Colombo, Sri Lanka - First Impressions

Hot and Crowded
The first thing you notice is the heat and humidity.  It overwhelms the airport air conditioning and sticks to you.  Within minutes I felt like I'd showered in olive oil.  While waiting to pass through immigration, I peek outside.  It's early afternoon and the sky is already black, but then the blackness swirls and shifts to blue.  A swarm of crows had blotted out the light temporarily.  Colombo was not our destination, but a means to an end.  We'd soon be taking a train into the mountains to hike.  It looked to be a good plan since this city of five million is a sweaty people stew bubbling under a swollen sun.

We grab a cab at the airport and I find myself white-knuckling the back of the seat.  Road markings are merely decorative, there are four lanes of traffic squeezed into two.  I feel deja vu.  Sri Lanka is about as different from India as the US is from Canada.  We arrive at our destination, a large house surrounded by embassies.  We are shown to a bedroom in a wing of the house that looked to be little used.  Out host is a friendly lady named Champika who cooked us a breakfast from scratch the two mornings we spent there.  We asked for a restaurant recommendation for dinner our first night and she sent us to a cafe with a cricket motif, run by Australians.  We immediately left and went across the street to a hole in the wall.  Thankfully there were photos since Sinhalese script is as mysterious as its Tamil cousin, one of the four official languages in Singapore.

The cooks and customers were surprised to see us.  I don't think they get a lot of foreign visitors.  "Philippines?" they kept asking Dodo.  We pointed at the photos and one of the customers gave us a thumbs up.  We'd chosen wisely.

I ordered something called Kottu, which is a spicy dish of chopped roti, chicken, vegetables and curry.  The chef made it on a large tabletop grill, chopping down on it with two gleaming cleavers.  It made a deafening sound, like a machine gun, which overwhelmed even the street noise outside.  When we got back, we told Champika about our adventure and her eyebrows went up.  "This is a government cantine, which is for the workers" she laughed as she told us.  She must've been thinking 'these two are pretty crazy.'

During our short time in Colombo we made our way around in tuk-tuks.  A tuk-tuk is a three wheeled motorcycle covered with a thin metal carapace.  It's like riding inside a vibrating tin can.  After a few tuk-tuk rides I fondly recalled the safety and comfort of my earlier cab ride.

We strolled through a nearby park where Buddha sat staring at a building that was modeled on the Capitol.  The crows from the airport were there, drinking from a fountain and then taking off en masse, shape-shifting into a large black cloud above the trees.

We visited what was billed as a floating market.  I expected something like I'd seen in Thailand, where the vendors sit in boats surrounded by goods.  This was a market in name only, it was almost empty, a tourist attraction that had failed to take root.  A few swans floated by on the turgid green water, under the shadow of a telecommunications tower shaped like a lotus.

A few blocks away we walked the busy market streets.  Each block specialized in a specific product.  In one you could buy shoes and clothes, in another electronics, and another textiles.  I picked up a pair of flip-flops, which I changed into as quickly as possible.

When Dodo got thirsty, she jogged across the street for a fresh coconut juice. The vendor took out a large machete, chopped off the top, popped in a straw and handed it over.