Helen writes,
Today Helen, May and Roshan went on an elephant ride round a beautiful lake filled with lotus flowers.
When we arrived we climbed a rickety ladder up to a high platform and Rajah the elephant waited patiently while we clambered onto his back and sat on a padded seat either side of his back.
The mahout was a spindly man with a simple stick to control the elephant. Luckily Rajah obeyed all his commands and transported us safely around the lake stopping to munch on various leaves en route.
The mahout’s friend took pictures of us as he said the camera was safer like that! I tried to take photos but they were all shaky.
After a while Rajah took a precipitous turn into the lake! We were frightened to death.
We couldn’t see what was in the lake and thoughts of unfriendly reptiles made us very uneasy.
Rajah plodded in deeper and deeper.
We raised our legs and I made conversation with the mahout to keep my mind off hidden perils!
We emerged much later thankfully unscathed!
The guide made us all garlands from lotus flowers, which were lovely.
He also found us interesting plants for May to draw.
This morning we woke in a state of great nervous expectation because the day promised two possible results; either we would be meeting Roshan’s birth mother for the first time in twenty years or disapointingly she would not be able to make the journey to Dambulla for the reunion.
The tentative arrangement was for us to meet at 11am.
Before this we planned to climb up the steep rock face at Dambulla to see the ancient Buddhist cave temples.
We started out at 8am and climbed painfully slowly up the steep pathway towards the caves. Several elderly ladies passed us negotiating the route much more nimbly than our leaden limbs could manage.
How unfit are we?
The temple was interesting and our guide was very informative but in truth, I was far too anxious about our coming appointment to concentrate on touristy stuff and wanted to get going to town and make the rendezvous with Roshan’s mum.
At the base of the temple our guide got a call on his mobile from Priyantha, Roshan’s brother. He said his mother hadn’t yet arrived.
I told Roshan that the chances of us meeting her were now very small as she wasn’t able to make the journey from where she now lives.
He was sad but said he understood she must feel very stressed about it all.
He knows all about stress!!
We headed out of town to try and get my phone unblocked but every phone shop said that this would cause permanent damage so I’ve given up trying now and will just stick with May if we are out, as her phone is fine.
At 12 o’clock we had another call from Priyantha. He said he would be meeting us with his mother very soon.
We waited and soon a little green tuk-tuk appeared.
Out climbed three people; Priyantha, a young woman in orange robes and a small, thin woman whose face I instantly recognised as Roshan’s Mum!
It was all very emotional all round really.
The young woman turned out to be Roshan’s sister. Her name is Depeeka.
She has been a Buddhist nun since she was a young girl.
She is 26 now and remembers Roshan when he was a baby.
She was shocked to see him initially and cried.
Through Neil our guide I asked if we could go to a café to have a drink and talk some more and everyone readily agreed.
We spent over an hour exchanging information and his mum was very happy to find that Roshan had been well looked after and was able to live well in spite of his deafness. She was worried for him and that he needed a cure but we explained that it wasn’t possible.
We exchanged addresses and promised to be in touch with more photos etc.
Roshan was happy to meet his family.
But I don’t think he’s realised quite how amazingly lucky we were to have found them.
Helen writes,
Today we had a remarkable adventure!
We were told by the Sri Lankan authorities that neither May nor Roshan’s mothers were traceable so we gave up on the idea of actually meeting them during our visit.
But on the way to our next stop at Dambulla we asked Neil, our driver, if he could stop at the home village of Roshan’s birth Mother so we could investigate.
I knew she had lived in the grounds of a Buddhist temple in a little town called Gallewella on the road to Dambulla.
Neil was sceptical about finding anyone who might know of her as it was such a long time ago That she had lived there and we didn’t have the address of the actual temple but ..... Helen, the Determined Woman persisted and I asked Neil to stop at the temples we found on the route and make enquiries.
At the first one - puzzled faces all round.
But at the second, where we had long conversations with aged and venerable Buddhist monks - Neil acting as translator - and a chattering clutch of very young novitiates eager to practise their English, there was a glimmer of recognition from a visiting tuk-tuk driver that rapidly sent him and Neil off into the town to find another tuk-tuk driver who turned out to be Roshan’s older brother, Priyantha!
He looks such a lot like Roshan and frowns with a puzzled, bewildered expression in exactly the same way that Roshan does.
Possibly tomorrow at 11am we may meet up with his birth mother once again after nearly 20 years!
Well, a long, hot and eventful journey from Negombo to Dambulla yesterday.
(More on the events later from Helen.)
A day of hard and dusty driving but fortunately we have the benefit of powerful air-con in our people carrier.
May took many photos of the sights and scenes of daily life of as we drove ever onward into the Sri Lankan interior. I'll try to upload them to a flikr account if we have time in the schedule. Broadband is a bit erratic and very slow at times.
