Quik Thinking

I met Anita at the airport in Colombo. She'd also quit her engineering job in California last year and had been traveling around India for a few months. Like me, she'd been part of the bicycling community in San Francisco and used to get her veggies from a local farm. Unlike me, she'd arrived in Sri Lanka with an enormous backpack containing most of the stuff she'd been lugging around the Himalayas all Winter. Neither of us had a concrete idea of what we wanted to see in Sri Lanka, aside from living in hostels, taking trains/buses and eating cheap local food. We were, it seemed, destined to be travel buddies.

As we left the airport in search of a bus to the city, we were harangued by a plague of tuk-tuk drivers. It was a herald of things to come. The bus ride into the city ended up taking over two hours, long enough for my hunger pangs to kick in. Fortunately Anita had brought with her a ripe guava from India. She gave it to me and it was delicious. I liked her already.

Upon reaching Colombo, we found a tourist information office and inquired about taking trains around the country. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves getting the hard sell for a fancy package tour from this alleged government official. Feeling uneasy about the whole situation, we insisted that we wanted to take buses instead of hiring a private driver and left, although we decided to roughly follow the itinerary he had suggested for us, since it sounded pretty compelling.

We also took his recommendation on a place for lunch. The staff there must have found us most entertaining because they stood by our table and watched us eat with giant grins plastered across their faces. Eventually, however, my slow pace of eating wore them down and they literally pleaded with us to leave so they could seat other customers! Acquiescing, we bought 1st class train tickets to Kandy and then caught a bus to a beach-side hostel in nearby Mt. Lavinia.

After checking into a triple room that we shared with a Japanese girl, we walked to the beach. First we splashed around in the salty waves, then we build castles on the beautiful sand. When the sun grew too hot, we lay down under a parasol and chatted, our conversation punctuated by the local train as it rumbled passed. Soon we grew hungry and bought some snacks, including a king coconut. King coconuts are different from the ones I'd been used to in Malaysia because they have only water and no flesh. Even so, they're cheaper than bottled water and far tastier.

As we devoured our snacks, a gang of young Sri Lankans, mostly guys, showed up on on the beach. They told us they were engineering students from a nearby university and had come to party on the beach. It was fun to watch them dancing and we spent some time talking to a few of them. One of them was shocked to hear that there were no coconuts grown in the US. Evidently he'd seen palm trees on CSI Miami and assumed that they were coconut palms!

At Anita's urging, we ended our night on the beach by dissecting the shell of a coconut. It was to be the first of many random things we dissected. A girl after my own heart indeed.

In the morning we walked down the tracks to the nearby train station and rode the local train into Colombo. We'd been hoping to lie on the grass in a park but the grass was withered from the heat so we strolled along the beach instead. Anita wasn't feeling too well that morning so we soon stopped to rest at a nearby Buddhist temple that had a large golden statue and an interesting pagoda with depictions of the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

After resting for a while, we headed back to the train station for lunch. The place we picked for lunch had a wonderful surprise in store for us: they served faluda, a delicious milky drink that I that despaired about ever finding again after I left Karachi. Anita had never tasted it before but after just one sip she had been won over. Although we were bowled over by the availability of faluda, we did have some trouble asking for a more mundane item: salt. Anita wanted some to help with her dehydration but we simply could not get across the concept of salt to the one waiter who spoke any English! After a long and frustrating struggle to communicate our desire for salt, another patron took pity on us and translated the word. I think the poor waiter was almost as relieved as we were.

When we returned to the beach, I spotted a bunch of guys playing cricket there. I was a little surprised that they were able to do so without constantly losing their ball to the waves. I actually wanted to join them but I was too tired and thirsty to bother. Instead we just relaxed at our hostel for a few hours before heading out for a bite.

There was a little restaurant on the main road near the hostel that appeared to have cheap local food. Inside it was a guy constantly chopping a mixture of veggies and meat with a pair of large metal implements. It sounded something like a drum beat and grabbed our attention as we walked by so we walked in and ordered the stuff he'd been making, which is called kutto. I was fascinated to discover that they served the food on a sheet of cling foil! Not only does this eliminate the need for washing plates but it makes for an instant doggie-bag at the end of the meal.