2015 February 16: The Long Road to Chilaw

Map courtesy Google Maps.

The Negombo Bus Station. The clamour of drivers hawking the virtues of their particular routes. No orderly lines and ticket counters here - in fact, there are no lines or ticket counters period. We study the rows of brightly coloured buses in all shapes and sizes, find one that is going to Chilaw, and board. There are no timetables or schedules - when the bus is full, it leaves. No matter...all day long another is waiting to take its place. The assistant passes by, asking for end locations and accepting payments....three people traveling 51 kilometres (31 miles) is just 177 rupees ($1.38 US). As people disembark en route, the driver's assistant loudly calls 'ilaw ilaw ilaw ilaw' (short for Chilaw) to the passing throngs of people, trying to refill the bus and maximize his profits on this trip.

The road is lined with street vendors of all sorts, everything one could imagine available as we pass by....pastries, candy, fruit, shots of liquor, t-shirts, dresses, shoes, kitchen strainers, vegetables, water, pets, farm animals....

Nainamadama....a town filled with tiles factories, with their hot kilns and mounds of clay ready to be made into roofing tiles and bricks.

We pass the Coconut Research Institute, a very important and prestigious government department, with its acres and acres of coconut plantations, many of them doubling as cow pastures as they attempt to maximize the use of the land.

Cathedrals, Catholic schools, shrines, white robed nuns, uniformed school children line the entire length of this Catholic corridor, and everywhere, everywhere are leftover signs welcoming the Holy Father, Pope Francis, who visited Sri Lanka in January of this year. With 1.2 million Catholics in the country, this made worldwide news, as did the mass that was celebrated in Colombo, the capital city, with some estimates of over one million attendees.

Marawila....waiting for more riders, the intoxicating fragrance of row upon row of bakeshops fills the senses, a sharp contrast to the sweetly acrid and smoky air in Nainamadama.

To our right....ancient tanks or wevas (reservoirs), constructed up to 1700 years ago, filled with waterfowl, yellow lilies, pink lotus flowers - part of an irrigation system envisioned by King Parakrama Bahu the Great (1153-1186), who declared "Let not even a drop of rain water go to the sea without benefiting man."

To our left....mile upon mile of rice paddies and marshes, resplendent with myriad types of fowl, including three kinds of egret surrounding the cows peacefully grazing.

Madampe....vast coconut plantations, canals filled with pampas grass, fences lined with sweet smelling jasmine, Hindu temples, Buddhist stupa, shrines to the Horse God, the Roman Catholic Church of San Sebastian, a mosque complete with Ladies Prayer Room and women's clothing store pass quietly by.

Sewer construction causes a small traffic jam as motorists and pedestrians of all sorts attempt to get through. No careful city planning and pipe placement here...to build one's sewer line simply dig a trench from one's house to the sidewalk, line it with concrete blocks, lift the concrete pavers covering the sewer ditch and hope it slopes properly. Then, replace the concrete paver to turn the ditch into a sidewalk again. Block traffic while doing so.

The Madampe Bus Station....just a widened part of the road at a vacant lot where people gather to wait for their bus. We wait for more passengers. In a nearby storefront I spy women's blouses for 350 rupees ($2.74), men's dress shirts for 295 rupees ($2.30), complete children's outfits for 150 rupees ($1.17). A group of white uniformed giggling schoolgirls flee when Steve catches them staring wide-eyed at his huge scary American self. 

Fully loaded once more, we return to the main road, passing vendors lining the fence outside a brightly painted blue Hindu temple surrounded by coconut groves.

Kakkapalliya....40 kilometres (24.5 miles) into our journey. An odd building that looks like a viking boat complete with Chinese dragon head and a door where the mouth should be gives us pause...it's called the Bum Boat. Mynas, egrets, and cormorants line the canal.

Chilaw at last. The driver's assistant finds a bus for us to a well known Hindu temple in Musseswaram, found in the Tamil Region. We are one day early for for the Shiva festival Sivarathri, but it cannot be helped - we have to be in Colombo tomorrow. We buy fruit for an offering - it being a Hindu temple we feel this is okay as the money goes towards feeding the poor, the offering is to be eaten by us afterwards, and Hindus believe in the sanctity of all religions and all gods/Gods. Our guide is delighted to hear Steve speaking Tamil, gives us a personal tour, explains the ceremony and the temple's shrines to us.

The many faces of Shiva, "Great God".

Sariswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, wisdom, arts, music       and learning.

Our guide.

Afterwards Steve quickly makes friends with two of the men and a woman at the stand to buy fruit for offerings. As Tamils, they were very impressed that Steve had been to Tamilnadu and many of the shrines found in the parts of India that he has visited.

