h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just got back from Sri Lanka - no it's not rhyming slang for anything.
It's a lovely place and we had a lovely time.
We travelled with Sri Lankan friends and ate our food without resort to knives and forks just like proper Sri Lankans. Waiters in restaurants stood round the table to watch us perform and brought finger bowls with huge grins on their faces. "You eat like Sri Lankans!" they said. We nodded and drank the finger bowls.

Glad you enjoyed yourselves.

You must tell us more! How about writing something for ?

We-ell, the elephant Orphanage (really it's a sanctuary) at Pinnewala is very interesting. They have over 60 elephants there that vary from the abandoned babies (cute) to the one with the missing foot (trod on a mine) and the blind one. Some of the others have damaged crops and been threatened by villagers all over the country so they are brought to the orphanage for their safety. The blind elephant gets special one to one attention and does most things separate from the herd to keep it safe.

The orphanage is about 250 meters from the river and twice a day the elephants make the journey down what has now become a street of shops to the water. The shopkeepers all close up when the elephants are due as the elephants are notorious shoplifters and are also a bit clumsy causing damage to any outdoor displays or signs.

People crowd onto the balcony of the hotel which overlooks the river (which we were staying in - hotel, that is, not river) to see the elephants make their way into the comparatively shallow water. Here the elephants do a lot of standing around and hosing themselves down with their trunks. Some of the elephants are chained in place. We heard that one of the mahouts (the person who looks after and controls an elephant) was killed two weeks previously by an elephant so maybe the naughty ones have to wear chains while they are out.

While they are so close to the hotel some of the local people take advantage of the tourists by selling them bananas of dubious quality to throw to the elephants. What is amazing is that the elephants can peel the bananas before eating them. They hold the bananas in the tip of their trunk and then dexterously rub the banana against a higher part of the inside of the trunk to remove the skin. Then they pop the banana in the side of their mouth and wantonly discard the peel.

The elephants get about 2 hours in the water to wallow, hose, wander and do whatever the hell they want to if they aren't chained. The chained ones get the undivided attention of a mahout. We watched one very big elephant obligingly roll over in the water while the conscientious mahout scrubbed every inch of the elephant's flesh with a coconut husk to get it spotlessly clean (and probably remove some nasties in the skin).

The babies are quite hairy with some lovely crew cut hair styles. The adults seem to be devoid of hair apart from the tip of their tails (if they haven't been lost through mishap).

The land was donated to the orphanage by the family that owns the hotel overlooking the bathing place, which seems like a good business idea to me. People will continue to book rooms in that hotel while the elephants are bathing there twice a day.

Strangely people are not prevented from going down to the river while the elephants are in it. Sri Lankans seem to take a much more adult approach to health and safety. "If you don't want to get hurt don't do silly things." Lots of tourists hover on the rocks clicking photos of the elephants while they are bathing (elephants not tourists that is). Then when the elephants decide that they want to stand on those rocks the tourists head for the safety of the hotel or the roadway.

The river is very low at the moment as there has been a drought. this is obvious when you go there. The water is now running through channels between the rocks rather than over the rocks. The local villagers built a "bund" or small dam to try and raise the level of the water where the elephants bathe and a good job they made of it. There was much celebration when it was finished and they had all done it as volunteers to help the elephants (who in turn bring in the tourists which brings in their livelihood).

The orphanage is the place to go if you want to see the elephants dry and eating. The babies are bottle fed. Some of the babies are twice the size of a horse and stand not too patiently while attendants attach a huge teat to a quart/litre bottle of milk and give it to a fee paying (generally) white person who tips it down the hungry elephants throat. The milk goes down in a single gulp so there isn't any chance to coo over the baby or say "diddums den!" The teat is snatched from that bottle and forced onto the next while the next punter is pushed forward to have their 5 seconds of elephant nurturing.

Greenery is trucked in from the surrounding area to feed the adults who have a hefty appetite. To ensure that nothing goes to waste the elephant dung is collected and taken to a specialised factory which turns it into paper which is used to make items for sale to the public. Some of the profit from these sales goes back to the orphanage to support the work.

Can I be brutally honest? I was quite happy to buy writing paper and notelets made of elephant dung paper (it doesn't smell and the colours are quite pleasant) but I couldn't see myself licking an envelope made this way!

Hi VB

I can't remember now what brought me to your PS, but I really enjoyed reading about your holiday.

I've never been to Sri Lanka (and probably will never visit), but one of my colleagues went a few weeks after the Tsunami (amazingly her holiday wasn't cancelled). Like you, she visited an elephant sanctuary, but she couldn't enjoy the holiday inside her hotel's fenced-off compund while destitute Sri Lankans who had lost everything were crammed around the outside with outstretched arms.

Hi Icy,
I'm glad you enjoyed the journal.
You don't need a reason to come to my PS - you're always welcome. Why not pull up a chair and have a and some . I've got plenty.

One interesting thing I noticed about Sri Lanka was land sales. They generally sell empty land for development and they sell it by the perch. This is a very small area and most UK smallish homes would need more than one perch to fit the ground floor.

As we drove along roads through the jungle/forest there were often signs at the side of the road offering land for sale. On some of the mountain sides people had built their homes/shops on the edge of the road with the back of the premises being on fairly long and precarious stilts. I'm not sure I'd fancy living like that.

Sounds fascinating.

Did you see any evidence of the civil war going on over there? I know it's all been resolved since, but the aftermath looks pretty awful for those who were caught up in the endgame.

We went with Singhalese friends so we had to be very careful what we said. They were absolutely delightful and the perfect hosts but when news of the war came on TV we could tell that they had no time for the Tamil rebels and especially the LTTE (Tamil Tigers). It reminded me of growing up in Birmingham in the 1960's when the IRA were active and no matter how much you might think there may be a case for Catholics getting the vote in NI you didn't want to say anything for fear of being punched.
Anyway we had to divert a couple of times when our friends received phone calls from family saying this or that road was now being considered dangerous. We were there when the LTTE planes attacked Colombo (where we started and ended our journey) and there were frantic phone calls between our friends and their parents to make sure they were OK.
The Brits brought in a lot of Tamils (who were native of southern India originally) to work in the tea plantations as cheap(er) labour (I don't think they paid the Singhalese much) and who now are in the cooler, central mountain region of Sri Lanka. They do not link themselves particularly closely with the northern Tamils who arrived by a different route.
We were told that the south would be safe and we had a lovely time gazing out at the Indian Ocean. If we could have looked right round the curve of the earth the first thing we would have seen would have been Africa.
The week after we left there was an explosion in a Mosque on the south coast and many people were killed - so we realised that nowhere was safe after all.
We noticed that when the TV coverage was about the war we were reminded of an era long ago in the UK. The army is not referred to as "the army" or "our troops" they were invariably referred to as "our war heroes". They also don't edit out the gory bits and you actually see people (Tamils mainly but occasionally Singhalese soldiers) being killed on the news.

This is much longer than I intended but it's nice to talk - especially if you like the sound of your own fingers on the keyboard.