Morgalogue

Travellers in India are pulled towards Varanasi like teenage inter-railers to Amsterdam. For a Hindu, it is as important a journey as a Muslim travelling to Mecca. Every year millions of pilgrims come to bathe in the Ganges, the holiest river in India that is worshipped as a god. Some come here to die, whereupon they will be cremated on its banks, assuring them a ticket to nirvana, a loophole in the cycle of reincarnation. It is literally, a once in a lifetime experience. (more…)

Another catching up post. For the benifit of my Mum, who wants a map included (I’ll see), since leaving Madurai I’ve been to Kumbakonam and some small, very rural towns around there, Thanjavur, Tiruchirapalli, Coimbatore, Ooty (the British summer retreat), Mysore, Hampi and now the beautiful, surprisingly undeveloped, beaches of Gokarna. I’m relaxing in the sun doing absolutely nothing and loving it - but you don’t want to hear about that I’m sure. Rather than log all that lot, I just picked a few little snapshots I wanted to write about … and in my usual style, combed through them in minute detail. (more…)

Sorry - this has turned into a bit of a novelette. Get a cup of tea.  

It seems to me, that you can’t really know Asia without understanding religion. Here, it’s a lesson in both history and mainstream culture. Being completely and indiscriminately ignorant of all faiths however, the mind of the believer is taking me alot of effort to get grips with. Without ever properly having stopped to think about it, I guess I’d always explained the continuing devotion of millions worldwide to gods and goddesses as tradition. Self-serving ideas and institutions built to explain a world we assumed to be flat, still tangled up in our cultures and the identities we give ourselves. If people really wanted to think rationally about it, surely they’d realise it’s probably not true. The millions can be wrong - look at James Blunt - so what’s to know ?

Well, while actual faith may be beyond me, the last week has been a fascinating ride into the 3rd eye of Hindu spirituality. (more…)

With a heavy heart and dodgy stomach I write to you from Bangalore. Lidka reluctantly flew home on Saturday to start her new job after 10 beautiful days spent touring Kerela. After moping around the completely uninspiring city of Kochi feeling sorry for myself with food poisoning, I have decided to jump-start my survival insticts with a trip to a frightening megatropolis. Also not a bad place to pick up a new camera. I arrived this morning on the night train, a little short on sleep, so I may become incoherent soon. I haven’t seen much of the city since the sun came up, though it has already confused me. I spent over an hour trying to find a hotel that wasn’t full with the mass influx of visitors to the big Farming Expo - not quite the IT boomtown I was expecting. Some outskirts of the city are also under curfew after rioting yesterday. At 5am this morning I was slouched at a newsstand trying to make sense of the following headlines: 2 dead, 40 vehicles burned as riots blaze Bangalore. Jade Goody admits racist slur. “Oh god, what has the silly cow done ? Maybe I should take a taxi” were my initial thoughts, but after reading on, the stories were thankfully unrelated. (more…)

Hambantota and Kalmounai are small towns that, a bit like Lockerbie or Dunblane, become defined by tragedy. Despite there being nothing much to see, before or after ‘History’ left its mark, you can’t view them in their rightful ordinariness again. After all the tsunami dead and missing were added up, first hand reports compiled and carnage quantified, these 2 unlucky spots came out head and shoulders above everywhere else on the island. It’s a label I’m sure they’d rather forget, but when everything from the school to the graveyard has a placard erected, marketing the generosity of a different country or aid organisation, it doesn’t seem likely for some time yet. (more…)

We had to get going. We had a 5 hour drive East to get to Amapara and the military imposed curfew began in 6. We’d spend the night there and make the trip to Kalmounai in the morning. Unlike the LTTE border I’d visited in the North, this one was pretty live. Very shortly it looks like Sri Lanka will admit to the international community what everyone here has known for months – civil war is back on. The Tigers have declared and end to negotiation, termed the ceasefire agreement ‘defunct’ and tried to blow up the Defence Secretary (the President’s brother). It seems like a fairly clear message to me. (more…)

Trip two was a ride with the village boys up to one of our micro-hydro sites in the rain forest, high in tea country. My colleague Dasanayke and our driver Premasiri only speak a few words of English between them, which is about the current extent of my Sinhalese, so departing at 4.30am, chat was a bit thin on the ground. By 9am we’d reached the foothill town of Ratnapura, which sounds like the recipe for the curry we ate for breakfast in a grotty wee café. Cleanliness here is a notch above India people tell me. But it’s not easy; in the heat and general grime, if you leave a crumb for more than a minute it becomes an ant-hill. Their solution is to wrap your grubby plate in cling-film and eat off that. 

There is a meeting of representatives of from every micro-hydro village in the region scheduled for 10am in a conference room above a noisy bus-station. We meet the round little chairman and then, after a cryptic exchange, my colleagues rush off to a meeting in the next town and I’m left there. All will apparently be explained later  (more…)

Well readers, I left you last time with the cheery little tale of an old man being decapitated by a rather slow, but obviously very heavy, train. You’ll be pleased to know things are looking up.

Work have dispatched me off on trips to little villages on just about every corner of the island. I’ve got to know the inside of our little ‘loaf of bread’ mini-van with its fairground suspension better than my gaff. I have discovered that Sri Lankans spend approximately 97% of their lives travelling - wedged together, hurtling through the jungle in the rain, on the wrong side of the road, wherever there’s room, to the sound of some fantastic spangley-asian-rhumba music. The first trip was up north to Anuradhapura, the ancient capital and then on to some remote villages on the LTTE (Les Tigres Tamil) border. My colleague Bandula, a big loveable guy with the temperament of Baloo the bear, had taken his wife and two little girls along for the ride, so I figured was safe. (more…)