As our host takes us to meet his friend, a tuktuk driver who can take us back to Chilaw, others call out insults in Sinhala. He quickly chastises them, "They speak Sinhala so you better watch your mouth", with a shake of his head and a dismissive gesture of the hand. His friend agrees to take us back to Chilaw and stops several times along the way so we can do a little bird watching, and when asked, takes us to an eatery that he knows of, Wadiya Restaurant.

A huge flying fox colony.

 Water buffalo and sacred ibises.

Open billed stork.

After a delightful meal of curried dal, beetroot salad, green onion salad, hot okra, rice for the three of us, and spicy fish and devilled prawns for Steve and Elanor (1100 rupees or $8.60, including three litre size bottles of water, and one small bottle of water), the quality of which was no doubt aided by the owners' surprise to hear Steve speaking Sinhalese to him, we head back to the bus station for our return journey.

Past the cows wandering the side streets of Chilaw, past the rural areas just to the south with the numerous Serene Gardens Coconut Plantations, past the rice paddies with their red-wattled lapwings, past Marawila's beautiful rivers and furniture carvers and egrets and bee eaters, past the storefronts and street vendors and beautiful houses and tropical gardens of Katunariya, Wennapuwa, Nainamadama, Waikkala, and Kochchikade....

Back to Negombo.

 Fishermen in the late afternoon.

A murder of crows at breakfast.

Celebrities

Ever wonder what it feels like to be a celebrity? Today, we found out just what that feels like!

The former Negombo chapel where Steve attended - 12 members the first time he went there in 2000.

Fourteen years ago while studying a dialect of Tamil spoken by the Catholic fishermen of Negombo, Steve attended church here with a very small group of people. He came to love them and they loved him back. Many of them are still friends with him these many years later. And so, today, he anxiously returned to church with these never-forgotten friends, with Elanor and me in tow.

The new Negombo chapel, completed in 2010 - currently housing between 500 and 600 members.

And what a reception it was! There were hugs, there were kisses, there were handshakes, there were pats on the back, there were tears, there were smiles, as word spread throughout the building that Bonta had returned and people came running to greet him. He was given a king's welcome by these wonderful people that he holds so dear.

As the wife of their great friend, I was also warmly welcomed and greeted with the traditional pressing of cheeks, enveloping hugs from the women, and hearty handshakes from the men. One of the men very enthusiastically told me, "You deserve many congratulations for being Steve's wife!" And as I sat in my Sunday School class, I could hear a growing murmur that eventually stopped the lesson until it died down again, as pointing fingers and head nods and whispers of "Bonta's wife! Bonta's wife!" announced my presence to everyone in the room. The excited outpouring of mutual esteem between Steve and his old friends and their families and even the people he had never met but who had heard of him from the others was honestly like nothing I have witnessed before.

I attended Sunday School in Sinhalese, with some explanations of the discussions being provided in English. But, one of my talents is being able to understand, even if only in small and simple ways, what others are saying when they speak in other languages, and this experience was no different. Between the anglicized words found in Sinhala, the scripture references, the study guide, and the brief explanations of what others were saying, I had no trouble following the gist of the lesson after just a few minutes, and then helped an older woman visiting Sri Lanka from Finland to follow the gist of the lesson as well. She, by her own admission, does not speak English very well, but between the sections I was pointing out to her in my English language scriptures, the very simple summaries of what the teacher said, and some pantomime, she was also able to follow the lesson. She and her husband came here to meet a girl whose schooling they have sponsored since she was young. This young woman is about to graduate from university in Europe, and they came to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment with her.

Elanor experienced some culture shock as the day passed by. We told her that we were guests in this country, and that as guests, we needed to make sure that we respect the language, culture, and customs of the people here. Part of this includes her attending her Sunday School (Primary) classes in Sinhala, not English. We want her to learn some Sinhalese while we are here. She is a little anxious about that, but I explained to her that we believe she can do it. After all, her step-sister Amber learned Inuktitut when she and I lived among the Inuit for two years in northern Canada, and there is no reason why she can't do the same here in Sri Lanka.

After church we were treated to lunch by one of Steve's closest friends here at a roadside open air restaurant usually frequented by locals found not far from the chapel. Served family style and all-you-can-eat, we feasted on basmati rice, curried manioc, onion pickle, jackfruit mash, thin noodles with carrots, a grilled mackerel-like fish with spiced gravy, barbecue chicken, and tiny dried fish with coconut shreds. Total cost? 1108 Sri Lankan rupees - about $8.65 total for all four of us.

