barefoot kottu — sigi/ciggy
in the morning the fella taking the pay on the local bus into colombo had a jerome bettis quality. little bit of a round guy. probably could handle skipping a couple meals, but light on his feet. it’s not so easy to move up and down the aisles collecting fares with how bumpy and aggressive the ride is. he manages it with skill. frankly it’s a little surprising he’s not thinner. dancing around like that all day in the heat.
i got a little offended by the old (very, very old) woman who sat right next to me and exchanged smiles only to bolt for another seat when i was looking out the window. got off at the colombo station and started walking around trying to find the best option (a combination of seat quality and speed) for continuing south. the train was beyond full, so not an option.
saw a dude in a corner sharpening a knife on a concrete wall. it would be reasonable to assume a large portion of the population is scarred by violence. most people grew up during a 26 year civil war that stretched from 1983 to 2009. economic instability and poverty don’t help.
i made it to the southern town weligama in time to drop off my pack at the hostel and get a long sunset walk on the beach.
i found a traditional sri lankan rice and curries dinner a little later on and the server was confused i offered to leave something like my id as collateral while i retrieved my wallet from the hostel. “it’s ok, you come back” he said, smiling. an innocent, almost childish, clear kindness is common in sri lankan interactions. some of the people are so kind it confused me. wondering what the angle is.
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barefoot kottu
i went to sri lanka because nicolas capitan told me to one day when we were driving mopeds around the countryside in laos. he said it was good and i wanted a beach, so there i went. i set my sights on the southwest coast.
from the colombo airport to the south shore is fourish bus hours with a couple connections. my flight from bangkok was scheduled to land at 11pm. i booked a small boutique hotel close to the airport that offered an airport pickup, with the idea of getting up and heading south in the morning. next thing i know i’m standing in the airport duty free shop buying perfume and wine for the hotel owner. if he would have turned out to be a weirdo it would have been a bit of a strange ask. for a minute there it did feel off to be messaging someone i don’t know on whatsapp about which perfume to buy. i’m not experienced at buying perfume. but he was fine. he just wanted to save a couple bucks. i get it.
immigration had a line but was no hassle on the visa. duty free line was slow on account of how much scotch the indian fellas in front of me were buying. by the time i got to customs i just wanted out of that goddamn airport. but as i walked up around twenty other people, all with way more luggage than i had, a customs dude made a beeline to me. i have experienced magnetism from these types before.
sri lanka customs guy asked, with a little confusion in the voice, if that was all i was carrying. frankly i’d been asked this a lot in the last month. mostly in hostel rooms. yes. it’s a small backpack. he thought this was suspicious. i’ll point out the obvious: there’s a hell of a lot less space to pack something ominous in a small backpack than in the wheeled luggage that rolled by while he made me empty the pack and asked me a few questions.
— —
i spent a week on the southern coast and spread my time around, which is easy to do with the frequency of the busses.
it is dirty and crowded and loud. there are a couple different types of bus options in sri lanka. there’s a line with red busses that look like wholesome 70’s transport vehicles, and then there’s a blue pimp my ride version that looks almost like whoever made the music video for crazy town’s 1999 “butterfly” morphed into a sri lankan and was made responsible for bus design aesthetic. i added the year there so you would not get it confused with any other absolute smash hits called “butterfly” by any other great bands called crazy town.
eventually i asked someone to explain this to me and i found out that the red ones are public, while the blue line is a private company. the entire experience contrasts. the red bus people are calm and their drivers drive like they have a wife, kids, and a future. the blue bus ticket takers operate like feral sheepdogs. they have bags under their eyes as they holler and round up as many helpless souls to pack into the bus like sardines at every stop. the blue drivers spend only half their time, if that, in their own lane, and they treat the horn like an improvisational jazz instrument.
a local told me meth is common amongst the private bus employees and said, “if you get the chance you should try to sit in the middle, probably.” apparently they have tipped. an expat told me that last year one of the blues turned a couple tourists and the mopeds they were cruising on into minced meat. there was trouble identifying the bodies.
