sri lanka 2013: part 2 - the hill country

continued from the previous post - here

i then headed inland, up into sri lanka's hill country! on the way, near wellawaya, a little detour was made to see sri lanka's largest standing buddha. it was carved into a mountain and could best be described as underwhelming. the journey to find it, however, was excellent - lots of coconut consumption and getting lost and a really serene lake where i splashed around with some local kids. and got a gnarly sunburn. sri lanka is the world's premier producer of tea, and it all happens up in the hills in the center of the country, which are actually more like mountains. it is actually quite cold up there. the roads become very tortuous and are perfect for scooting. there are many waterfalls. i went to the third largest waterfall in the country called dunhinda - which ended up being at least an hour's hike and a dozen close-up monkey sightings off the road. i left my backpack with some random guy and thankfully he still had it when i got back! i spent a night at the "beuty view mountain inn" in the tourist hill town of ella. there was a little girl who served the food there who was super cute. best rice and curry of the trip. people come to ella to get away from the heat and to avail of the local delicacy - buffalo curds, and indulge in ayurvedic spa treatments. i passed on the spa treatments as i heard that sometimes they just pour heated recycled canola oil over you and rub it into your skin and people get crazy acne afterwards. in ella i also ran up a mountain called little adam's peak where there were excellent views down a valley all the way to the ocean. ella is surrounded by expansive tea plantations. i went on a tour of a tea factory and learned a lot about the process of fermenting and drying the tea. even got to taste all the varieties afterward - all the same leaves, just picked at different times and processed in different ways. it seemed like i might have been the first tourist to visit the factory in weeks. on the topic of tea, the guy giving me the tour told me all about sir thomas lipton of lipton tea fame. he had a chain of grocery stores in england, and was tired of dealing with money-grubbing middle men for his tea. so he decided to source it straight from ceylon - he even moved to sri lanka. he started plantations with the imported cheap labor of tamils from south india, a practice which continues to this day as picking tea is not financially lucrative enough for the locals.

the scooting continued through some picturesque muslim majority mountain villages to the highest town in sri lanka, nuwara eliya. it was extremely cold scooting, as it was beginning to get dark and i had not brought any coat or even pants on the trip! the temperature remains in the low-teens celcius throughout the year, and the town is perpetually smothered in cold fog. nuwara eliya is sri lanka's tea capital - the best tea is generally grown at the highest altitudes. the only other thing that grows there are root vegetables like potatoes and carrots. it is also known as sri lanka's "little england", as there are numerous victorian mansions and the climate is rainy and overcast - just like england. the next 150 km were all downhill switchbacks - in the dark - and cold - which was exhilarating. at one point a bug flew into my eye and aggravated it to such an extent that i drove the rest of the way using just the other eye. and maybe it was the cold or the lack of traffic but i found myself accidently driving on the right side of the road a few times - that's the wrong side of the road in sri lanka. i was glad to finally make it to kandy.

kandy is the holiest buddhist city in sri lanka, and a former capital of the country. it is supposed to be alcohol free to keep it pure, and every year they have a huge party/parade with hundreds of elephants that walk through the streets on red carpets - the country's greatest spectacle. if the cow is india's favorite animal, for sri lanka it is the elephant. one particular kandyan elephant has even become something of a national icon. kandy is centered around a lake, on which is a temple said to contain one of buddha's teeth. the temple of the buddha's tooth relic draws buddhists from around the world. people bring flowers to place before the shrine inside the temple. of course i also had to check out sri lanka's largest shopping mall which is in kandy - lets just say there are good reasons that no one visits sri lanka for its malls. as was expected at some point, i became physically ill in kandy, so everything became a bit of a blur toward the end. i did go the national botanical garden, however, where, in addition to a long nap induced by dehydration, headache and fever, i saw some really beautiful orchid varieties and a very large fig tree. also saw a traditional kandyan dance spectacle for a couple dollars that ended with fire throwing and barefoot coal walking. the original ancient inhabitants of sri lanka, the veddah people, still live in an isolated mountainous region east of kandy. if i had a few more days i would have loved to go find some of them. they still speak their own language and there are only a few thousand remaining.

