Morgalogue

This was meant to be my christmas report, then an account of a workshop I ran in one of the villages, then a goodbye Sri Lanka post, It’s been a hectic few weeks. I’m now writing from Kerela, South India where we are having a well earned rest at Kovlam, a touristy but really pretty nice beach resort. My camera has been stolen (along with my diary by baggage handlers) so I’ll spare you the photos. Our last weekend in Sri Lanka was spent with our affectionate surrogate family. We joined them and the chronically unfit Sri Lankan masses on a pilgrimage to the top of Adams Peak (2200m) to watch the sunrise. It was spectacular - and I took 125 photos … who knows when I’ll upload them. There were many scenes of devout (and avoidable) suffering on the 12 hour round trip to make it feel rather holy. Not that I pushed the point, but ‘training’ surely isn’t against God’s will ? Perhaps walking to work for a week before you scale your country’s third highest mountain ?

Work ended in the usual mad dash that all priojects I undertake seem to. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved and am optimistic it will be put into practice. I’ll post some of the design work I did some time, I have it on a CD. I was even published in the English and Sinhala national press - an article I wrote on the findings of a study on national energy policy. Fame but sadly no fortune.

My aborted Xmas post (I wanted to stick in the photos):

It’s been a busy time since Lidka arrived. People are incredibly enthusiastic about socialising with a couple (though going for dinner means you eat and they watch expectantly), our callender has been so fully booked, that the weekends are practically the only proper time we’ve spent together. We’re both finishing up work on Tuesday (sic - we have) so there’s been loads to do there to. It’s been a month of hellos and goodbyes … and it’s flown by fast. I’m trying to find the space to reflect on it all. India and my first period of true vagrant joblessness in a long time beckons … what do you do again ? I’m slightly apprehensive.

Xmas was a bit of a non-event for me and Lidka. The Sri Lankan’s do celebrate it, along with Hajj, Devali, Poya and a whole host of others. With a day off work on every full moon and Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim festival – around 35 days annually – the Sri Lankans do not bad on public holidays. When the economic conditions are right, DIY will consume this land but for now, they actually do religious things on these days off. Everyone obviously has their own preference, but generally they have a bash at all of them. We went to Lidka’s office’s Christmas Party – it was a bit of a mishmash of cultures. Party games and sober dancing aside, there was the conviction that Christmas is a religious celebration (news to me …) and a rag-tag office choir, collectively believing in all known gods, assembled to sing carols on the stage. Backed by a DJ we had an R’n’B cover of ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Silver Bells’ (Dean Martin ?) and a very strange ‘Auld Land Syne’. Hearts were definitely in the right place.

Jesus looks quite funny as ‘another God’ out here. The windscreens of just about every car are dripping with garlands, plastic flowers and divine images and dashboards cluttered with more icons and statuettes than a grannys mantelpiece. Plastic Buddha’s with flashing LED auras are particularly popular on busses. Jesus often gets the same high-energy, technicolour treatment. The more scars, more hair and more Jesuses the better. I saw a statue North of Colombo near ‘little Rome’ where he bled from so many wounds it looked like he’d been gunned down with an M-16.

So, despite having enough fairy lights, reindeers and Santas around neither of us really recognised it as Christmas. I suppose friends, families and the love-hate regime of the big day is what really makes it. We made the most of the long weekend to visit some big Buddhist sites up North.

Our first stop was Dambulla to visit ‘the cave temples’. Something I like about the ancient Buddhists is that wherever they found a really interesting geological feature they often turned it into a shrine by painstakingly carving out large sculptures of the Buddha from the rock, or creating a peaceful spot for meditation. The locations are always pretty remote and dramatic and you can’t help but get the feeling Buddhism is respectful of the natural world in a very different way to Christianity. Modern Buddhism has an unfortunate weakness for concrete and plastic though I can’t fault the wild use of colour. The Buddhist museum at the bottom of the hill looks like the entrance to the most exciting ghost train in the world with a giant dragon’s mouth for a door and an enormous (pissed-off looking) Buddha perched on top like an ‘End-of-level Boss’.

  

Our mosquito-magnet guesthouse was an 8km adventure out of town in ‘the middle of nowhere’. Our poor wee rickshaw driver hadn’t a clue where it was and we made several aborted attempts along jungle mud-roads, through mud-hut villages before we eventually found it. A real bonus however, was that we discovered a 5-star designer hotel built into a remote jungle rock face with views out over the lake. It was designed by Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka’s main contemporary architect. It’s a real Bond villain location, all ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’ levels and platforms cantilevered out of the natural rock and waterfalls of jungle foliage tumbling over the framework. The whole complex is a kilometre in length. It must really be something at night. Actually made me think there may be some merit to being filthy rich.

