impressions of lanka

On the road to Kandy

Although I haven’t heard any statistics on road death in Sri Lanka, I’m quite sure it’s frequent.

-a graveyard, some stone markers, many white flags

-trucks so full of people that men stand on the open back, holding onto the top while standing like a door at the end of the flatbed, their toes holding on for life

-women beating their clothes in the river, washing wells or washing tanks

-motorcycles carrying huge towering bundles or boxes 4 times their size

-coconuts everywhere: great piles of them, or their husks

-mens' sarongs hitched up like miniskirts to relieve the heat

-women in colorful saris walking along the dirty streets with brightly colored umbrellas to protect their skin from the sun…the pharmacies have an amazing quantity of body lotions and facial products promising to whiten skin

-yellow butterflies everywhere, surrounding the car like so many dreams half forgotten in the moments between sleep and wakefulness

-temples, shrines, dagobas everywhere you turn serve as a reminder that the poor turn to God in whatever form they believe, while in cities God is widely forgotten

-dogs, everywhere is the same dog, every few yards is another of the same, which makes you wonder if you are really in a movie and they were just cutting down on the price of the sets by running the same background over and over again

-animals sleep on the road at night, the road retains warmth and the animals don’t seem terribly concerned about the cars...the cars in turn must take great care, because the animals can be numerous and quite big

-tuk tuks (three wheeler type cars/carriages/taxis) are not considered space on the road. Other cars pass them as if they do not exist, blithely swinging round even if there is a car coming from the other direction at the same moment.

-elephants in the distance in a clearing near the jungle in a wildlife reserve

-monkeys swinging from the trees above

-a poisonous water monitor slides into a pool of water and out of view

-chameleons blend with the trees and spiny plants

-a water buffalo founders in the deep muck of the paddy field that it’s plowing

-a bus has flipped off the road and into a ditch below, where it lies on its side. People are gathered. A military man radios for help. Our driver informs us that last week two Italian ladies and their jeep safari driver had an accident and died in the same place the week before. A few minutes later he shows us the jeep in a yard in town. The bus was there the next day.

-cows wander the streets...their owners are too poor to keep them on land, but I've been assured that at night they come home