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All posts for the month January, 2018

One highlight of Colombo for us was our cute hotel, Residences by Ugo, and this pool. The quiet and serenity after five weeks in India were charming.

I didn’t really know what to expect on arrival in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, but whatever I thought was wrong. First, it’s not the capital after all. While Colombo is Sri Lanka’s commercial capital and largest city – and is often referred to as the capital – technically the capital is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. Kotte, as it is commonly called, is a near-in suburb of Colombo and very much a part of Colombo’s urban area but technically a separate city that is itself the nation’s capital. (To give a sense of this confusion, Wikipedia describes Kotte as “… the official capital of Sri Lanka, a satellite city and within the urban area of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.” Confusing indeed.)

Second and more important, to the extent I thought I knew something, I was expecting kind of a mini-India. Sri Lanka is, after all, just this little island dangling off the southern tip of India; it must be pretty similar, right? Probably a lot like India but with a big disadvantage in that Sri Lanka has only recently emerged from an ugly civil war. From 1983 to 2009 the Tamil minority battled for rights and then independence from the Sinhalese majority. Ultimately they lost but I was still expecting basically an India without the advantage of relative peace.

Galle Face Green is the area long the coast where Colombos (Colombans?) gather in the cool evening to stroll. As far as beaches go it’s not much but still pleasant.

Wow, was I wrong about all that. Yes, the people look and dress similarly, but we were blown away by the cultural differences. None of the dirt and chaos of India. Streets are clean. Animals are controlled. Traffic is … regular. No more horn honking than you’d find in Boston. Parks. Grocery stores. Restaurants. It was as though we’d traveled a thousand miles from India.

Why the difference? Importantly, Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country while India is primarily Hindu. (Estimates are that about 70 percent of Sri Lankans are Buddhist, 13 percent Hindu, and 10 percent Moslem.) And because the cow is sacred in India they roam everywhere and leave cow shit everywhere. Mark & I both guessed – maybe simplistically, but maybe not – that in India, once you’ve accepted cow shit everywhere it just doesn’t make sense to be all that concerned about keeping everything else clean and neat. In Sri Lanka, no cows wandering, no cow shit, and things are clean and neat. Maybe it’s more complicated than that, but I just can’t overstate the difference walking around. Like night and day.

A great banyan tree in Viharamahadevi Park, where the National Museum is located. The park was clean and calm, lush even, something simply unimaginable in India.

Except for just the knock-you-over-the-head change after five weeks in India, there’s not a lot to actually see or do in Colombo. It’s on the coast but what little they have that passes for “beach” is pretty limited. There are no great cathedrals or temples that you have to see, and the national museum that I spent some time in was … OK. We did stop during one long walk around town in a café for tea, something you just have to do in what was once Ceylon, but that was about it for excitement.

That said, we loved it. Maybe if we hadn’t just come from India and wasn’t anticipating a war-ravaged environment I wouldn’t have been so impressed. But it just had this great Southeast Asia feel to it that is enchanting. Now we’re eager to go inland and see more of this strange, unknown country.

We weren’t sure just what this statue was supposed to signify but we liked it

Oh, one more thing. About that name, Sri Lanka. When I was growing up, of course, this was Ceylon. What’s the connection between the names? To the natives, the island was always Lanka. (Moslem traders called it Serendib, “Island of Jewels” and the root of our word serendipity.) When the Portuguese came they called it Sinhala-dvipa (Island of the Sinhalese) which somehow morphed into Ceilão. The Dutch came next and called it Ceylan and then the British changed that to Ceylon. Finally in 1972 the now-independent government changed the name back to Lanka, adding Sri, a title of respect, to the name. Mystery solved.

We found a great French café just minutes from our hotel. Couldn’t wait to try the steak tartare. Except it really wasn’t very good, probably the most boring I’ve ever had. Fortunately right near by was a place called Monsoon, a pan-Asian restaurant with great food.

Touring the National Museum was worth an hour or two of one’s time. If I understood right, these are late-19th century copies of rock murals dating from the 5th century BC.

Colombo is on the coast so I went in search of someplace to sit on the beach and read, hoping I’d find something nicer than Galle Face. After a long walk this was as close as I got…

Grounds of the Museum. Beautiful but sharing the same air as the rest of the city.

Our last stop in India was in Mumbai, the city formerly known as Bombay. In some ways it was a big change: it’s a massive, global city after our schlep through Rajasthan and to me, at least, it has more in common with southern India than the north where we’ve been up until now. In most ways, though, it was similar to what we’ve been experiencing; crazy, chaotic, dirty, smoggy, and fascinating.

I’m familiar with Clear, Cloudy, Rain, Snow, whatever. Never seen Smoke before….

We spent only three days there and, to put it mildly, you can’t remotely see Mumbai in three days. I mean, it’s more than twice the size of New York City and no one would spend three days there and say they’d figured out the Big Apple. So we didn’t even try to cover it significantly. In fact one day we spent just lazy around the hotel and shopping at a nearby mall, distinctly atypical behavior for us. (And alas, we’re terrible shoppers; neither of us bought a damned thing.)