The Hotel Kandalama, where we are staying, is an unbelievable place. It is built into and around a high rocky, jungle-clad hill overlooking a huge tank (man-made reservoir – I say man-made but it was made by men living in a previous millennium so there is nothing artificial about it.)
The building is close to half a km long in total, winding it’s way round the hill, and has 6 floors but is as unlike a concrete monolithic edifice as it is possible to get. The jungle is never more than a few feet away at any point.
We woke this morning to find monkeys on one of our balconies.
Yes, we have two balconies. We booked standard rooms at all the hotels on our tour but Rebecca at Audley’s managed to get them all upgraded to deluxe rooms at no extra cost. She’s a marvel.
When we arrived at the Kandalama they only had one deluxe room available so they upgraded us again to a suite. At first May insisted that she and mum had the suite but decided on reflection that she preferred the panoramic lake view from the one deluxe room to the suite’s less exotic jungle view, so poor old Roshan and me had to settle for the suite.
We aren’t complaining. The Jacuzzi is huge.
There is a tri-nation cricket tournament going on at the moment and the hotel is the base for the Sri Lankan, Indian and New Zealand teams. We are constantly coming across people I’ve seen playing on Sky Sports.
It’s a strange, unworldly experience to keep bumping into strangers who look so familiar.
Today Sri Lanka are playing new Zealand, so the hotel is quieter but this evening there will be one happy group and one a little more downcast, I expect.
I was talking to one of the Sri Lankan coaches (an Aussie) last night and he’s very confident of a Lankan win. We’ll see later.
All the players and their support staff for all three teams seem a friendly bunch despite their great fame and the reverence they are universally held in, here in Sri Lanka, which is a country utterly besotted with cricket.
It’s a marvellous place.
Helen writes,
Life in Economy wasn’t so bad! After a short while on board we were given food and drink.
All was fine until the plane converted to Sri Lankan time and after only a few hours sleep in the darkened plane the lights were turned on and cold flannels distributed to all of us to wake us up.
I looked at my watch. It was 2am.
We were served breakfast then we landed. In local time it was 8 am. We were very jet lagged! We definitely needed to relax and acclimatise.
Our driver, Neil, met us at the airport and took us to our first hotel called ‘the Beach’ at Negombo.
It is spectacular! There are palm lined beaches and a crashing surf beyond. We explored the hotel and the local beach, enjoyed fantastic local cuisine and cocktails in the evening on the terrace.
May had a King Coconut, which is a whole coconut, pierced and drunk through a straw into the fruit.
The three intrepid travelers take time out for a welcome pedicure. Dad just foot the bill.
Today our Sri Lankan friend, Chuli da Silva, came to see us.
She stayed for dinner in the evening and we enjoyed a Sri Lankan buffet on the terrace of the hotel. She thought the food was great so we feel we’ve been eating the authentic cuisine.
It was great to see her after 20 years.
She is about to start work in Dacca, Bangladesh where she is curating/ organising a huge event in photography. She’s just as enthusiastic as I remember she was all those years ago when we first met in Brunei.
She took lots of photos, especially of May and Roshan. She’s always been very interested in their lives as she was instrumental in our adoption of them originally.
We may see her again in Galle as she’s there at the same time as us - fingers crossed.
I asked them at the check-in desk and I asked again at boarding.
I asked the kind young stewardess who showed me to my capacious and luxurious seat and she asked the smiling dapper cabin manager who then came to see me. So I asked him too.
He went off and asked the ultimate arbiter, the flight manager who also came to see me and, yes you’ve guessed it, I asked him.
Oh how I asked him. I used all the obsequious charm I’d picked up during my two years in Northern Borneo. I smiled my Mackworth grin and shook his hand like I was his long lost son.
And he said YES! It certainly was perfectly possible for my family to join me in the exclusive business class cabin. It was only half full, after all and he could quite understand how I might be lonely parted from them for a full ten hour flight. All I had to do was pay a £550 upgrade fee – each - and they could leave the cramped hell I’d consigned them to and scamper forward to the roomy acres at the front of the plane.
As you might guess, I declined his kind offer and settled disconsolately into my deeply padded recliner and tried to come to terms with my failure as I tucked into my Tian of Seafood with Mesculine salad, followed by Fillet of Beef with green peppercorn sauce served onto china plates (silver service, of course) and a very pleasant, if a little fruity, cheeky glass of red.
Somehow I recovered. I’m not sure Helen, May and Roshan have though.
Three days of pampered luxury on the agenda to help us get acclimatised and to re adjust our internal clocks before we get down to the hard traveling to come later.
Exactly how many deeply alcoholic coconut cocktails and exotic nibbles served by the pool might be considered to constitute adequate preparation, I wonder?
