11-9-05

We’re back in Colombo after four days on the road. Wow! What a trip. Since we have lots to report we’ll break it up so as not to overwhelm you with details that I (Tricia) am so fond of !

We left at 9:40 Saturday morning to travel 70 miles (116 k) It took just over three and a half hours. You would not believe the roads (very narrow with no shoulder) and such heavy traffic. The roads are crowded with buses (private and public) as this is how many people travel to and fro since many people cannot afford a car. Then there are tri-wheelers everywhere we went, motor scooters, motorcycles, and bicycles. Since there are no shoulders, the road is shared by pedestrians who walk on the road, and are crossing dogs, and the occasional cow. You average 25 k an hour due to traffic. Also adding to the problem is the roads go through the center of each town. The street in the center of town is lined with small shops selling everything-food, clothes and hardware and there dozens of each type of shop in each town. How does anyone make any money? So there are many people standing in the street in front of the shops so traffic becomes a crawl once you hit town. The roads are never straight so your driver is constantly speeding up and braking. They pass on curves, hills and all those places we would never pass. If you are driving along and the on coming traffic has someone who is passing and is in your lane, you stop so there won’t be a head on collision. It’s just a rather casual way of driving. You know those lines down the middle of the road to determine which is your side of the road? Well here is it merely a suggestion. It is quite common to drive straddling that line so you can get three cars or more riding abreast on the two lane roads. As I said it’s just a more casual approach to driving. Because I have ridden so much in the tri-wheelers, the driving didn’t bother me so much. But what was exhausting was the being flung side to side as we went around curves and the constant acceleration and braking. You had to constantly brace yourself. When we got home yesterday, we were quite tired and went to bed a little before 9:00 and slept until 6:30!

So along the way to Kandy, which is northeast of Colombo, we passed through areas that specialized in making the following which were displayed in numerous shops on the roadside: car seat upholstery, leather goods, wicker furniture, terra cotta pots, batik, plastic blow-up toys, and cashews. In addition, Saturday is a big shopping day so every town and there were many, had hundreds of shoppers who were standing in the street or crossing the street (forget at intersections, they cross anywhere they please here. There are no traffic lights in these small towns. All of this makes for very slow going.

We got to Kandy around 1:30 (we made one short stop to look at wicker furniture) ate a quick buffet lunch (buffet meals are the standard in the hotels here), and took off for the 2:00 meeting we had with the local training center. The training center had one large room with tables and chairs packed into every available inch, one small white board and an overhead projector (no not the fancy digital kind, the old fashion kind that uses transparencies) and that was it. Their trainers get paid $4.00 an hour! Some travel all the way from Colombo to teach and they require at least three hours of teaching in order to make the journey (remember this is a 3.5 hr journey one way!!!) It was a humbling experience. Ski Lankans make do with so little and Americans have such an abundance that we often take for granted. This is the only training center on the island. Their idea of training is straight lecture. Forget interactive exercises or case studies where you work in small groups. Forget AV equipments like video players or digital projectors. The Asia Foundation hopes to use the center for some of their training and will give the center some of its much-needed improvements. If they pay them in cash, the money goes to the general fund and they cannot use the money for the center.

We stayed in a beautiful hotel where the normal rate is $204 a night but we got a special rate of $90 a night. It was a lovely, large colonial architecture building overlooking a river. The hotel has an open format where the dining room is located near the front desk and is open to the grounds-no windows or doors. The lounge borders the pool and the floor of the lounge is at the same level as the pool so you could swim right up to the lounge and order a drink or sit in the lounge with your feet in the water. Very tropical feel. All the restaurant staff, housecleaning staff and porters wear sarongs and are barefooted. More ambiance.

In the afternoon we visited the Temple of the Tooth. That would be Buddha’s tooth. What a lovely place. There was a Hindu temple adjacent to the grounds so we went there also. We left our shoes in the car because you are not allowed to enter a temple with shoes on. Oy, such a tender foot I am.

We ended the day by visiting the local market that sold everything: fish, meat (yuck) vegetables, fruits (I saw apples and looked closely and discovered they were from Washington state! It’s too hot for apples here. I was surprised that these small businesses could afford to buy/sell apples that had been transported half way around the globe.) leather goods, clothes, well the list goes on. Anything you want they have. If we had our house I would have bought some of the fabulous spices: cinnamon, fresh mace, coriander cloves, and pepper. All the shops are about six feet wide by maybe 10 feet or smaller. And everyone one of them wants you to buy from them so there is lots of conversation trying to entice you into their shop. It was easy to resist because I have no desire to shop until we are into the house and I have a place to put things.

That night we gave the driver a night off and ate at the hotel. Alix, the program director ordered a margarita without seeing the drink menu and got quite a shock when her bill came and it was $8.50!!! This is the country where you can have a good meal for $2-$4. Needless to say she was less than pleased with the waiter who had suggested the drink. It poured rain that night so I was glad we didn’t go out to eat.

To be continued. My fingers hurt from typing.