Sri Lanka is, in many respects, a third-world country. There is a lot of garbage everywhere you look. Mangy dogs roam free. Street vendors and small sidewalk boutiques line every available space in some places. We paid less than a dollar for the same adaptor we could have bought at Walmart back home for $12. Our hotel costs about $35 per night. Yesterday our tuktuk driver spent close to an hour taking us to downtown Negombo so we could buy adaptors, fruit, and anti-histamines for Elanor, and it cost us 600 rupees - $4.70. A beggar came into our church today looking for 10 rupees - 7 cents - to buy rice.

But don't let any of the above fool you. These people are generous and kind and good-hearted. They are modest, well-kept, and dress well - skirts and blouses or dresses or traditional attire for the women, dress shirts and slacks or wraps and well-shined shoes for the men. Even the few locals that we have seen wearing our typical Western leisure clothing look nothing like Westerners do in Western clothing - nothing is dirty, frayed, offensive, immodest, baggy. At the beach last night there were throngs and throngs of people of all ages enjoying the sand, the ocean, the beachside Valentine's Day concert / political rally, with nary a bikini in sight. The only immodestly dressed people we saw were two European men wearing speedos, one American woman wearing a one piece swimsuit that would be considered completely modest back home, and two fisherman who stripped to their underwear and dove into the warm waves to clean away the results of their day's labours before they headed home.

And their spirit is unquenchable. We met a woman at church today with the brightest smile, the most loving eyes, the most welcoming words...and yet her story is one that would have broken most people. She was originally from the south of Sri Lanka, but came to Negombo after the 2004 tsunami as a refugee. For three months she looked for her youngest son, who had been washed out to sea by those terrible waves. For three months this mother never gave up hope. And when she finally began to despair of ever seeing her son again, she found some church members here in Negombo who told her to keep having faith and helped her to look for him. And, beyond all miracles, she found him. She had been a devout Buddhist her entire life, but became a member of our church after experiencing the love and care and compassion and help of the members here. In her words, "For everyone around the world, tsunamis are terrible problems. But for me, our tsunami was a blessing, a wonderful blessing in my life, because it brought me here, where I could be with these good people." A man whom Steve has known for a long time here grew up as the son of the leader of another church here in Sri Lanka. He had been granted a full scholarship to study medicine at one of the best medical schools in India, but gave it all up to be here with these members.

As I heard life story after life story - all told with cheerful faces with no regrets - it struck me that while we were given the royal treatment, these people were the real celebrities. Celebrities inspire awe and humility in us, a desire to want what they have and to be like them. If I can learn to be half as joyful, half as hopeful, half as optimistic as these good people, I will consider myself to be very blessed indeed.

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A few more sights from today....

No idea what kind of tree this flower grows on, but each flower lasts for only one day before it falls to the ground with a loud whump that is audible from our balcony three stories above!

  Yellow billed babbler

Cattle egrets

Stumbling Onto Something

After a refreshing day of sleep, we awoke around 3 pm with one goal: food! It didn't matter where or what or how much - we were famished. We decided to see where we ended up, which, in truth, ended up being not far from our hotel.

We were a little wary as we were led down a very long black corridor into the very bowels, it seemed, of what we thought was a quaint little open air restaurant. We were shown to our seats in the otherwise empty back rooms, ordered while trying not to shift the wobbly table and chairs too much, and waited somewhat patiently for our food to arrive.

The back of the restaurant was open to a courtyard, and we spent the better part of half an hour admiring the wildlife that flitted past....

a brown headed barbet happily digging for grubs or insects inside a dead stump in the courtyard...

...a fence lizard come to bask in the hot sun atop the wall...

...several Oriental magpie robins happily calling to each other amongst the nearby telephone wires and courtyard trees....

When our meals began to arrive, we thought that this was a simple Sri Lankan restaurant serving simple Sri Lankan fare. Steve had ordered some fish fried rice to baby his stomach, Elanor ordered fish and chips - complete with the ubiquitous curry batter, and me? I ordered what I thought was a simple vegetarian curry. What I actually got what this splendid feast:

Mushroom, raisin, and cashew nut curry, onion and tomato salad, red beet in curry sauce, coconut sambula, red and white rice, and freshly made puppadams! Now, if you read my earlier post about my first experiences with authentic Sri Lankan food, you will remember how much I raved about the Coconut Onion Gravy that I had at the Banana Leaf Restaurant in Washington DC. It was one of the best things I have ever eaten in my life. But this? This was a thousand times better! The flavours somehow melded together into perfect bites of creamy goodness, exploding with curry leaf, turmeric, capsicum, thai pepper, and lime, and with the just the right amount of crunch added by the puppadam, used for scooping everything together in lieu of silverware.

