Early Retirement Month 17: Sri Lanka Snippets

How did we go from Early Retirement Month 7 in the last post to Month 17? Well… after the months of traveling last year, I went back home and did not have many more travel updates to give. However, I’m traveling again, doing another two months in Southeast Asia, visiting Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Here’s a few snippets from solo traveling in Sri Lanka.

The Bus

On the bus, airport to train station. There’s no sign, so I stand at the side of the road with my backpack and handbag. A man leans out from the bus door, “Combocolombocolomboomboooo,” he yells. Definitely my bus. I am barely through the door when it lurches forward. I perch my backpack on my knees, the girl next to me gestures for me to put my handbag on her lap. “Okay, okay,” she says.

In front of me, there is an older lady with smile lines around her eyes. She looks back at me, “Beautiful,” she says. I smile, but tightly. I know my whiteness means I meet a beauty standard levied against the people here. She reaches for my hand and I give it, she takes her hand back and kisses it, like she just touched somebody special. “Welcome to our country.” Later, she takes a red spiky fruit, peels it. It’s called rambutan, but I keep forgetting and calling it Rasputin Fruit. She offers a bite to her husband across the row. Then she turns to me, half-eaten fruit offered to me for a taste. I shake my head, but am touched by the gesture.

The girl asks if I am traveling alone, and with a ‘yes’, her eyes widen. “You have to be careful,” she says. “Some guys… they have bad habits. Where are you going?” I tell her the train station. “I will walk with you there,” she says with finality. I know I can get there myself, but I let her. We get chased by tuk tuk drivers but her presence stymies them. I’m relieved. “Nangi,” they say, little sister, are you friends with this tourist? She says she is, so they leave us. I know they’d follow me all the way to the train station if I were alone. When I stepped out of the airport, it became clear that the punishment for saying no to the first tuk tuk was the curse to say no to a hundred more on the ten minute walk to the bus stop.

Skipping Class

I am outside of Kandy after taking a 40 minute tuk tuk ride, where the driver pulled over to show me photos of an accident. “Coma, 2 years,” he says, hand to throat, tilting his head up and closing his eyes. Later he stops again to put his hands to his head, bow to me, and then pretends to cry. He sniffles for the rest of the journey, peeking at me in the mirror to see if I feel bad enough to tip him.

Bosco leads me now up past a 2000 year-old Buddhist temple. I pepper him with questions. “How do you say older brother?” I keep mixing up Ayiya and Akka, older brother and sister. I know from my time in Nepal that these are useful words to know, ways to get someone’s attention. Bosco slips a little on the rock. “How do you say careful?”

“Parisaming.”

“Parisamin?”

“Ming, ming.”

“Parisamean?”

“Parisaming, like ‘ing’.”

Later I say it at a waterfall, when I slip and a local woman reaches to help me, shampoo in her hair. Parisaming.

At the top, a view of the lake, six girls taking photos and six dogs waiting for snacks. My heart in my throat when one girl throws snacks that go over the side, the dog chasing. It stops right before the edge, momentum threatening to send it over.

I take a breath, then take in the view. “How do you say, beautiful?” “La-sah-nigh.”

I hear it later on a bus ride, blaring over the speakers, lassanayi, lassanayi, lassanayi. I get it mixed up with delicious, ra-sigh. I hope I don’t tell someone they are delicious when I mean to say beautiful.

Bosco says something to the girls and they all giggle. “What did you say?”

“They are skipping class, so I asked them if school was on top of the rock.”

Kandy to Ella Train

My feet are going numb, crammed into the train from Kandy to Ella. Two fans whirr above us, keeping me from melting completely into a puddle of sweat, though I can still feel the slide of drops down my back. Men at the front beat some drums to tunes the rest of the car knows, clapping along. For the first hour, it is a delight. By the third, I scan the rows at every stop, hoping to see the shifting of someone getting ready to get off. I pull out the samosa I bought at the train station, doing my best to contain the flakes. The other tourists buy theirs from the man somehow making his way through the jam, plastic bucket above his head.

A woman in front of me pulls up a blog article on her phone about the route. Which side to sit on (right at the start, left at the end, irrelevant to us), when to lean out the door for the instagram shot (no thanks). When I was little I met a man with an amputated leg. I called him “Jeffica,” mixing his name with mine, an honor. All I know is that the accident had something to do with a train, so I will be keeping my arms and legs inside the ride at all times. The woman scrolls a little further. We really regret that we did not bring our own food. We ate the food on the trains and as a result had food poisoning for the next 36 hours. Oh dear. I fold the samosa wrapping and tuck it into my handbag. A man puts down his tray and gestures, at first I think he’s telling me I can sit there, but when I assess if it could possibly hold my weight, he points at my bag. It’s not heavy but it is in the way, so I set it down. Thinking about men with bad habits, I keep my hand on the strap.

An older lady gestures to an empty seat. There are locals closer who could slide in, but she’s picked me out, waving me over. I do not have the energy to argue, only enough energy to feel guilty that the lady gave up her seat for me. I contemplate offering her the seat again, but somebody moves and now I am in the middle seat between two ladies, talking to each other across from me. When they leave, I scoot over to the window, Yessss, the cool window, with a breeze and a view. Three boys squeeze into the two seats next to me. I feel a digging in my side, a weight. One of the boys fell asleep, he’s leaning into me.

Dutch Conditioner

My first night in a long time in a dorm. One girl hack coughs all night. “Heat stroke,” she says. She asks me for some shampoo, and I realize I left it at the little motel by the train station. She pulls out her conditioner, a massive pink bottle. So many Dutch people, the Dutch accent making me think of her. I want to ask them, do they know her, can they tell her I don’t have her number any more. I don’t know how she is, but maybe… maybe I could send a message through someone here, a friend of a friend. When you travel, the world feels smaller, you run into people from other cities, you connect through random coincidences.

