Tuesday August 22^nd – Colombo

So it has been some time since I last updated my journal.  The reason being that nothing of note has happened lately, at least not that I was directly involved in.  Mostly my life has been fairly mundane, going to the office and the gym every day and back to my modest 3 bedroom “fortress of solitude” in a nearby suburb. 

Because I realized recently I have only a few more months here (it is only 7 1/2 weeks now) I’ve been trying to get out a bit on my weekends.  Mostly I have been heading down to Unawatuna, a beach resort about 120km down the coast (it takes three hours to get there though) which has been pretty good.  There are a lot of travelers there and there is a beach party on every Friday and Saturday (at the same 2 restaurants – and with the same DJ with the same playlist) so it’s a pretty good night out.  Plus the place where I stay is next door to Friday nights venue (the Happy Banana) so I don’t have much choice but to go along – I can’t get to sleep until the night winds down anyway.  Accommodation here is ridiculously cheap – my usual room is $13 US a night but last weekend I upgraded to a $20 a night room with air conditioning, a standard meal costs around $3 and a longneck stubbie $2 so it’s a fairly idyllic place.  I will try to put some photo’s up of the area – some of it is pretty nice. 

One of the interesting “cultural” quirks of Sri Lankan beach towns is the population of “beach boys” (not the Californians who sing in harmony).  Beach boys are young Sri Lankan males who hang around the beach all day, smoking marijuana (among other things) and trying to pick up white girls (which to be fair they are reasonably adept at – more so than me anyway).  They are most active on Friday and Saturday nights at whatever venue is hosting that nights’ party.  No sooner has a girl or group of girls stepped onto the dance floor than they are surrounded by long haired locals in tight t-shirts trying to dance in close.  They are also quite “protective” of what they perceive to be “their” girls (any girl in the place).  Last Friday I was standing at the bar when waiting for a drink when a girl stood in the spot next to me to order.  Within 10 seconds a beach boy had wedged himself into the non-existent space between us with his back to me to make sure I had no chance of starting a conversation with “his” girl.  It’s pretty funny to watch if you stand back and observe how they operate. There must not be many groups of blokes traveling through Unawatuna though because I’m sure these guys would get beaten up pretty regularly if there were.  Getting sheparded away from any girl that walks past – especially when you are just talking to someone else (or if the girl is good looking) does get on your nerves a bit.

I also spent a weekend at the Cinnamon Grand – my favorite hotel here.  It’s a bit more expensive but still very cheap by Australian standards – probably on a par with the Hyatt but for $70 a night (with my UN ID special discount)  The South African Cricket team was staying there at the same time I was and mostly they could be found at the bar by the pool drinking beer.  Surprisingly it was Castle Larger – their sponsor – not sure how they got that over here – the hotel must have stocked it specifically.  I only left the hotel once over the weekend and that was to get lunch so it was pretty relaxing – the pool there is great and because the lobbies and all the restaurants are air conditioned its nice to walk around without sweating for a change.  The hotel also happened to be just across the road from where Friday night drinks were so it was an easy stagger home.

Back in the real world there has been quite a lot of violence in the North and East of the country.  It may have been reported back home about the Tigers closing off a sluice gate which supplies irrigation to a government controlled area to the south.  This has triggered a month of fighting which doesn’t look likely to end anytime soon and has meant that I am unable to travel to Jaffna, Trincomalee and Killinochi where I was due to do some field visits over the last few weeks – coincidently Jaffna and Trinco are the towns where most of the fighting is taking place and Killinochi is usually described as a “rebel stronghold” so I might be sitting around the office waiting for a while yet. 

The sluice gate that was at the centre of all this is the most pathetic looking thing to fight about – it’s just a small valve in a canal that looks more like an open drain.  I’m fairly sure if the army had anyone who was a decent shot with a mortar one round would have destroyed the weir, water flows again, problem solved.  Unfortunately no-one seems to think like that here.  The army has been just as big a cause of the problems as the Tamil Tigers, at one stage the Tigers were on their way to open the gate with the head of the peace monitoring mission (who had informed the army he was on his way) and the army opened fire with heavy artillery and nearly shelled his 4wd.  Both sides blatantly lie about everything from casualty figures to who started what and there is a lot of blame being passed back and forth over 17 aid workers who were executed in Trinco.  Personally my money is on the army given that 16 of them were Tamils and the investigation has basically been swept under the rug.  I’m painting a bit of a bleak picture about this but for the most part life goes on as normal in Colombo and we just hear half fabricated reports from the mostly government controlled media.  It’s almost as if it’s all happening in another country, certainly at no point have I felt in any danger. 

We’ve even had 2 bombs go off here in Colombo in the past fortnight (thanks no-one for checking if I was still alive) but even then I tend to view these things with a sense of detachment.  The first was a few km’s south of here and I happened to be meeting some people round the corner from where it happened later that night.  It was a bit weird walking across the intersection where it happened – there was glass still on the road and a bit of police tape – but everything else had been cleared away and traffic was still going through.  My tuk tuk driver had been a bit nervous though when I told him where I wanted to be dropped off. 

The second was quite close to the office – about 1 ½ kms away and along the road I go when I head into town.  It was reported as an attack on the Pakistani Ambassador but I’m not sure that the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) are that organized – I suspect they were just trying to get the army truck that was escorting him – the army barracks is just down the road and there would be trucks heading down there all the time so probably just bad luck on the Pakistani’s part – although he was unhurt.  Again everything was cleared away and life returned to normal pretty quickly.  Sri Lankans seem to take these things in their stride and don’t get too worked up about them.  This incidentally was the blast the made the South African Cricket team decide to abandon their tour which they have been absolutely slated for in the press here.  The media in Sri Lanka is not above mudslinging, particularly when it comes to foreign sporting teams.  The South Africans have been called cowards, it’s been suggested they left because they were worried about losing the one dayers, the Australian team has even been dragged into it for their refusal to come here during the 1995 world cup after a similar blast.   In fact every cancelled tour or match for the last 20 years has been blamed on foreign teams not being man enough to come and play here (that’s the description used in the papers). 

Another interesting aside to this whole ”civil war” thing is that there was a peace rally here the other day organized by anti war Buddhist monks.  The demonstration was then disrupted by (I shit you not) pro war Buddhist monks who got up on stage and tried to take over.    Who has ever heard of pro war Buddhist monks.  I like to imagine they are like those Shoalin fighting monks who are all kung foo experts but unfortunately there was no Jackie Chan style action on the TV coverage.  Only in Sri Lanka.  I wonder if the pro war monks also like to go deer hunting and get in bar fights.  Perhaps George Bush should get some of these guys when he is up for re-election – I mean if a Buddhist monk says’ it’s ok…..

I will leave it there for this entry.  Am hoping to get to some of the more interesting (less civil war type) locations in Sri Lanka before I leave so will write more when I have seen some of those.