After our meal we stopped at the entrance to see the two pools of koi, and this little guy:

Then we headed for the beach directly behind our hotel for a couple of hours of fun to celebrate Valentine's Day, Steve's birthday, and our arrival - finally - in Sri Lanka while taking in our first sunset over the warm Indian Ocean:

Oh, and by the way, what we stumbled upon in our quest for nourishment to appease our famished stomachs? Only one of the best restaurants in Negombo, Lords Restaurant, which, according to Lonely Planet is "By far Negombo’s most creative eating experience". And cost only about the same as a typical fast food meal back home!

Sixty-Four Degrees Part 2

From this in Moncton, New Brunswick, on our way to Newfoundland, Canada, to catch our flight:

To this just a few days later in Sri Lanka:

And in between, we saw some beautiful art and artifacts at the Museum located throughout the Mumbai Airport:

Sixty-Four Degrees

To pick up where we left off last time....

We got our Suburban fixed (well, sort of - Dad reports today that it's not running again), got everything packed, and headed for St. John's for the night on Wednesday. The two little dogs knew something was up, as they both refused to leave my side during the trip. The snow started coming on as we finished up some last minute items. And the baleful look of my Shih-Poo as Mom and Dad pulled away from the hotel broke my heart. They drove our truck back to their place in a wintry blast all the way to Whitbourne, where it suddenly turned into a beautiful evening for a drive. Poor little Essie (my first dog, named Essex after my first new car, a Dodge SX) cried all Thursday because he missed his momma.

With yet another snowstorm forecast for Thursday morning, we were relieved to see clear skies when we awoke at 5 am to go to the airport. As we walked into the lobby a scant thirty minutes later, the heavens opened and we were in whiteout conditions. By the time we got to the airport, just five minutes later, all incoming flights had been cancelled, and our flight was scheduled to be the last one to leave.

And leave we did! Although, admittedly, it was more than a little disconcerting to be in 70 km / hour winds, with snow whipping everywhere at -31 C, and snowplows clearing the runway in front of the plane as we took off!

With all of the opposition we had faced while getting ready for this adventure, it was no surprise to be given this one last kick as we left for warmer climes.

In the meantime, my husband (who claims to be an introvert and anti-social) happily spent an hour at the gate chatting with former Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Beaton Tulk about politics, books, the oil industry, finance, Kevin King's back country cabin, Mr. Tulk's 76 year old house that he and his wife bought and restored in Musgravetown, and my first-cousin-once-removed Eli who is a good friend of his and whom Steve spent a day this past summer helping to put up a fence around a cemetery where many of my ancestors are buried - part of yet another cemetery restoration project envisioned by my great-uncle Sim who is celebrating his 91st birthday today! Our many hours long stop-over in Newark also saw my husband happily chatting away with the guys at the pizza stand in the airport food court - in Spanish, Sinhala, and Tamil.

The flight from Newark to Mumbai was an uneventful but long fourteen hours. It was rather strange in some ways, because we left on Thursday, but were flying east, so we had an extremely short day and landed in Mumbai shortly before midnight on Friday. It did give one pause for thought as we flew over Afghanistan, grateful to be flying at over 30 000 feet. But the sunset high in the air over Pakistan was truly spectacular - there is no word to describe the colour of where the saffron and cobalt of a Middle Eastern sunset meet as the sun is just sinking below the horizon. And one doesn't often hear this about airline food...but it was incredible. Curried chickpea wraps for snacking, some sort of crunchy grain salad and cauliflower curry for supper, mini samosas with sweet chutney and curried sago for breakfast.

The airport in Mumbai was incredible - the terminal has been completely renovated and now doubles as one of the pre-eminent museums in India, with 3 kms of exhibits! And, unlike American, Canadian, and other Western airports, photography is encouraged. With ancient and modern arts and crafts, frescoes, and archeological displays, it is truly breathtaking.

While wandering around and exploring all there was to see, I happened to stroll down a side hall in search of 'the facilities'. As I passed by a huge open double-door leading to a florescent sterile tube shaped corridor that apparently runs around the entire outside perimeter of the shopping, duty-free, and display area, I caught a glimpse of a large man with Asian features being held and forcibly removed of his jacket and backpack by three security officers. Needless to say, I did not stick around to see how this ended.

