2017 Colombo
Monday 9th January 2017
Our flight was with the excellent Emirates airline, on an A380, a huge double-decker plane that looked like it had filled its full capacity of 519 passengers. It was a good flight and even the food was ok. Who can argue with a sticky toffee pudding for dessert?
After a short stopover in Dubai, we arrived in Colombo at 4 am local time. I was dreading a long, chaotic queue at passport control, but we were through in no time. I had purchased tickets for some train journeys from an agent in Brighton who told me they would be available at the airport at the Mobitel (mobile phone) counter. I wasn’t expecting them to be there, but they were cheap, so it was worth taking the risk. To my surprise, they found my bookings straight away, and a few minutes later, the train tickets were in my hand. I also bought SIM cards from them so we would have local mobile numbers during our holiday. Even more surprising was that they connected to the internet first time, so I couldn’t ever remember a journey ever going so smoothly.
For the first three nights, we were staying at the Grand Oriental Hotel. It was a famous hotel in its day, but most of the reviews on booking.com said it was well past its sell-by date. Their main promotional picture showed a smart doorman at the entrance welcoming the guests. On our arrival, there was a red carpet, and we did get a welcome, but it was in the form of a large rat. It stood by the front door like it was waiting for someone to let it in. What surprised me was that although my experience of rats was very limited, those that I had come across were very nervous and ran off as soon as they saw me. This rat strolled past so casually that I thought it was going to ask me the way to the kitchen. 
By the time we had checked in and were in our room, it was 6 a.m. local time, so we had the choice of having breakfast or going to sleep. After a full day’s travelling, it was no contest.
We woke at around 1 pm and looked around our room. I had changed my mind about staying at that hotel a dozen times, but kept the booking out of curiosity more than anything else. With a booking.com review score of 6.6, it was the lowest-rated hotel we had ever stayed at, but there was no question that it was once a magnificent hotel. We paid extra for a deluxe room, and yet it was still very cheap. It was a huge room with a sitting room and a four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting. We had to take the netting off because it was so dusty that it looked like it had never been washed. It was a dark room with dark furniture displaying countless scuffs left behind by the generations of guests that had gone before us. I had such mixed feelings about it, as there was no doubt that the lack of maintenance made it quite depressing, but at the same time, you could almost feel the history it contained. From the front, it still looked like a palace, but the back looked out onto a dockyard.
We asked a tuk-tuk driver to take us to a shopping mall where we knew there was a food court. We were hungry and hot, and when you are unsure of a place, you can’t go wrong with a shopping mall. Our friendly driver told us we were very lucky because it was the last day of a government sale, so they were selling gemstones very cheaply. We weren’t interested, but he insisted. He drove through the traffic like a lunatic before mounting the pavement in front of a shop. We had expected him to take us to a market that sold gems for next to nothing, but it was a normal shop with prices much the same as England. We discovered later that shops paid tuk-tuk drivers to take tourists to them even if they didn’t buy anything. Federika loved looking at gemstones but had no intention of buying anything in the first few hours of our trip, so after 15 minutes of high-pressure salesmanship, we left. Not only had the Tuk-tuk driver taken us to somewhere we didn’t want to go, but it was completely out of our way, so we had also paid him extra for the privilege.
One of the first things we noticed was how friendly everyone was. We ate in a self-service restaurant, and after getting our food, we found there was nowhere to sit. A Sri Lankan man invited us to sit with him, and we started chatting effortlessly. The irony was that Federika and I were eating delicious Sri Lankan food, and he was eating pizza. We exchanged business cards, and an hour later, I received a delightful email from him saying how lucky he was to have sat with us and that he had spent the last hour listening to my music.
Early evening, we went to the Galle Face Hotel, which was far more of a “Grand Hotel” than ours, and inside, there were walls full of signed pictures of all the famous people who had stayed there. It was by the sea, so we sat on the terrace with two Bellinis for company and watched the sunset. 
Breakfast in the hotel the next morning was an interesting experience. There was a large buffet, which was mainly Sri Lankan food. I loved trying out new food, but not so much for breakfast. Most of the dishes were the kind of things you would have for lunch or dinner. Lots of curry and noodle dishes, roast potatoes and all kinds of heavy-looking things. The only thing vaguely European was tiny chicken sausages and some hard-boiled eggs, but fortunately, there were croissants and jam, which were all we needed.
Our first visit of the day was to the Pettah Market, but as there weren’t many tourists around, the stall holders soon pounced on us and demanded we take advantage of their “special prices.” If we showed any hint or weakness, they latched onto us like dogs sharing a bone, so when Federika showed interest in a pair of shorts, the salesman produced six pairs to choose from. Some were hopelessly too big, but he assured us that they only looked big because that was the style. Eventually, she settled on a pair she liked and asked about the price. He wanted 4500 rupees, which was double what they cost in England. We laughed and walked away. We were 50 metres down the street when he came running after us, and we finally settled for 1500 rupees, which was still not a great price, but we just wanted to get rid of him.