  

Sigriya rock further North was our next stop. It’s a mighty volcanic plug that nature has mysteriously eroded into an almost perfect cuboid surrounded by miles of forest. It actually tapers out towards the top giving the thing a really dramatic sense of perspective when you’re on the way up the rickety little iron gantry or peering over the edge at the top. In the old days, people would scale the thing without ropes, relying on some fist-deep notches cut into the face, no doubt still wearing flip-flops and saris. There’s a bit of a dispute as to whether the ruins on top were the palace of a paranoid king, hiding from a vengeful brother who eventually murdered him (nowhere to run !) or as new evidence suggests, a meditation site. I prefer the latter. To open it up as a place for thought, not even a grandiose temple for prayer – that sounds very civilised. The symmetrical gardens at the bottom mirror the ‘squareness’ of the rock. The Buddhists again taking great care and attention, to create contemplative little spaces in between the enormous boulders, ancient trees and pools. Careful little brick paths lead pilgrims through the site that was apparently pretty advanced for it’s time with fountains and even ‘air conditioned’ stone structures.

  

  

We stopped off at Kandy for the night on Christmas Eve. Everything had gone so smoothly I made the mistake of actually saying it out loud. We had a guesthouse booked, I knew where we should go for dinner and for a glamorous Christmas cocktail overlooking the lake, we’d even put a wad of cash on my SIM for Xmas day phone calls. I went to the cash machine and our troubles began. RBS had decided my activities to be ‘suspicious’ and we were frozen. Lidka made a 5 minute call to Poland that obscenely guzzled our credit so we phoneless. We gambled our remaining money on meagre dinner and showed up at the guesthouse smiling and knowingly penniless. Lidka was convinced this was God’s will, some kind real-life nativity play. Thankfully she isn’t pregnant. We thanked God for sparing us the ‘plague of mosquitos’ and went to sleep. We were saved by texting my workmate Wathsala with our remaining rupees, who sent us the address of a hotel in the next valley, where a guy, at a wedding, would lend us some money and save the day. He did. And we genuinely did feel the blessing of Christmas charity.

Village Workshop Post:

To ‘focus group’ some of my electrical concepts we organised a weekend trip to a couple more micro-hydro villages. Lidka came along for the ride. It was back into the jungle again. I fucking love the jungle. I don’t like snakes, spiders and leeches particularly but I’m going to put up with them sometime this year to get a proper look around.

     

Sri Lankan jungle is a real tapestry of greens. Infinitely repeated leafy patterns and motifs, twisting, curling, branching into forever. A green universe. Big expressive coconut palms burst out of the canopy like frozen fireworks. They rocket wildly out of the ground, trailing wooden hosepipe-trunks and explode, catherine-wheeling huge, waxy-green feathers along the skyline. Another variety rise up impossibly, like Indian rope tricks, topped with headdresses of fanned leaves that windmill gently in the breeze. Gliricidia trees look computer generated, creating leaves to recursive formula of dot-matrixes, silently speaking of some mysterious mathematical secret. Banana palms always look goofy – their big fins floppy and wilted like elephants ears. They look like the sort of tree we made out of crepe paper in primary school.

I love the mighty root systems. Thick tentacles of liquid wood, snaking round rocks and boulders, slowly tightening their grip on the rich, red earth. The bodhi trees - ancient, wizened old things, like Eastern Oaks. Rugs of reeds, ferns and ivy gather around the bases of some trees, huge Greek column trunks completely hidden by ladders of leaves and creepers. Bamboo pipes sprout together in colossal bundles, like a mighty church organs.

     

Anyway … sorry. Got a bit carried away there. The workshop was a success. Asoka, my boss was quite the showman and solicited the household woes of the common woman as they giggled like schoolgirls at this tall, hadsome chap. Sitting separately, the men sat groping, joking and occassionally making the odd poitical sounding statement.

     

We explored the area around Dasanaykes village and found a chalk/limestone cave that can be followed for 2 miles. The water was a bit high to risk the walk unfortunately, but a great weekend. The last of the year, Sunday was hogmanay. Colombo errupted like an enormous street battle. Bangers, firecrackers and rockets everywhere.

I hope you all had fun wherever you were. My thoughts turn to Scotland a fair bit. In no order, just laid out like shoebox of photos emptied on to the table. I remembered alot of good times.

Take care all.