Sri Lanka, Day Two
This morning, we woke up to find that the Hindu temple we can see from the balcony didn’t blast off to the moon during the night. Pity. That would’ve been neat.
Remember: you can click any pic to see it fully on your screen without scrolling.
Sorry, bad joke. It’s just that when we first saw the silhouette of this thing thru the smog, it reminded me a an exhibit we saw in Reykjavik, Iceland: The Art of Tintin. In that exhibit was this:
Speaking of things we saw in the smog as we approached Colombo, there were some buildings that seem to have had some issues - like one of the towers falling against the other.
As it turns out, it’s a new apartment building complex called “Altair”. Really interesting!
Moshe Safdie is the architect, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because he also designed Habitat 67 in Montreal, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Terminal 1 of YYZ, Toronto, Library Square in Vancouver, the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, and the Jewel Changi Airport, also in Singapore, which includes the Rain Vortex - the world’s largest indoor waterfall. It’s absolutely spectacular.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We got on the bus for our included tour and I think that our tour guide and our shipmates on this particular tour joined forces to find new and creative ways to frustrate the two of us as much as possible. It started with a lengthy “test out your listening devices to make sure they work” routine - which is done at the start of every tour - but some of the folks on this bus seem to have been seeing one of these things for the first time. How do I turn it on? How do I choose the channel? Which channel is it again? (It’s always the same channel as our bus number.) The guy sitting in front of me couldn’t get his to turn on, so his wife sighed heavily, rolled her eyes, then moved over and took it from him and said, “like this.” And then she proceeded to tell him which buttons to push as if he were a child. Sadly, everything she showed him was wrong, and she couldn’t get it to work, either. Eventually, we were off and running (oh, by the way, we never used those headsets that we wasted all that time on.) Unlike yesterday’s modern mall, the Colombo we saw today was more in line with what I expected Sri Lanka to look like.
Drove past the Town Hall, which the guide said “looks like the White House.” It actually looks like the US Capitol building, but nobody bothered to correct him.
Across the street from the Town Hall is a golden Buddha.
Sri Lanka has temples, mosques, and churches in abundance. We passed a few Christian churches, which were modest in size. The mosques were more elaborate, such as the Jami-Ul-Alfar Mosque Sinhala, or “Red Mosque.”
We didn’t stop in any Hindu temples (I would’ve liked to have seen the inside of the rocket ship one, but I don’t think the majority of our group could’ve made it up all those stairs) but we did have a stop at the Buddhist Vajiraramaya Temple. It was quite something. To give a sense of scale, the figure of the man in the red cloth wrap at Buddha’s knee is normal human size.
About now, you might be thinking to yourself (as I did), “hang on… that’s Buddha? What about the half-naked fat guy who’s always laughing?” As it turns out, those two people (they were both actual people) lived about 1400 years apart. This Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is the founder of Buddhist philosophy. “Buddha” is a descriptive term for “enlightened one” and doesn’t specifically refer to a single person. Sometimes this Buddha is shown as a gaunt, starving figure - basically a living skeleton - to indicate the period in Siddhartha Gautama’s life where he starved himself for six years as a means of escaping life’s troubles. Eventually, he decided that extremism in any form was a load of crap and he advised a “middle way”, moderation rather than extremism, as the way to enlightenment. This is why you never hear of “extremist” or “radical” Buddhists. The more into Buddhism you get, the less extremist you become.
The fat Buddha you’re likely familiar with was a wandering monk in China about 1400 years after Siddhartha Gautama. He is sometimes called Budai or Pu-tai and his kindness and generosity were legendary to the point that he was considered bhodisatva, a Buddhist saint. It was expected that he would become Buddha in the future and this, plus the similar-sounding name Budai might be why he’s often called the ‘laughing Buddha.’
This temple is home to many Buddhist monks and per tradition, they only eat their meals between sunup and noon. Thus, a few minutes before noon, a loud… a very loud drumming/musical ‘chant’ blasts out to let the monks know that they should eat now, lest they will have to wait until tomorrow. The drums are very potent and the instrument played is a nadaswaram. It’s a double-reed instrument like an oboe and it sounds quite similar to an oboe merged with a bagpipe, but without the drone. Scratch that. It sounds like an oboe merged with a bagpipe hooked to a bank of amplifiers meant for a concert at Wimbley Stadium. That little woodwind has unbelievable power. Both instruments are intended to be played outside in the open as a means to get their message out to everyone in the area. We were treated to it inside the temple.
Notice the shipmate on the far left of the photo scrambling to remove her hearing aids. Holy crap, it was loud. Maybe two seconds into their performance, Rob and I both made a hasty exit to keep our ears from bursting.
We mostly enjoyed the things we saw on the tour, but the tour guide just about drove us crazy. He was easily distracted and it wasn’t uncommon for the whole group of us to be waiting to go into someplace, then someone would ask him a question and he’d stop and spend quite some time answering that person’s question while the rest of the group stood around waiting to go into whatever place we were supposed to be seeing.
Worse, the shipmates on the tour tended to ask questions that he had already explained while we were on the bus… or they had questions such as, “the name ‘Sri Lanka’ - is that from a native language?” or the other person who asked “what kind of tea does Sri Lanka mainly produce” and was told, “orange pekoe, which is used in English Breakfast tea.” The person then asked, “oh. But what kind of tea is it?” The guide replied, “Orange pekoe. It’s a black tea, very common here.” The person nodded his head, then asked, “right… but what kind of tea do you grow here?” It was that kind of tour.
Anyway… back on the bus. We noticed a lot of the Ceylon ironwood trees starting to bloom. It’s the Sri Lankan national tree and it’s really pretty.
On the way back to the ship, we noticed that some places were already decorating for Christmas. It was a quick jolt of reality, reminding us that even though we’ve been sailing through tropical and desert climates and enjoying the hot, humid days, it’s still mid-November and the elves are working overtime. Back home, there’s snow on the ground, but that seems almost like another planet right now.
We briefly considered hopping on the shuttle bus and heading back to the mall. Not to go shopping, but to head down the street from the mall a bit to check out the historic Galle Face Hotel, circa 1864.
But honestly, after a half-day of dealing with the guide, the fellow tourists, and everything else, we decided just to kick back on the ship for the rest of the day. Multiple sea days ahead of us as we left Sri Lanka and headed into the open waters of the Bay of Bengal and our first bout of rough seas greeted us. Up until now, we’ve had unbelievably calm, almost glass-smooth seas on this trip, but that ended abruptly with a full day of ocean motion. Rob used the rocking of the ship to enhance his afternoon nap, while I spent a good chunk of the day in the pool, which was super-sloshy as the ship rocked. It was quite the experience.
So that’s it for a few days. As I write this now, the seas have calmed a little with periods of roughness between smother sections. Not like yesterday’s all-day drunk-walking simulator, which I don’t really need repeated, thank you. And since we’re at sea, the wifi is particularly sketchy and lots more people are trying to use it since nobody is on shore. It often takes an hour or more to finally get a picture uploaded, if the wifi works at all. Regardless, this post is finally up and now I can head back to the sloshy pool until we arrive at our next stop in a couple of days.