Sadly, the most memorable part of the visit may have been the air quality. After Delhi I didn’t think anything could surprise me but this was all but unbelievable. Just a heavy haze hanging over the city much of the day, bad enough that the weather app we use showed the current condition as “Smoke.” Seriously. Bizarre and I assume pretty unhealthy.

Although we had limited time there we weren’t total Philistines, we spent much of one day at few of Mumbai’s good museums. The most important is the improbably named Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. Once upon a time it was the Prince of Wales Museum, named after the future Edward VIII in honor of his visit to Bombay. (Edward, you will recall, spent a lot more time as Prince of Wales than he did as king, given that he abdicated so he could marry Wallis Simpson, but that is a very separate story.) When India was busy changing Bombay to Mumbai (and Madras to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata; you get the idea) they also renamed the museum for a King Shivaji. As that name is too difficult even for Indians it’s nicknamed “CSMVS” but as that is both stupid sounding and still too long for people to really remember these days the museum is mostly just known as … the museum.

So we spent a few hours in the museum, a museum of India’s history. Mark is reading a (long) history of India and he in particular appreciated the layout of the exhibits, tracking surprisingly closely the structure of his book. One could argue that we should have toured the history of India before we spent five weeks there rather than on our last day but hey, we got there eventually.

This tiny bronze figurine, known as the Dancing Girl, dates from about 2,500 BC and is considered the iconic artifact from the Harappan Empire of the Indus Valley, contemporary to the great Egypt and Mesopotamian civilizations.

That was the big museum but right in the same area were two smaller art museums so we stopped in at those as well and they were both fun. Short, quick stops with some interesting art, just the way I like it best.

A piece from an exhibit called Tribal Beauty. Sadly, I forgot to capture the artist’s name.

And that was it, time to leave India. It is an intense place and it took me longer to warm up to all that than it did on earlier visits but eventually I got there. We had scheduled the five weeks in large part because we were afraid we would just need to get away at that point. In fact I’d be happy to have had more time to see more of the country but apparently we’ll have to save that for another visit. I won’t miss the dang dynamic currency conversion scam we have to watch for like an eagle and I’d be OK if waiters quit insisting you can’t eat Indian curry without rice or bread (you can). For now, though, it’s south to Sri Lanka!

The view from our hotel room. Thought I was kidding about the air quality?

After our museum wanderings we were looking for a place to lunch. As we walked past one restaurant Mark’s face lit up: “I think I ate here in 1993,” he said. As we entered it was more clear that indeed, he’d eaten here on his first trip to India nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Weird.

In a welcome break from Indian curry – we love it, but five weeks is a lot of curry – we had this amazing plate of sashimi

Indian modern art

And this piece called “Still Chewing.” That red stuff is the artist’s rendition of chewing gum holding her from the ceiling.

If you paid attention you could see grand colonial architecture along, of course, with the more mundane modern apartment blocks

Strange sight – apparently this is the laundry district, just acres and acres of laundry drying

And of course, like presumably all Indian cities big and small, there is always a street scene

Enjoying one of our three fabulous lunches at the White Terrace

We ended our Rajasthani bike trip with a day in Udaipur and while the rest of the group flew to Delhi and then on toward home we – since we don’t have a home – stayed in Udaipur for three more days. We checked into a luxury hotel to recover from all that biking and – having toured the City Palace with the bike group – had a pretty chill couple of days.

Separated from the Thar Desert that we’d been biking through by the Aravalli Range that we biked over, Udaipur is quite different from the Rajasthan that we’d become familiar with. In fact, it has lakes, something we definitely had not seen a lot of. Accordingly Udaipur is known as the City of Lakes, though based on my experience it would never be confused with that other City of Lakes, Minneapolis. Still, those lakes give Udaipur an attractive quality missing in the other Rajasthan cities we visited.

Lake Pichola. Mark found himself wondering what birds did before humans discovered electricity and started stringing electric wires….

To be clear, though, the peace we found there was overwhelmingly the result of staying at the Oberoi hotel. Acres and acres of beautifully landscaped lawns and gardens. A pool for Mark to hang out by and a hammock for me to read in. We’d just hang out in the morning, then go into town for a great lunch at the White Terrace (if you’re ever in Udaipur it’s definitely worth a visit). I’d go back to the hotel for some more hammock time while Mark would explore the city a little on his own.

My view from the hammock. Outside the hotel grounds Udaipur is a typically chaotic, noisy, dirty city but in here serenity reigns.

And that’s it. Relaxing and calm, though we were both annoyed by the way hotel staff had been trained to engage guests, inquiring constantly if everything was nice, if we’d slept well, if the food was good, and on and on and on and on. If your biggest complaint is that there are too many staff members doting on you your life is probably OK.

Mark’s perch at the pool

More of the hotel grounds. Acres and acres of calm.

Outside, though, you were right back in India

Mark used to drive a tractor just like this when he was a kid in Michigan

A street scene

We were almost always too excited by the food to remember to take pictures but managed to restrain our urge to feed long enough to get this shot