on my final day in sri lanka i drove back to the airport 4 hours to the west, stopping at an elephant orphanage along the way for another nap, and to hang out with lots of elephants! watched them bathing in a river and got to pet them, including 2 of the most adorable hairy little baby elephants you've ever seen! these things were so small and fresh from their mother's oven that their skin was still soft! you could even feed them with a bottle for a mere $2. 

sri lanka is probably the coolest country ever and everyone should go there. it has the otherwordly charm of india but without the incessant touts. english is widely understood and travel distances are relatively short. even the cops are friendly, some of them even remembered me from when i had driven by the previous day! paradise on earth i tell you!

sri lanka 2013: part 1 - the south coast

my goal: to go to sri lanka and rent a scooter and drive around aimlessly and helmet-less by myself for a week to decompress from a summer of incessant and dehumanizing board exam studying!

and it was achieved!
 
i arrived in sri lanka in the middle of the night, and made my way to to the beachside town of negombo. a unique thing about being a tourist in sri lanka is that you can stay in "guesthouses", ie. rooms in people's glorified houses. the hosts happily make you meals on demand and help with whatever you may need. my need was to find a scooter for the next week, and my nice grandmotherly host quickly found the man for the job, a guy named anton who runs negombo's premier scooter rental enterprise - "cockney rebels east riders". if anyone reading this ever needs a scooter in sri lanka this is your man! i promised i'd promote him. it was an excellent scooter. i devised a way to squeeze my backpack into the scooter where one's legs should probably be, and set off on a week of cathartic scooting! i headed south into the chaotic traffic of sri lanka's capital colombo where i quickly became profoundly lost and had countless brushes with road accident death in the first few hours alone.

i was putting off deciding which direction to go in, but eventually decided on south. south of colombo i spent 2 nights in the beach town of hikkaduwa. after requisite ocean-swimming wake ups, massive and cheap full english breakfasts were leisurely enjoyed on the beach each morning, with copious sri lanka coffee and tea (tea is the country's claim to fame). during the intervening day i scooted down the coast to galle, the centerpiece of which is a picturesque moss-covered walled fort from the british colonial era. in it there are many old churches, a famous lighthouse, and some of the best rice and curry at a place called "mamas" where i made friends with some french people. sri lankan rice and curry is a plate of rice with about 3 - 8 different bowls of different curried things - all mixed together and eaten with one's right hand. near galle is one of the most idyllic beach towns imaginable called unawatuna. better than hikkaduwa. i scooted up an obscure mountain path for a few hours and found a bunch of buddhist temples.

sri lanka is mostly buddhist. there are also some chrsitians, which is great, and some hindus and muslims as well. most of the country speaks singhalese, while those in the far north speak tamil. the country is impressively on the mend after the end of a terrible three decade-long civil war that just ended in 2009. the war was between the government and the secessionist tamil tigers in the north of the island, who desired to create an independent state called tamil eelam. for decades they maintained complete control of the north of the country, which was was separated from the south by a militarized front. a friend of mine from college and probable future president of sri lanka, prashan, started an excellent ngo called "sri lanka unites" to bring youth from disparate ethnic and religious backgrounds together in unity after the war. he also had been the host of a nationally-syndicated talk show in sri lanka and chills with foreign dignitaries when they visit, making him probably the most important person i know. unfortunately we weren't able to meet up when i was there as he had just moved back to the united states to attend grad school. next time!

i then continued scooting around the south coast to an even more impossibly idyllic town called tangalle, where i stayed at a guesthouse called frangipane. it was around this time that it finally hit me that the sweet water of freshly opened (via machete) king coconuts was readily available from vendors along the side of the road for next to no cost, and i started stopping very frequently to indulge. i also began preferring to ride the scooter helmet-less, as the traffic was finally less frenetic. in the tranquil town i went on some shirtless long runs (and i thought people stared elsewhere), and chatted with a local english-speaking dentist over a dinner of hoppers, the local 10 cent foodstuff that consist of a egg inside something like a crepe! the south coast of sri lanka was one of the hardest hit areas of the 2004 tsunami; over 35,000 people lost their lives here :(

near tangalle i found a unique cave-temple complex called mulkigara on the side of a mountain with lots of monkeys. the scooter made all the difference as i never would have found or been able to get to all this cool stuff without it. the next big town was hambatota, which is seeing massive infrastructure development of late, not so subtly because it is the hometown of current sri lankan president mahina rajapaksa. the largest port in the country is being constructed there, and a brand new international airport, the country's second, has just opened. it currently handles 2 flights a day which is a little underwhelming, but maybe there will be more in the future. there are also hundreds of kilometers of brand new 6 lane expressways replete with state-of-the-art interchanges and flyovers around hambatota and the new airport, all of which are essentially unused as it is a relatively sparsely populated corner of the country. it was fascinating to scoot around on these roads and be the only traffic for miles. safe to say that all that money probably could have been put to better use elsewhere in the country.