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from weligama to galle (on a blue bus, not seated in the middle, because i am dumb) is only 45 minutes and 120 rupees so an afternoon in galle made sense. i learned the bookshop in galle is actually up on top of the bus station, because sanjeev saw i was walking around the street across looking at building signs and offered to walk me over.
i went to galle mainly to see the dutch fort and local maritime museum. for at least a couple thousand years this rocky peninsula has been a busy port location for global trade linking asian, arab, and mediterranean industry. in the 16th century the portuguese built a fort and the next century the dutch swiped it and built it up. the maritime importance of the fort contributes to what is still a very diverse town, ethnically and religiously. if you stroll along the 17th century fortifications you see crowds of locals spending time in the sea.
when in a country like sri lanka you sometimes have to curb your expectations about what a museum is going to hold for you. the highlight was definitely artifacts from a dutch shipwreck. none of which are all that entertaining to explain to anyone now that i think of it. but i read a lot of history books as a kid, and sometimes my interests are not so flashy. there were a bunch of smoking pipes from drowned sailors and a cannon and a big anchor and…
anyways, i ate kottu for the first time at the fort and the older man and woman working their little shop made me happy. kottu is sri lankan comfort food. the way midwesterners throw a bunch of shit together and mix it up and call it hot dish the sri lankans throw a bunch of flatbread, meat, veggies, and spices in a pan and chop it up with cleavers. the rat-tat-tat of kottu being chopped up is something you hear everywhere you go in sri lanka. it’s the type of thing that grows in your stomach and makes you want a little nappy. it’s the type of thing that also is sometimes served without cutlery. and as much as you sometimes long to “get in the local tradition” you’re happy you carry a camping spork in your backpack, because you don’t think of your hands as being the most sanitary thing in the world after a day of bus riding and walking around a fort sweating.
when i looked at the space between weligama and galle on a map, and for that matter the space i thought there would be when i went inland later, my delusional minnesota brain was thinking that it would mean there would be less people. more actual space. but:
minnesota = 86,939 square miles
sri lanka = 25,332 square miles
minnesota = 5,800,000 people
sri lanka = 23,000,000 people
escaping the crowd is a fallacy.
kid seated next to me guessed i was russian. what an insult. when i got off i saw a sign for chicago fried chicken — little did i know they specialized in such a thing.
street food guy handed me my samosas and spicy chickpeas in little self made envelopes constructed of completed kid’s workbooks. have less waste less.
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the beach towns of ahangama, weligama, mirisa, and hiriketiya are cool places to visit. they are also really good examples of smoothie bowl prosperity. you get enough white backpackers in a beach town and all the sudden the cafes have avocado toast listed next to the kottu and in a lot of them eventually no kottu.
i had a cool night at a hip as hell party full of almost all expats and european backpackers. these people put a skate bowl behind a restaurant and for years twice a week they’ve been throwing a big party where whoever is around and good enough can skate the bowl for a few hours while a crowd grows around them and a dj bumps music. it’s interesting that it exists. it’s hard to imagine in america for insurance purposes and in most traveling places it’s hard to imagine insofar as getting enough people around who can make it worth watching, but the surf culture supplies.
for my money i was waiting for the moment when someone sitting too close and not paying attention would get hurt, which inevitably happened when a skateboard clipped a couple melons of some kids who weren’t watching at all. seated only a few feet from the edge.
i was genuinely confused, and entertained, by the playlist. i guess i’m just at an age where i’m shocked about what from my childhood resonates with younger generations. akon’s mr lonely at the the fucking skate park in sri lanka? 50 cent, shaggy, nelly, fat joe, and when i comment my surprise that hip hop tracks that were hot at my junior high dances are popular abroad a swiss girl informs me that these tunes have had a renaissance on tiktok. the simulation is a strange place to be.
a backpacker in hiriketiya told me she was there a decade ago and aside from the beach it was quite literally unrecognizable. it is common fare on the backpacker lingo menu, which you will find is maddeningly small, to say “it was better ten years ago in (list town)”, and i myself do this, but who are we to shame their development because we like to say we wish for a more “genuine” experience? maybe they want their incomes to go up with tourist money. maybe they want iphones.
maybe it was better for them before, i don’t know. one of the books i picked up in galle with the help of my guy sanjeev i finished very fast because it was so good but god damn was it depressing. kamala markandaya’s 1954 nectar in a seieve is about a peasant farming family’s life struggles and the challenges brought on to their community in rural india by industrialization. one thing we learn as we age that is difficult for many of us to keep in mind is that the good things do not go together.