I forgot what it was like to sleep through all the little things. The door opening and closing, the snores, the bathroom light clicking on. I go to a yoga class with some Germans I met on the train. I fall asleep in shavasana and later the man laughs and laughs, recounting the way I woke, bolting up, looking around, and doing a hasty bow. “I didn’t know I was asleep!” I say, “I thought I just didn’t hear her tell us to get up.” He laughs harder.

The Dutch woman leaves behind her conditioner. I text her to let her know it’s still here, and she replies, “Take it.” My hair has never been so lush and shiny.

If You Give A Monkey Some Juice

One more night in a hostel, then I book a cabana. It sounds luxurious, space to myself, but there’s no AC and it’s wicked hot. The hostess gives me some juice, sweat beading on her upper lip. I take a sip, but it’s too sweet. I leave it on the porch to unpack inside. When I go back out onto the porch, a monkey startles me as I startle him. He peers behind a bar of the porch. The juice is still full, but I get the sense that he’s measuring the space between him and the juice and me and the juice. Can he make a break for it?

I don’t know what to do with a monkey who wants juice, so I go back to the hostess. “Monkey,” I say. She grabs a gorilla mask, larger than her face and framed with a black mane. In her other hand she takes a broom, and scares away the monkey, his little paw dipped inside, half the juice now gone. A crew of six monkeys dump the glasses in the cabana next door, where the Germans are staying. At night I hear scratching, like something is trying to get in. “No!” I yell, and reach for the lights. My heart beats fast. The bathroom is half open to the outdoors, and I’m too panicked to go. What if the monkeys are back? I just remembered the ginger snap cookies in my backpack. I don’t have a gorilla mask handy.

Rose is our yoga teacher, calm voice telling us to do a reclined butterfly. I rest my head back, watching the geckos poach moths above. I close my eyes at her instruction. Breathing in, breathing out. Something hits my eye. I swipe it, look up. A gecko just pooped on my face. I tell Rose afterwards and she says one time the entire gecko fell on a woman’s face. “I’ve never heard such a scream.”

Before our next class, Rose tells me she left her window cracked last night, just enough for some airflow. She went to bed, closing her eyes for a second. She opened them to a massive monkey sitting on her table. With a shift from her, he startled and escaped out the window. “I don’t know how he got in! It was just a crack!” She says. I imagine a monkey climbing on the mosquito net. I sleep worse than in the shared dorm.

Tuk Tuks Fall Over

The bus ricochets down from Ella. I should be used to this after traveling in Nepal, in Vietnam, the constant near-death misses. I should have known better than to sit in the front of the bus, to witness the head on traffic as the driver blares the horn. The payment collector pauses to spray the flowers at the front of the bus, hanging by one arm as we careen around a corner.

We pass another bus, running a scooter completely off the road, his two arms in the air in incredulity. He is not the only one I see scattering off-road to miss the bus. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” A Dutch woman behind me cries when we go head-to-head with a cement-truck. “Don’t worry!” Her neighbor is a cheerful Australian, clutching her necklace in a fist, “Ganesh is looking out for us!”

There is a sign saying “Shartcuts cut shart life.”

When it’s my stop, a man waves me over and I squash myself past people, sorry, sorry, stumbling as the bus lurches. It slows to let me off but never stops completely. I jump off, running off the momentum to the cheers of some watching tuk tuk drivers. I think of Jeffica again, how easy it would be to be injured.

I share a tuk tuk with two other women, the tuk tuk takes a sharp turn down a steep hill and we all yell in surprise. He laughs, then we do too. I comfort myself with the knowledge that they do this type of driving every day, somehow avoiding accidents, living long lives. Then I meet a girl with a bandage on her thigh, huge bruise blooming.

“What happened?”

“My tuk tuk fell over.”

“What like, fell over completely?!”

She nods.

So much for that comfort.

A Hundred Little Legs

“You have been living here for a while, so you’ve probably seen this before,” I preface. “Do you mind if I show you a video?” I need to share it with someone, to see if I overreacted when I walked into my bathroom to an enormous centipede.

I made friends with a couple of Americans who bought property here in the south of Sri Lanka. I decided to go see their town and meet up again. They visited on vacation for three weeks, fell in love with the town, and bought the property before the end of their holiday. I love the impulsiveness of it, the feeling that this is it, the knowing. Or maybe just the acting in spite of the unknowns.

We spend the day together, first surfing in the morning, where I get pummeled by a set so hard that I leak sea water out of my nose for the rest of the day. Then we load up their puppies in their truck and take them to the beach. The puppies are endless entertainment. She does a tarot reading for me on our sarongs, one puppy gnawing at the box of cards, the other stumbling over the lay out. In the evening we get dinner, and we’ve been talking about all the creepy crawlies on the island.

Enormous and wiggling, I yelled when I first opened the door. It couldn’t climb up the sides of the sink, but it wouldn’t fit down the drain either. I tried washing it down, but it panicked, undulating in a way that activated primal fear in me. I decided to leave it alone. It groomed itself, leg by leg, pincers waving in the air.

“I didn’t kill it. I mean I am in its home,” I say to my friend.

“No, it is in YOUR home!” She exclaims, making me feel better for my failed attempt at trying to wash it down the drain. When I show her the video, she yelps, “That’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen.” Vindication. “It’s poisonous you know.” I send my sister a video and she is faux mad that I even showed it to her. “I am never going to Sri Lanka,” she jokes.

The worst part is that the next time I go into the bathroom, it has disappeared. At night, I stuff a mat under the bathroom door.