the journey continues in the next post - click here.

sri lanka 2013 - getting there and back

i went to the beautiful island of sri lanka over the jewish sukkot holiday in october! the journey there and back was half the fun. it was only financially feasible (dirt cheap, actually!) to fly out of amman, jordan. strangely, the cheapest way to get to amman from beer sheva is to take a 4 hour bus all the way to the extreme southern tip of israel to cross the border from eilat, israel to aqaba, jordan, and then take another bus 5 hours north to amman. in eilat i stayed with some of my classmates who were doing their internal medicine clerkship there. thanks to mayuri for letting me sleep in her bed while she was gone! i really wanted to do my internal medicine clerkship in eilat as well but alas the spots were limited and luck wasn't on my side this time. a frustrating thing about this border crossing is that there is a monopolistic taxi mafia on the jordanian side. even though the city of aqaba is just a few kilometers away, they collaborate with the military to prevent anyone from walking. they charge exorbitantly for the short trip into aqaba and physically accost you when you try to arrange with others to share a cab. the bus from aqaba to amman on jett, the national bus company of jordan, is very pleasant however: there is even a stewardess who makes fresh arabic coffee and sandwiches for passengers on request! in amman i had a few hours to kill, so i smoked way too much shisha and chanced upon a huge brand new beautiful shopping mall called the galleria that had just opened!

after a late night flight to dubai, i slept on the airport floor in terminal 2 (an antiquated terminal for low cost airlines only), and found an excellent breakfast place across the street from the terminal - foul (arab bean paste) with pita and pickles for $1! i then took the metro south to the dubai marina, which is a huge new development that i hadn't been to yet. there is an excellent mall there, and a new epically tall building that is shaped like a spiral, ostensibly defying the laws of physics! then i took a monorail out onto one of dubai's massive man-made island paradises called the palm - from space it looks like a palm tree jutting into the gulf of arabia. at the tip of this palm tree is an opulent hotel called the atlantis. after numerous unsuccessful tries, i was able to find my way into the guests-only area through a back entrance. inside the hotel is the largest aquarium tank in the world, which when it was first unveiled contained a whale shark, the largest fish ever to be held in captivity. there is one of the nicest water parks in the world there as well, but unfortunately it is grossly overpriced so i was not able to avail myself of its awesomeness. finished the day at the dubai mall - the largest in the world! the newest proliferating coffee chain in the gulf region is canada's own tim hortons! there are about 4 outlets in the dubai mall, which i patronized about as many times! on my way back from sri lanka i again went to the dubai mall and spent an entire day there, because how could anyone ever get enough! kobe bryant was also visiting the mall that day with his entourage as publicity for its huge nike store.

coming back through jordan i spent a few late night hours discussing islam and christianity with a proselytizing muslim gentleman on the streets of amman. the following day i was able to cross from jordan into israel at the allenby border crossing - the most direct crossing between amman and jerusalem, saving an entire day of buses. interestingly, the reason tourists can cross from jordan to the israeli-occupied west bank but not the other way around (at least without a jordanian visa issued in advance) is that jordan officially still considers the west bank to be part of jordan (as it was before 1967), so will not issue visas at the border because in their view it is not a border. there is also another border crossing between northern israel and jordan - but its kind of in the middle of nowhere and public transportation is lacking, necessitating expensive taxis. the allenby border crossing is the only crossing that most palestinian residents of the west bank may use - and it is understaffed - so it is insanely overcrowded. it can take hours to push through the throngs of hundreds of palestinians trying to push their way to one or two open windows. there were some elderly women who were quite literally being crushed. more than one palestinian shared with me during the push-fest that they believe israel deliberately understaffs the terminal so as to make the crossing less than easy. then come the israeli interrogations, which in my experience are more intense there than elsewhere. always an enjoyable "welcome home" to be interrogated like you are a criminal.

this year's class video!