If you had slept through your trip from Kerala to Sri Lanka,
you will not realize that you are in a different land. Sri Lanka resembles the
God’s own country in many ways. Be it be the long rows of coconut trees that
line up the tarred highways, houses with tiled roof tops or sound of the rumbling
sea at a distance.
“Sri Lanka got independence from British in 1948” our guide
quipped. “British did a lot of good work over the 140 years they were in Sri
Lanka. They build our railways, 5 star hotels and a good road network. They
would have continued their good work but unfortunately we got independence in
1948”. I was a little taken aback by the eulogy for colonists by the oppressed.
As we moved on seeing the city of
Colombo and hearing more from our Sri Lankan guide, the similarity I had weaved
in my mind started dissolving. The first difference I could see was the blatant
disparity between rich and the poor. Our guide took care that our tour bus went
through the rich localities of Lanka and we were all given a perception of a
developed country. But the intermittent slums which littered the lands gave us
the actual picture of the golden kingdom build for Ravanna by the mason of
gods. The vehicles running on the roads were mostly imported from India. There
were Altos, Swifts and Nanos. Tata Nano infact is a big hit in Sri Lanka and is
extensively used as Nano taxis there. But I was surprised to hear that the
prices of vehicles are very high. It seems Nano costs almost 10 lacs after
the large import duty imposed by government. The price of nano is around 3 - 4 time more than it is in India and almost equal to the price of Alto, the market leader of Sri Lanka. Initially, I thought the high price of cars are a strategy used by the Lankan
government is keeping its roads less congested. They cannot expand their city
roads, so only way to keep the roads commutable is by reducing the vehicles- If
you cannot solve the problem, delay the problem.Later I found out that the Lankan government had actually sliced the duty on cars but immediately rolled back the same after the large number of car imports drained all its foreign reserves.
Most of our tour concentrated in an area called Colombo 7
aka Cinnamon gardens. The tour showed us the freedom square first and moved on
the famous buildings of the New Lanka – Bandaranayike convention centre,
Cultural auditorium etc. Interestingly all these structures were build with
Chinese money donated to the Lankans. The President of Lanka Mahindra Rajapaksa
is getting abundant helping hand from the Chinese which is using to rebuild his
country, he liberated from LTTE. Chinese money is also building the second
international airport and port down south. Interestingly, Chinese is trying
hard to impress the large Budhist community in Sri Lanka and trying to build a
network around India. I have a feeling that this is a bit of paranoiac work
from Chinese as we all very well know that India is no match for China with all
its internal troubles. Whatever investments Chinese do for Sri Lanka,
Budhists world over are never going to
support them against Dalai Lama, so the big brother of Asia may not reach anywhere with this strategy.
After the city tour, we returned back to our resort called
Club Dolphin. The resort is well build and is one of the favorite destinations
of European and American tourists. Because of the this same reason, the staff will
treat you like shit. The welcome drink and initial ritual will work fine but
when it comes to peak hours, they will quietly ignore you and will tell you to
wait if you press your case.
We then moved to Colombo international airport for our
flight. Everything in that airport is substandard. First you will
face an uncontrollable mob at the entry terminal. People will all be rushing in
and the security staff will just toss your baggage in and out the scanning
machinery. Once you are through with the entrance, you reach a large line of
shops selling "authentic" Lankan stuff in dollars. Next you will be faced with
security check-in staff with outdated metal detectors. The system is so poor
that they will ask you to remove every piece of metal from your body before getting
yourself scanned. You will have to remove your shoes, belt and I was wondering
what they will do about people with metal implants within their body. Finally,
we boarded our Sri Lankan air flight at 11:35 pm in the night. Tired from the
day long trip, I slept off immediately only to woken up by the air hostess at
1:30 am for dinner. Imagine, 1:30 am and dinner made up of noodles pushed towards you. After the “dinner”,
I went back to sleep again; again to be woken up a smiling air hostess at 4 am.
“You will have to go through security check at Singapore airport now” she said.
“What? But I am going to KL, why will I get a security check here” I asked.
“You will have to sir, as our flight is goes via Singapore” she replied. Now
imagine the heights – You are woken up at 4 am in the morning to take a walk
through an airport which you are not even getting down at. As we had no choice, we
went through the turmoil of taking a walk through the legendary Singapore
airport and getting ourselves scanned and checked. I never really understood
why Singapore was doing this. Singapore airport is one the most crowded and
successful airports in the world. Surely, they don’t need to take people though
such jokes to show off their possession. May be Singapore knows the quality of security in Sri Lankan airports and so was being doubly sure.
All in all, I feel that Sri Lanka is a beautiful country,
very similar to Kerala in its geography and topography. Its sun, beaches and
food are lovely and worth a tour. The best thing about Sri Lankan tour is
that after a tour, you realize that India is a great place after all.