A couple of hours later we were on the final leg of our journey - Mumbai to Colombo - where again, the airline food was delicious - a spiced pancake with a vegetable korma and fruit salad (the one thing I did not like was a piece of fruit found in the fruit salad which tasted the way I imagine socks that have been worn for far too long in old hiking boots would taste), and Moong Dal for snacking. (This treat reminded me of a student I once taught who was supposed to be autistic and had been placed in my hard-to-serve regional autistic program. While trying to find some way to reach him, I visited him and his family at their home, where I discovered that he was a very different person at home than at school. While he obviously did have some intellectual delay, he could communicate just fine with his family, showed all sorts of social skills that he did not display at school, and did not have many of the repetitive behaviours that were his hallmark while in the classroom. After speaking at length with his huge extended family, I determined that the boy could not speak or understand English, but spoke Urdu at a child's level, and that Dal was his favourite food. I started bringing Dal to school to share with him whenever he became agitated, and miraculously, many of his autistic behaviours disappeared, and he was later moved to a program that better fit his needs as an ESL learner with intellectual delay, rather than an autistic program.)

At 5 am we landed, and quickly made our way through customs and immigration, found our driver (named Walleterad), and marveled at the beauty of a Sri Lankan early morning in 33 degree weather.

Of course, there was a mix-up at the hotel where we were supposed to be staying (are you surprised? given the nature of our trip to this point, we certainly weren't!) and our reservation had been lost. The owner of the hotel was very apologetic, especially after he learned that I am Canadian. He lived in Calgary for several years and loves Canada, but it was too cold for him although his wife loves it! First they lived in England, but it was too expensive, then Arizona where he loved the weather but it was a terrible place to raise children, then on to Calgary which was great for his children and he even considered buying some farmland, before deciding to move back to Sri Lanka, "the most beautiful and best place in the world!"

Fortunately, however, his son and daughter-in-law or daughter and son-in-law (it was a little confusing to follow) own a hotel across the street from his establishment, and Steve quickly arranged for us to stay there.

And so, here we are - from a North Atlantic blizzard to Sri Lankan humidity. And only 64 degrees change in the temperature!

Final Preparations: A Soap Opera in the Making

The plan? Finish packing up and cleaning the house by Friday evening, do last minute things on Saturday, leave right after church on Sunday, get to Newfoundland Wednesday or Thursday to leave the dogs with my parents while we are gone and meet our new nephew and spend a week with family before leaving for Sri Lanka.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans....

Week One - Packing:

• Two blizzards = four day delay moving out of our house.
• Sub-zero temperatures = destroyed wiring in the Suburban. (Three garage visits later, the wiring is finally fixed.)
• Blizzard #3 = broken windshield wiper motor. A huge thanks to the little garage behind my brother-in-law's house in Bellefonte, where they were able to fix it quickly.
• Unknown cause = sick-in-bed daughter at my brother-in-law's. A huge thank you to him for taking care of her and cleaning up after her while we finished up at the house.

Week Two - Driving:

• Overturned fully-loaded semi = two hours sitting in rush hour traffic in Scranton, PA, while road is cleared.
• Cramped spaces + jealousy over who was sitting in 'mommy's' lap = multiple dog spats.
• Daughter's stuff in dog beds + two cranky fighting dogs + me separating them = finger bitten to the bone.
• Delays in leaving = stop at a K-mart in Massachusetts to buy dog food, resulting in me leaving my wallet at the store, which we discovered when we got to Bangor, ME, 230 miles (372 km)north.
• Misunderstanding by FedEx = two day delay in Bangor while we wait for UPS to deliver my wallet so we can leave. Thanks to Jenn, the manager at the Tewksbury, MA, K-mart, for taking care of things on her end so UPS could get my wallet to me.
• Violently ill daughter = one overnight emergency room trip.
• Slippery roads and snow = 200 yard slide down an ice covered hill on the way to the hospital, just missing a car on the side of the road.
• Sub-zero temperatures = me and the dogs sleeping in the running car so it would not destroy the wiring again.
• Bad weather = UPS missing the next day delivery flight. Thanks to the call center, the customer service department, the local delivery warehouse and the UPS driver who went an hour and a half out of his way to get my wallet to me on Friday instead of us having to wait until Saturday. And, thanks to the Quality Inn in Bangor for putting up with us and not charging us for an extra day when the delivery came late in the afternoon.
• A chain of storms on the West Coast of Newfoundland =  more than 200 miles (330 km) of absolutely wretched ice covered roads and intermittent snowstorms and whiteout conditions, and two near misses as people were not driving according to weather conditions.

Week Three - Visiting:

• Coldest night of the winter = dead vehicle in driveway.

Honestly, we couldn't make this stuff up if we tried!

A couple of days here in Newfoundland with family, and then we leave for Sri Lanka on Thursday, arriving on Saturday. Praying and hoping for smoother travel the rest of the way!