One of my favourite things about being a volunteer is getting the chance to be a “jack of all trades”. At my work I have had the opportunity to dip my toes into the areas of graphic design, photography, and delivering training, as well as the more familiar areas of writing and editing, media relations and public speaking.
Outside of work, volunteers often end up dipping their toes in different areas as well. The most common – and sometimes most challenging – is trying to straddle the two often incompatible worlds of tourist and local.
I know I’m not really a local here. Sure, I live with a Sinhalese family, eat copious amounts of rice and very very spicy curry with my fingers, work for a Sri Lankan NGO, speak some of the local language, and enjoy my tea with seven sugars, but Olof and I know we are leaving soon and will return to our friends, families, bland food and sugarless tea of the UK.
At the same time though, I am not really a tourist. For one thing, Sri Lankan tourism isn’t really geared up to people like me – people who are on a budget and hoping to get a bargain. Really, the sorts of people that Sri Lanka likes to attract are those that can afford to stay in the beautiful private villas that dot the coastline along here, or the smart colonial style tea bungalows of the hill country, and travel across the island in private vehicles.
Unlike the locals though, I do go away at weekends and stay in hotels and guesthouses. I do go and visit the tourist destinations and temples. And I do study my lonely planet and Sri Lanka map religiously - much to the bemusement of the locals, many of whom have never looked at a map in their lives, and can’t tell you the distance to or location of their nearest town.
So volunteers, and the handful of independent travellers here, end up having an interesting, colourful and sometimes incredibly uncomfortable and humiliating experience, trying to combine the experience of being a tourist and the budget of being a local. On Saturday, Olof and I experienced all of these as we decided to explore Kandy and the surrounding area independently. Silly us.
As I mentioned, most tourists and the wealthier Sri Lankans manage getting around the island by hiring a van and driver. Now this isn’t because there is no public transport in Sri Lanka. Far from it in fact, as tens of thousands of buses career along the roads here, sending dogs, cows, three-wheelers and the odd unfortunate cyclist flying in their wakes. But these people are actually incredibly sensible and have decided to give public transport a miss. Clever them.
On leaving our guesthouse in Kandy to walk (yes, walk) to the bus station, we were interrupted several times by “You want tuk tuk sir?”, “You want taxi madam?”. After responding “no” a few times, we decided to bring our Sinhala into the equation. “Api payin yannavar” (we’re walking). “Api payin yanne kemetiy” (we like walking). The three wheeler drivers looked at each other in amazement – tourists, who like to walk (can tourists walk?) and who speak Sinhala (why would a tourist learn Sinhala? – good question actually), and left us alone, shaking their heads and trying to remember just how much arrack they drank the night before.
Ten minutes later we arrived at the bus stand to get the bus to the Elephant Orphanage nearby. Or what we thought was the relevant bus stand. Sri Lankan bus stands remind me a bit of videos you see of the stock exchange – hundreds of people crammed around shouting and waving their hands in the air. Except I think that’s organised chaos. This is just chaos. Add to that fifty or so big, rusty ugly buses, a handful of people carrying various snacks, drinks or fruits above their heads and signs and signs in Sinhala, and you have a Sri Lankan city bus stand.
After asking several people, we eventually found Kandy’s bus stand number two (or was it three?) and climbed aboard a bus to Colombo. We can both read Sinhala so knew where it was going, and had studied the aforementioned map so knew our destination was on the way. “Where going?” asked the conductor, “Kegalle” we said. “Get off. This bus isn’t going there”. Now we knew it was, but bus conductors don’t really like to give seats to people who are not going the whole journey, and also like tourists even less, so we obediently got down and continued on our way.
“Madam, sir I give you special tuk tuk price – 1200 rupees to the Elephant Orphanage”, said one three-wheeler driver. We didn’t have Elephant Orphanage written on our heads but he must have guessed (we are after all tourists – aren’t we?). 1200 rupees is actually only £6 so, you might think, a bargain for the hour long journey from Kandy. But I have been in a three wheeler for an hour on a busy main road in Sri Lanka, and I can honestly say that it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, as the HUGE bus screeched round the corner and narrowly missed the three wheeler by a few inches, so I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
Utterly confused by the lack of buses to the nearest big town (that we were allowed on), we decided to ask at the “information desk”. I have since decided that the misinformation desk, as it should be called, is actually staffed by passersby and anyone else who feels like sitting in an office to have a little rest. Needless to say, this didn’t help, so we changed plans and decided another line of attack – get the train to the botanical gardens and spend the morning in there. Then get a bus to the Elephant Orphanage in time for bathing in the river (the elephants, not us) and feeding. Good plan.
Well it sort of was. Of course, we got off at the wrong stop – the Peradeniya botanical gardens is not at the Peradeniya station (why would it be – this is after all Sri Lanka). But we managed to spend a relaxing morning in amongst the talipot palms and coco de mer trees in this amazing place.
We also made it to the Elephant Orphanage by bus, albeit standing all the way with people pressed into my back, and with my face in someone else’s armpit. Unusually the bus was incredibly slow (here they go terrifyingly fast unless you want to get somewhere quickly, and then they go ve-e-e-ry slo-oo-wly). So we missed the Elephant bathing but did manage to get really close and watch them feeding. After a couple of hours, we decided to get the bus back to Kandy.
On leaving the orphanage, Olof spotted a bus. “Let’s get that bus”, he said. “Bus?” shouted the security guard, thinking he must have misheard that tourists would want to travel in this way. Within seconds, his words had echoed around the whole village, and about twenty people came out to flag the bus down for us. And twenty more to watch the spectacle of the strange behaviour of foreigners getting the bus.
Now the bus back was one of these extremely crowded ones. And I don’t just mean face-in-the-armpit crowded. This was seriously crowded. The density of people was a little bit like cramming seven or eight into a British phone box (do we still have those?) and felt a bit like the phone box had been taken and rolled down a hill. I had people pressed into every part of my body I could feel. And then the monks got on.
In Sri Lanka, people are expected to give up their seats to Buddhist monks. What’s more, women are not allowed to sit next to them. The rights and wrongs of this aside, it’s just the way things are here and I accept it. So when four monks got on, and people dutifully moved out of their seats, the density in the aisle reached epic proportions. I tried to move away from the monk, I really did, but at one point I found myself almost sitting on a monk’s lap, trying to move out of the way to let someone pass, aware all the time of my unholy foreign bare leg pressing into his orange clad holy one. The poor monk. His twenty year vow of chastity and general holiness was in mortal danger. And all because a silly foreigner tried to behave like a local!
Eventually I spotted an opportunity for a seat. A man who had been sitting on the bus’s engine next to the driver climbed out. Looking back, I realise it was because he was told to move by a policeman. But at the time my need to sit overtook everything and I climbed over the bars and onto the engine. This proved to be too much for most people and a wave of hysterical laughter broke out across the bus. (Women don’t do things like that here). The poor monks tried to keep straight faces, but it was all getting a bit much for them. I didn’t mind though. I had my seat.
When Olof and I got back to Kandy we discovered that we could have made the whole trip for about £20 in an air conditioned taxi. That’s what the proper tourists do. But us rural dwellers didn’t even know that such things existed in Sri Lanka.
So, tired, sweaty and a little humiliated, we agreed that there was only one place for us – and excitingly Kandy is one of the only parts of Sri Lanka outside Colombo with one. THE PUB! After all, that’s what tourists do on holiday. As I tucked into my tourist beer at tourist prices, surrounded by other tourists I thought to myself: Sri Lanka, you drive me crazy. But I will miss you.
Peradeniya Botanical Gardens
Meeting a baby Elephant
The bus ride home...
