 25 years ago.
Another first was a visit to the Galle Literary Festival. I am called a literary snob, so take my comments with a large arrack. In fact, a patron of the arts living in the country, and a friend of mine, was more critical than me and described the festival as a “snob fest for the Colombo set.” Although the range of speakers was vast and subjects ranged from stolen foreign artefacts to literary prizes, war, colonialism, immigration, journalism, history, translation, and cooking, I found the messages being preached were for the consumer and did not delve deep enough for the serious writer. In fact, our hotel hosted many apres-conference events and I got a read on the attendees – debut writers and mid-to-late career hacks, mostly from Britain, out on a junket in a tropical venue. I chatted up one of the debutants who had the next room to ours, and whose sessions I attended, and was told that they did not have to prepare anything, just come and wing it from the heart.
The visit to Anuradhapura was also new on this visit. There were a lot of temples to cover over this very large archeological site, which lies in a far greater state of ruin than the more recent Pollonnaruwa. But unlike my last visit in the 1970s, a new museum had been built and the artefacts scattered over the area had been collected and placed inside, making viewing easier. Of course, I had forgotten my manners being abroad for many years and had to cover my sexy knees with a sheet in order to enter sites like the Ruwanwelisaya, Jathawanaramaya, and Thuparamaya among others. The highlight for me was to see the Sri Maha Bodhi tree that still grows strong, albeit assisted with golden bars now – understandable, being only 2300 years young.
An eco tour to see elephants in the Habarana forest ended up in a free-for-all between battling tourist jeeps trying to get to the scarce elephants before they disappeared into the bush. If we saw an elephant, it would only be a matter of seconds before an army of jeeps descended upon us from all trails because the monkey telegraph (operated by the tour guide fraternity) seemed to be working overtime. Extricating ourselves from a jeep jam was more fun than spotting these rather small, docile, mud-spattered Asian elephants who looked used to humans staring at them from roaring vehicles. Climbing the mountain lookout at the end of the tour was the highlight, for we got a panoramic view and picked out all the elephants we’d been fighting to see over the previous three hours.
I must comment on the hotel service we met along the way – in Colombo, Galle, and Habarana. The staff were excellent as usual. The cuisine, whether eastern or western, was world-class. Hospitality came from the heart, not the handbook. And yet the lack of the ability to speak English (see my previous articles on the tragic loss of English in Sri Lanka beginning with Bandaranayake’s flawed Sinhala Only policy) made the staff look diffident and withdrawn, and foreigners might even take this for surliness. Compare this to the staff in Indian hotels (also a destination visited on this trip and slated for a future article) who “murdered the queen” (or is it king, now?) with confidence. And some hotels were down-playing the excellent Sri Lankan cuisine in favour of western cuisine for their foreign guests. Who the heck wants to eat hamburgers in Asia, man? I decided to go off-language and off-menu and spoke to the serving staff in Sinhala. When they realized I was a local boy, who just happened to look like a foreigner, they sighed with relief and became talkative and informative as hell – lots of local stories poured out, and so did many off-menu local delicacies – watalapan, pittu, roti, katta sambol, ambul thiyal, seeni sambol, rice and curry, hoppers and string hoppers, and arrack – while other tourists looked upon me with suspicion. The only hotel I found still proud of its local faire was the old GFH where its Sri Lankan buffet eclipsed the western one.
As the trip wound down, a sadness descended. I once belonged here. Not anymore. And as the years go past, that fact becomes clearer. As the lone bagpiper walked down at sunset on our last day to take down the national flag at the GFH, a practice that seems to have gone on since the hotel’s founding in 1864 (except that the flag has since changed from the Union Jack to the Sri Lankan Lion) I was grateful that some traditions still prevailed in this country to recognize its colonial past and my generation, the first post-colonial generation that arrived into a limbo of transition where the clear message was – “go forward and integrate, or go backward and get out.” We chose to go forward yet get out, the third unspoken option, and that plaintive drone of the bagpipe reminds me of how far we have come for taking that bold move.