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“For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and no farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money.” — kamala markandaya
i’ve thought a lot when in these countries about the types of people in my homeland who say stupid shit about the less fortunate like “they just gotta pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” and i’ve been very happy to not have been raised to think like that. at base almost all of your successes are a function of luck.
kaveeshi told me on his walk home from school it’s time to start thinking about a job if he doesn’t pass his next exam. kaveeshi is nine.
“What then of this bright fearless child who boasted that he stood alone? There is a limit to the achievements of human courage.” — kamala markandaya
—
when on the coast it’s just plain dumb to not make your way towards it for sunset. sri lankan sunsets were great. one mark against them is they don’t make it very easy to get beer. i like the code that governs places like mexico or thailand. solo beers in every little shop. twenty ouncers too. if i were global czar for a day i would make a rule that beach towns have to sell solo beers in every shop. hell let’s throw in solo cigs. make sunsets great again, or something.
on one pretty beach night on the south coast i got lucky. all the sudden like fifteen people were gathered around making hullabaloo pretty close to me so i walked over. my first instinct was that someone must be hurt, but when i got closer i realized little boinky baby sea turtles were just pouring out of the ground. poor bastards don’t know almost all of them won’t be alive very soon. some of them will drown. most of them will be a crunchy snack for some other hungry animal. but some of them will see the next century. the good things don’t go together.
the next morning i was sitting alone in a hostel common space pumping my fists like a psychopath for the wolves. can take the boy out of the country, but…
—
this train we are talking about is not a fast train. for that you quickly become thankful. each turn and town is a slice of hilton’s shangri-la. green peaks and winding roads. temples and mosques. homes and hotels perched on cliffs that would be perfect for sunrise or sunset. the train also doesn’t feel like a novelty. which is another thing to be thankful for in an area where you often are left to feel like a building or experience was only constructed for the sake of foreigners. which feels “a little icky”, as the british woman on the safari said. it was the rare example of a british person abroad saying something worth listening to.
safari is a term perhaps a bit bastardized. i’m protective of terms, frequently telling my dad that the story he just told was about a walk, it was not about a hike. a bar in minneapolis recently pitched its own opening as an “elevated dive bar”, and for that they deserve a basket of molotov cocktails. i might think that a safari would require more than a couple hour ride on tiered seating in the bed of a pickup through a gorgeous national park. i may just be responding to the poor luck with regard to sightseeing. i was in the national park with the highest density of leopards in the world, and it’s also known for having a lot of elephants.i saw neither. felt pretty bad for the guide, who obviously stresses about these things. no regrets on the going though. most of life is not the peak. i saw some peacocks, monkeys, and water buffaloes. the terrain was nice. the best moments were when we turned the truck off and sat. listening. the sense most valued in travel is sight. the one most commented on when it is violated is smell. the sense most overlooked is sound. it was good to hear yala national park.
perhaps the most entertaining part of it all was the irish dude who seemed very shocked and concerned about bumpiness. it’s just plain funny to hear an irish, kinda gay sounding (you get what i mean don’t overthink it) guy repeatedly say “oh god” when the truck leans just a bit. i considered the bumpiness level to be minimal. anyone who grew up in rural stearns county would not be shocked at the roads. i’ve been on pickups and four wheelers all my life that came closer to catastrophe.
sigi/ciggy
alright back to basics. tommy said that to himself. tommy had more reason than most to have to convince himself of that. be his own teacher. you figure it out when you have to, i guess.
two nights in ella looking at mountains and waterfalls. finished both my galle books so was on the hunt. an empty promise through a window to a small stack of books at a shop where i saw a mcmurty. returned when the shop was open to find it was a german copy. shucks.
no books for a seven hour train ride to kandy. hostel wifi wasn’t cooking with peanut oil that morning so had a hard time downloading some pods. shucks.
coffee spilt at the train station while i tried tying my shoes with a dunhill in my mouth and my kavu swung off. shucks.
was the second coffee anyways. ella to kandy is supposed to be one of the most beautiful stretches of train track in the world, so the books and pods thing shouldn’t be a problem. just because i’m conditioned (i.e. spoiled by modernity) it feels a bit like going into the arena with no sword. because:
“all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — blaise pascall
just look at the trees young man (how much longer will the qualifier “young” apply?). it was enough for your species for millions of years.
