The Demon King’s Golden Kingdom

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.