Tea Factories of Sri Lanka

Kandy, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is sometimes described as India Light. The culture, cuisine, and landscape are similar to South India, but it’s less crowded, less polluted, and less wretched. Like India, Sri Lanka is home to multiple ethnicities and religions. And like India, this has a long history of creating significant tension with periodic outbreaks of violence. Unlike India, Sri Lanka has recently experienced open warfare with multiple insurgencies, the most well-known of which is probably the Tamil Tigers. Within the last few years, the situation has calmed markedly, and Sri Lanka is emerging as a tourist destination.

Colombo is the capital, but like so many big cities in this part or the world, is hot, crowded, and dirty. The arrival of the southwest monsoon means rain every day, so I quickly made my way inland and upland to Kandy, the cultural center of the country. Kandy is centered around a shallow manmade lake, dug by hand on the orders of the last kings of Sri Lanka. When the princes balked at providing the labor, 1,500 people were impaled in the lake as motivation. It’s very picturesque except is inhabited by giant monitor lizards.

The elephant is the national symbol of Sri Lanka, and they are everywhere. At first, you’re traveling to elephant sanctuaries and hoping you’ll see a wild elephant. After a week, you don’t even look up for them, and hope you don’t run over them. Seriously, they run over elephants here like we hit deer in Arkansas.

The hotel in Kandy, like all of Sri Lanka, is overwhelmed with monkeys. These guy only appeared every third or fourth day, but showed up in dozens and made themselves right at home. The mother and baby made themselves comfortable on the balcony.

 

Borneo

This is the last post from April, as I try to get current on the blog.

Borneo is an enormous island, split between Malaysia in the north and Indonesia in the south. Along with the Amazon and Papua New Guinea, parts of Borneo are among the last truly wild tropical places remaining on the planet.

I’m not here long, so am spending most of my time in jungle survival school. You’re allowed only a backpack, a flashlight, and the clothes on your back. They issue you a hammock, sleeping sack, and machete. (If you do the longer trips, you aren’t allowed the hammock, sleeping sack, or flashlight). Specifically, you can’t bring in food, water, or fire. The guides agree to a drop off and pick up point, which are never the same twice.

Short-term survival is all about bamboo. The sections are full of water, so you can create an instant water bottle by hacking out a section. If you need a drink, just hack a hole in a stalk of bamboo, insert your bamboo straw, and drink. You make pots, pans, plates, and utensils from bamboo. You eat wild fruit, roots that you dig up, and some edible leaves. By the end of the first day, both hands are blistered from swinging the machete, which you have to regularly resharpen on river rocks. Camera, you may have noticed, was not on the list of supplies, so there are unfortunately no pictures of this.

The next day I had the jungle guide take me to see the highly endangered proboscis monkeys. Lots of Chinese tourists were there as well–the locals loathe the Chinese tourists, can call them “locusts”. According to the guide, all the tourists want to do are see fireflies (who knew those were a novelty?) and sunsets, go shopping, and eat at Chinese restaurants–this in a place with largest and cheapest fresh fish market I’ve ever seen. In the locusts defense, the sunsets here are pretty incredible.

The proboscis monkeys are actually pretty easy to find–they occupy a strip of land, maybe 100 yards deep, that runs along the river bank between the rivers and farmers’ fields.

They share the area with long-tailed macaques that create a great nuisance to the locals who live along the river. They steal food, destroy gardens, and even (not joking) have taken up residence in homes while the owners were away. The troops are generally the alpha male with his harem of females. To drive them away, the locals first empty a coconut by making a hole, then put sweets inside. The alpha male reaches in for the sweets with an open hand, but realizes that he can’t pull his fist, balled around the sweets, back through the hole (still not joking). While he is thus preoccupied, they collar him, literally. The hold him down and paint his ass red (still not joking). He’s set free and returns to the harem, but the females, for reasons either obvious or unknown, I’m not sure which, don’t want to be with the monkey with the red ass. So they leave, but he follows. They keep running, he keeps chasing, until, days later, his ass is no longer red. The harem has him back, and they settle nearby, far away from the original village.

Bali Market Day

From April, a series of pictures from the local market–also, a handful of photos of the construction of the funeral pyre for the recently deceased Balinese king.

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Bali

From April.

Bali is the heart of Hindu Indonesia, and probably the most famous travel destination here.  I hadn’t intended to come here, fearing that it had been overrun with tourists (and not just any tourists, but Australians) and sick to death of hearing about “Eat, Pray, Love.” But friends in the Philippines convinced me otherwise, so here I am.

For starters, it is definitely overrun with tourists, and they are definitely Australians. On the other hand, it might be the most naturally beautiful place I’ve ever been, rivaled only by Hawaii. There are rivers, lakes, beaches, gorges, canyons, and volcanoes, everywhere. There’s also a really vibrant culture here. I’ve spent as much of my time as possible away from the masses of people–hiking, biking, canyoning, four-wheelering. Unfortunately, those activities don’t lend themselves to photography, so I don’t have much to show you of the natural beauty I’ve just raved about. I have more of the people, but will save that for a separate post.

Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia

This is a post from April that I intended to create months ago, but never got around to it.

Jakarta is the largest city and capital of Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world. It’s hot, crowded, and one of the most polluted cities in the planet. There is almost literally nothing to see here. The main attraction seem to be a park with a giant pillar…and some pretty spectacular birdboxes.

Since there’s nothing else to see here, I went to the mall. And if you want to know where the moderate Islamic world stands on the United States, I suggest you do as I did, and watch Captain America in 4DX. All shows were sold out but one seat for the late show, so I found some decent sushi and waited it out. The people going to this show must have been waiting their whole lives for this shit. People of all ages were dressed up like the hero, like at the Star Wars opening (but not quite). The crowd cheered the sappy speeches about freedom, laughed at the stupid throwaway lines, tensed up for every fight scene, and were generally the most pro-America crowd you’re likely to find this side of a Marine Corps gala or Lee Greenwood concert. You have nothing to fear from the Indonesians.

As for the 4DX, the idea here is that they’re going to involve more of your senses in the theater experience. Yes, I know that doesn’t have anything to do with a 4th dimension, and if you’re like me, you’re prefer that they slightly disengage the traditional sensation by turning the sound down. Nonetheless, they found someone to finance, design, build, and implement this damn fool creation, so they must be doing something right. The chairs vibrate, but the movies aren’t designed for 4DX. It isn’t like Star Tours at Disneyland, where things move when your character would be moving. You don’t have a character–you’re just watching Captain America fight some nihilist/Nazi/Communist/whatever, so why are you vibrating? There are ports on your headrest that allow them to blow wind and scent on you, seemingly at random. They seem to have only two scents implemented thus far–junior high locker room and hot garbage. Finally, there’s fog and mist. The indoor rain is disconcerting at first but not really wet enough to be a bother. The fog is generated by the same type of fog machine used at high school dances, meaning it’s incredibly chalky and generally makes the audience cough and sneeze and wheeze for a few minutes. For better or worse, the whole thing does engage your other senses.

From Jakarta it’s on to Yogyakarta (Jogja in local parlance), the cultural center of Java. (Java being one of the 3 major islands of Indonesia–Java, Sumatra, and Borneo.) The attraction here is nearby volcanoes and nearby temples. This is the heart of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the most volcanically active place on the planet. Krakatoa, famous for 1883 eruption that produced the loudest noise in human history and disrupted the global climate for the better part of decade, is at the other end of Java. The temples, like the other temples of SE Asia, are a blend of animistic/Hindu/Buddhist/etc, being repurposed as religions waxed and waned in the region.