back to basics.
my country did a boo boo robbing itself of trains. it is irredeemably stupid one cannot go from fargo to msp to duluth on a train in a decent amount of time at a reasonable price. it’s a great way to travel. even if the dutch kids in front of you won’t shut their fucking mouths.
one of the few things i’d gotten right in the last few days was that i booked the 6:30am train as opposed to the later options. the sky in the mountains is a sharp blue in the morning, and each afternoon becomes overcast and drizzles at least a bit. or outright pours. which led me to learn my new rain jacket falls into the water-resistant category as opposed to the waterproof one. good to know.
i was victim of distorted views in ella for a couple days before that train ride. there is a beautiful, famous 1919 train bridge that i went to catch a late afternoon at outside of ella and the worker at the cafe i was looking out from told me it’s way better in the morning.
on a hike my view from ella rock would have improved if the wolves didn’t have a playoff game that morning. or at least a little better if they would have played at 6am local time instead of 7:30am, like they did game one. by the time i was up to the peak it was raining. i couldn’t see shit. there was lightning and i wondered if i was about to be turned into a crunchy fried cricket. plus we lost the goddamn game. this proving that being a minnesota sports fan never ceases finding ways to fuck you.
but a hike can’t be taken on only for destination. that’s an error often made by the instagram-obsessed generations. if you don’t actually like or at minimum find a way to get something experientially out of the trail to the peak i have some sad sack news for you pal: most of life is not the peak.
the park is unfortunately crowded. sitting in line at the entrance in a row of duplicative pickups is what the british woman was talking about. as a tourist i say, there are too many tourists. the train did not make me feel that way at all. there are loads of tourists on it for the same reason i was. they saw a headline proclaiming its beauty. but each stop had a stream of locals using it for exactly the reason it was constructed in 1924.
you’ll catch miles upon miles of tea plantations out the window. tea pickers with big bags on their backs, working the hills. this an industry that has been thriving for the last couple centuries. sri lanka is not a big country but it is responsible for about 18% of global tea exports and tea is a massive regional employer. in nectar in a seieve two of the narrator’s boys leave india to work in the ceylon (sri lanka) tea industry and their mother says at the moment they depart she knows she’ll never sees them again. she does not.
i’ve said before how i have been carrying a notebook around for six or seven years consistently and almost never using it but being incredibly thankful i have it on the rare occasions i do. that train ride proving the point. back to basics.
—
i spent enough time as a beach bum on the southern shore that the trip required a little haste for a stretch. i wrote on april 20th that i was “getting my ducks in a row”. sometimes you put a few transportations and stays on the calendar and it helps you ping along. this was supposedly going to happen at a coffee shop session on april 20th. it did not happen at a coffee shop session on april 20th, as these thing go. it happened over the course of the next four days. the ducks bouncing around and fucking off. but eventually.
a ticket for april 28 to bring me to istanbul, putting the asia leg of the tour on its last week and giving me a reason to leave the coast on the 22nd early in the morning. get to ella. get to kandy. get to dambulla. see the national park see some mountains see the train. see sigiriya.
i knew when i got off the seven hour train ride in kandy that i wouldn’t stay there for a night. i wanted to get to further north to dambulla so i was closer to sigiriya, but i also wanted to not go immediately from a seven hour train ride to a three hour bus ride. i started walking around kandy to move my bones a bit. had a mission of finding a coffee shop with a/c and a bookstore. the first couple i saw on the map weren’t so much bookstores and the third only had books in tamil. i persisted and struck gold at the fourth, finding an orhan pamuk. fitting because he’s from istanbul.
while i wandered around it looked like almost everyone was in white. at the train station it was noticeable, as i got a few blocks away it was obvious an event i was completely naive to was taking place. it was festive. packed. someone handed me a free watermelon, which i was very thankful for.
a dude working in the cafe, housed in an 1800 building that was originally a horse stable, explained to me that for only ten days a tooth allegedly belonging to the buddha was displayed in a nearby temple. a couple million people descend on the city to get a chance to peak at the tooth. i asked how long they got to see it. he smiled and said, “maybe half a second.”
on the bus leaving kandy it was miles and miles of people sitting on the side of the road in white. taking naps on plastic tarps. swaths of people just waiting for their chance to glance at the tooth or to return home. my own bus was packed, as these things usually are. there must have been close to a hundred people on a bus with seats for fifty.
transit day food. three samosas and a bag of spicy pineapple from a vendor on the train for 500 rupees. little sweet something from a muslim bakery for 100 rupees. cooked dahl cake from a street cart before the bus for 50 rupees. seeking the sri lankan equivalent to caribou coffee for it’s cheapness and reliability with regards to wifi and aircon.