Next morning, we hired a tuk-tuk to take us to the Gagaramaj Temple. The driver followed us into the temple and gave us an unsolicited tour. He told us a few interesting things, but we would have preferred to have been by ourselves, as we felt he was rushing us through. When we got back to the hotel, his charge had risen from 200 rupees to 2000 because of the tour we hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. The other reason for the price increase was that he had four children, so it seemed that tuk-tuk fares were not based on distance but on the number of children the driver had. We expected people to try it on, but this man was very unpleasant, and the charge was absurd, so I gave him 1000 rupees and the most menacing look I could muster.
That night, we still hadn’t recovered from the trip and time difference, so we needed a good night’s sleep, but we were woken at 5 am by someone praying through a million-watt P.A. system. It went on for nearly an hour, and my earplugs offered no protection, so even after it stopped, it took me ages to get back to sleep.
On our last day in Colombo, Federika was flicking through a local magazine when she saw an advert for the full moon festival at the Kelaniya Temple, which was about an hour away. Neither of us was keen on an hour travelling, and we nearly didn’t go, but we were so glad we did. As we sat in the tuk-tuk in heavy traffic with thick black exhaust fumes filling the air, we wished we were back in the hotel, but the traffic soon thinned out, so it was only mildly unbearable.
The Kelaniya Temple was a huge square complex at the top of a lot of steps. There was a main temple in the middle, a lot of mini temples around it and various other places of worship scattered around. Each area had places where incense was burning, so the whole area was filled with intense smells, and the atmosphere was electric in anticipation of the procession to come. We had an hour to kill before it all started, so we left the complex and went for something to eat. We stopped at a very basic restaurant and ordered some noodles. The cook was throwing noodles onto a large grid and tossing them with two metal utensils. I don’t know if it was intentional, but the way he was tossing the noodles created a rhythmic sound, so I went over to him and recorded it on my iPhone. I handed him my business card and explained, using sign language, that I would take his rhythmic noodle tossing and put it into one of my songs. I think he understood, as he looked delighted and gave me a scrap of paper with his phone number and Facebook page, so we became Facebook friends.
We returned to the temple where the festival was about to start, but rather than a procession, there were little groups of performers scattered around the place, so we didn’t know where to stand. There were also a lot of heavily shackled elephants dressed in magnificent robes that covered their heads and bodies. I don’t think there is any animal with the ability to look as bored as an elephant does. We spent the next hour walking around and looking at all the performers. Having seen enough, we started to make our way out, but when we got to the steps that led to the exit, we found it blocked solid with people sitting down and waiting for the procession to begin. There were wide steps on all four sides of the temple, but they were all blocked with people. Finally, we came to a road that led out of the temple and realised that the performers we had seen scattered around the place were making their way to join the procession on that road. It meant we had a really good place to see the many different groups in various styles of dress, all dancing to the drummers that walked behind them. All the performers were men, including some who clearly loved being dressed as women. 
It was fantastic, but I had always found standing still in one place very tiring, so after another hour we decided to leave. We knew that the road where the procession was going was the only exit, so we sneaked down the side behind a group of performers, but reached a point where the police refused to let us go any further. It seemed that the authorities organised this amazing annual event and took care of every detail except how to avoid trapping thousands of people in the temple area. Their attitude seemed to be that everyone had to stay until the procession was over at around 2 am. Heaven knows what would happen if there were any kind of emergency. I had to laugh when I compared it to the health and safety laws in the UK. In some of the pubs I performed in, if people started dancing, I had to tell them to sit down because it was against fire regulations, despite the fact that they were dancing next to the large entrance doors.
We found an official who pointed us to a car park area by the side, implying that it was the way out, but it was surrounded by a small wall. We joined other escapees who were climbing down the wall, which was easy enough, but on the other side was a steep verge that should have been grass but was now just dust. It was very slippery, and at the bottom was another bigger wall that we had to let ourselves gently down till we reached the ground. There were families with children and an elderly man with us, and it felt like we were taking part in a prison break. When we got to the outer perimeter road, we still weren’t free because of the procession, which was in full flow. There was a pedestrian bridge going across the road, but it was blocked with a metal barrier guarded by a grumpy policeman. I told him we wanted to leave, and he looked at me like I was crazy, but he did let us go across the bridge. After that, it was just a matter of squeezing through a solid mass of people at least 10 deep. It was a great night, and being held prisoner only added to the fun of it all. I expect those who slid down the grass verge to their deaths didn’t find it so much fun.
2017 Sri Lanka
