Serendipity

Well folks,

In the same spirit as such spontaneous Dave adventures as the “Let’s Drive South Until it Gets Warm” tour of the Florida Keys… or the ever classic, “Let’s drive 9 hours to Cape Breton to party for ten hours and drive home” tour, I embarked on the “We’re going to Sri Lanka day after tomorrow, want to come?” tour. Good times.

Sri Lanka is a small island just off the coast of Southern India, (you may have heard of India, its Pakistan’s sparsely populated neighbour). It’s often called the tear-drop of India, and Marco Polo, inventor of swimming pool hide-and-seek the world over, thought it was the finest island of its size in the world. Which, of course, begs the question, did he not make it to Grand Manan? But no, Sri Lanka is slightly bigger than the gem of the Fundy Bay, with a population of 19 million. Just to make my mother feel that much more worried, the country was mired in a bloody terrorist war up until about two years ago. But, all seems well at the moment. The country is about 65% Buddhist, 15% Hindi (or is that Hindu, I can never remember), 13% Christian and 7% Muslim… does that add up? So culturally, it’s quite diverse. Since Buddhists abhor killing any living thing, animals roam the roads freely and everyone tries valiantly not to hit them. This includes Sri Lanka’s most famous animal, the elephant (except in that case you are less worried about hitting the elephant as you are of the elephant hitting you.)

So, I flew into the capital city of Columbo on Thursday afternoon, in the company of Zubair, (who reminds me so much of my friend Frank Candelorro, that I just started calling him Frank after a while), and Ali Adamjee, (a luxurious gourmand, who’s every word is virtually incomprehensible). First stop was the airport duty free. You should see Paki’s go wild with the sight of cheap booze during Ramadan. Then off to our hotel, where we struck out to see the city. We made it about 500 feet to the bar across the street. I could see what kind of vacation this was going to be. That night we hooked up with an old college buddy of Ali’s named Soren. With true maritime hospitality, he took us under his wing and to a fantastic restaurant with, what do you know, drinks to follow. Soren is the kind of guy that if you called him an optimist, it would be an insult (“That glass half full? Are you kidding? It’s over flowing! It’s the greatest drink in the world”). He really should work for Sri Lankan tourism, because he was willing to convince us that anything to do with his country was the absolute best thing ever! The next night he took us to a high society party, the Sri Lankan upper crust. It was definitely crusty, but an extremely tall woman with a long white wig who we nick-named Cher kept looking my way, so we had a good time nevertheless.

The next day, we hired a car and driver and struck off exploring down the coast. Sri Lanka is amazingly beautiful. On one side of the road are dense jungles, on the other, the beach. The locals are super friendly, but will try to rip you off at any turn. Everything is super cheap, so it doesn’t matter that much. It’s almost like a national pastime. I had the old, give back two 10’s instead of two 50’s pulled on me at least twice that I noticed. Whenever you catch them at it, it’s like you’re in on a joke. Good work! You caught me, now let’s get down to business, amongst chuckles and grins. We decided to stop in a town called Hikkaduwa, at a cheap but excellent hotel called the Moonbeam. From there, we alternately relaxed, drank, slept, and made little forays down the coast. One day we went further south to a large Buddhist Temple, which boasted 200,000 paintings of the 550 lives of the Buddha. On our way back, between bars (having a driver is great), we walked around the old fort walls of Galle, which were built by the Dutch in the 1650’s. Some tourist stuff for sure, but don’t worry much relaxing was to be had.

One of the nights at the moonbeam, it’s kind of hazy which night for some reason, we met our travel buddies. Three Canadian Girls, Naomi, Kerri and Jerilyne and a Hawaiian named Holly. They all teach at a school in Kuwait and were burning off some Ramadan steam like us. So we burnt the midnight oil with them a couple times, but don’t worry mom, I think they were more interested in the local surfers than the 2-Pak-Canuck team, and who can blame them, you should have seen the size of their long-boards.

So then back to Columbo, where we met up with Soren again, with predictable results. We also reunited with our Canadian/Hawaiian pals for some drink and dance. Not only were we capping off our vacations, we were also 7 people flying back to dry countries the next day. Good times.

The original Arab name for Sri Lanka was Saren Dib, which translates along the lines of bountiful island. But it is also where we get the word Serendipity, which, according to the Dave-Ford English Dictionary (only slightly less popular than Oxford) is, you know, making happy discoveries by accident. I couldn’t sum up this spontaneous trip better.