—
“they built a lion’s face on the side of a mountain. that’s rock and roll.” — ryz
the next morning i woke up on the outskirts of dambulla and walked into town. four shots of espresso with a chocolate croissant because coffee is a fun drug and i knew i would have many steps ahead of me walking around sigiriya.
in the fifth century ce a fairly vain king killed his dad so he could take the throne and then he built a city around and on top of a tabletop 660 foot rock. he took the high ground not only for its beauty but its safety. his brother, who was the rightful heir to the throne, went into exile. the ruins are held in esteem as a unesco heritage site and the city planning is marveled at to this day.
they constructed gardens and reservoirs with hydraulic systems that still work. they had a gateway in the shape of a lion to lead from the ground floor up to the peak. he had the wall of a walkway constructed with a shiny plaster so he could look at himself. one entire side of the rock is believed to have been covered in frescoes. the remaining ones, as well as some sculpted art in the museum, share an obvious feature: the artists either took great liberties or all the women in this culture had incredible racks. a whole gang of sri lankan salma hayeks.
eventually his brother returned with a force ready to fuck shit up. the king’s own army deserted him on the battlefield and he committed suicide. no battle happened. i saw suggested somewhere that his soldiers mistook a signal he gave and fled in error, the whole thing a misunderstanding. regardless, he built a city to be king of the hill and lost it in sadly anticlimactic fashion. it would make the worst movie ever.
the tendency in modernity is to assume all our capabilities have improved with time. certainly this is true in certain domains — we are right to want modern medicine. but there’s a near to zero percent chance a gang of our most brilliant modern engineers could make sigiriya happen again if dropped on the rock. i think of a passage in chris ryan’s civilized to deathabout the amount of knowledge it would take to be a hunter-gatherer and how nobody commits that much knowledge to memory and instinct any more. there used to be people alive who had the entire bible or koran memorized. think about that. some skills have atrophied. i have friends who live in minneapolis who might not know the cardinal direction to stillwater.
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salons with signs that say “saloons”. first time i saw one i thought maybe it means there’s both in there. red mouths of betel chewers. seems like a working class habit. saw a drink wisconsibly shirt and badger hat coming down from sigiriya. the world is large but sometimes not. finding the south asian head wobble endearing. drinking a juice and eating popcorn in a bus station to wait out torrential rain.
—
a couple ducks left. after sigiriya it was a four hour day of busses to get to negombo for a day and a half before getting to the airport. still had to sort out that first night in istanbul for monday night by saturday night when i sat in a full restaurant and sipped on a lion lager listening to some sri lankan dudes play a bunch of western classic hits. oasis and the eagles and john mayer. stuff like that before switching gears to local tunes. the monday night thing remained unresolved until sunday afternoon.
cotton candy skies mate! just fucking look at it! there’s trash all over the beach but they’re playing volleyball and cricket here and the sun is setting. yeah well what now.
“can i feel another way?
or are less and more the same?
can i really still complain?
to be back here once again”
— there’s a rhythm, bon iver
still had to do a little homework on istanbul. it’s big. try to avoid an unforced error on where to stay and what neighborhoods to wander. maybe should send out the preliminary scouts, so to speak, on what route i should try getting from istanbul to budapest. i know nothing.
but by the airport i’ve been gone for 40 days and slept in 24 places and seen 3 countries and am destined to land, inshallah, early afternoon monday in a 4th. i’ve only a couple changes of clothes and my little backpack carries more than i need.
back to basics.
—
and when i become restless about what in the god damn fuck i’m doing with my life, thoughts that come with the territory and of their own timing or accord, i try to remind myself that i will get there. or more precisely that you always are already there if you’re not too thick skulled to open your sorry pagan eyes and realize it. there’s nowhere else you can be.
“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.” — tinkers, paul harding