The Buddhist temples that I have seen here in Sri Lanka are quite beautiful and well-kept.
From Kandy we travelled by bus to Hikkaduwa, a beautiful village on the south west coast of Sri Lanka. We checked into a little guest house, and walked along the golden sands studded with wavering palm trees.
Here in Sri Lanka I feel that I have reached heaven. During my travels I have been wandering, unconsciously searching for a haven in which to rest – and here it is at last. I feel that I want to stay here on this island as long as possible, to rest, read, draw and write to my heart’s content.
Len also wants to sightsee though, so in Hikkaduwa we went to see a rubber plantation and a tea factory.
We eat in little cafés. The food here is very spicy, like it is in South India. The Sri Lankans eat a lot of fish curry (far too spicy for me) with rice and grated coconut mixed together. Many of their curry sauces have a coconut milk base. The coconuts here are wonderful. Even the curd here is so much better than that in India – so thick and creamy. Perhaps the cows are in much better condition here and have more grass to eat.
I never intended to stay with Len so long – sometimes I just go along with things until the situation, or my better judgement, encourages me to leave. I like being with Len and having a travelling companion, but half of me would quite like to be alone again. I know that he is just hoping that I am going to let him sleep with me. I don’t want to.
Friday, 28th May 1976
Len took the train this morning to Badulla. I decided not to go with him. I told him I would go later by bus.
I finally got fed up with him criticising me and telling me that all American girls have been on the pill since the age of seventeen. He tried to make me feel as though there was something wrong with me because I’m a virgin.
Actually I shall miss his company as a travelling companion, but only because I have got used to it. I have travelled with him longer than anybody else so far.
Saturday, 29th May 1976
I have arrived in Badulla and spent the night here in a lovely little guest house for five rupees a night. The owners went out of their way to find me a little room to myself as I was alone, and would not let me sleep in the dormitory where other travellers are sleeping. I would not have minded! They insisted on giving me one of their ‘staff rooms’.
Bedulla is a delightful little town set in beautiful, hilly, green country. The scenery was spectacular on the way here and it was quite cold going through the mountains. I am longing to get to the coast again.
I thought I might see Len here in Bedulla but I have not. Possibly he has stopped at a town on the way as the train journey was very long. Maybe I shall see him when I go to Aragum Bay.
A Hut on the Beach
Tuesday, 1st June 1976
I am now in Aragum Bay. Again I have the feeling that I am in paradise. I have left the ‘Rest House’ (as the guest houses are so often called) that I was staying in here, and I am renting a hut made of thatched palm leaves, like the others in the village, on this beautiful beach for one rupee a day (five pence). This fishermen’s hut village is beautiful and everything here looks clean.
I am so lucky because I have been given an especially nice hut with two small rooms – the front is a kind of veranda with an open doorway and two large windows (no glass of course) where I am now sitting. There is a wooden table and chair. Most of the rented huts I have seen do not have this table and chair.
This is just perfect for me as I want to do a lot of reading and writing – I want to write some children’s stories. The back room of the hut is my bedroom. There is a camp bed in it – made of wood and soft rough fabric material – and there are two shelves which are created with planks of wood suspended by rope from the ceiling! There is one little window at the back of the hut with wooden sticks tied to it like bars and a thatched door with a chain and a padlock to this room leading from the veranda. However, I have taken the precaution of burying my passport and money in the sand floor. The sand is beautifully soft and fine. I also have two woven mats in the hut which is a luxury too.
The local people and their families who live in the huts round about are so friendly. Just now, several of them came up to chat with me in broken English and asked if I would like a pot of curd (2 rupees 50 paisa for a big pot) and honey which one lady here has offered me free as a present.
There are quite a few young travellers staying in huts around about me – so far I have spoken to Australians and Americans – and all are very friendly. Australians are here for the surf – there are strong waves here and you can rent a surf board for one rupee a day from the hut owner. In the curved bay there is also a beautifully calm spot of clear blue sea for bathing, just across the sand from my hut.
These friendly villagers have just come to chat again – boys, girls and women, along with the hut owner. He is a very friendly person. I have just ordered a bottle of liquid jaggery (which they call coconut honey) for six rupees and a pot of curd to eat every day. I shall eat and drink the coconuts and pineapples here too and have a meal of curry and rice cooked by the local women who live with their families in the huts next to mine. A meal only costs three rupees a day, but sometimes I shall go into town to eat. One of the women just brought me a plate of fried potatoes topped with the yolk of an egg, as a gift.
I love the way the women dress here in colourful lungies wrapped around their bodies (like my wrap-around skirt) and sari tops (blouses) showing their midriffs. They do not wear saris. Their clothes are so simple and suited to the climate. I am wearing something similar.
Now I am writing this diary and eating curd by candlelight. I feel very contented.
Len and another American guy are staying in a hut nearby. They arrived here yesterday. My emotions are so crazy – I miss him. I was feeling quite lonely until these villagers came and chatted to me. I don’t know whether Len feels that I rejected him by not sleeping with him or whether he has now rejected me, but it was me who decided to take the bus instead of the train. Len is sharing a hut with another American man. I suppose he met him on the train.
I don’t actually mind being alone. Rarely on the whole of my travels have I ever felt lonely or afraid for more than a few minutes. Life is so simple here, and people are so friendly.
Now it is so dark. I can see I shall be going to bed early in this place. I’ll go over to the little tea shop (another hut) and see the other travellers here now.
Wednesday, 2nd June 1976
I’m not even sure if this is the right date.
Here I am still in this paradise sitting in my little house. The whole village must be asleep except me. It should be about eleven o’clock now, though time means nothing here. People tell time by the position of the sun in the sky. At sunset they eat and get ready for bed because the nights are so pitch black. They rise at dawn – about five o’clock − and the sunrises are so beautiful, but at first it is hard to get used to these timings.
I want to stay here longer on this beautiful beach. I love being so close to nature. I am not so keen on the nights though. Every now and again an enormous bug comes into the hut under the door or through the window. If I was asleep, I wouldn’t see them. Mostly the insects don’t worry me but they do at night. I even started to worry about wild animals last night. Behind the beach there is a jungle-like area. I have seen wild monkeys running about there and climbing in the trees when I walked along the country road to the town yesterday. I think there are crocodiles in the river here. I have also seen elephants on this island, especially working elephants, but I am not afraid of them. There is so much wild life in Sri Lanka. It is like an open safari park.
Yesterday I stayed too long in the town and missed the six o’clock evening bus back, and then it was too dark to walk the mile and a half back home to our hut village on the beach. I didn’t want to wait until ten o’clock for the next bus. One
of the local village boys was in town with his bike. He gave me a ride on his cross-bar back to the village and refused to take any payment for it. How nice the local people are. I have nearly always found them to be so to me. Some people seem to have more trouble with them and I think it is because of their own attitude, their own mistrust – perhaps some travellers expect the worse and that’s what they get. However, perhaps I am lucky.
Sunday, 6th June 1976
Len left early on Thursday morning with his friend. I woke up just a few minutes before they came out of their hut to go. I saw the torch light. I think I picked up their vibrations.
After Len had gone, I started to miss him again, but now I have gradually regained my feeling of contentment and tranquillity in this lovely place. I have met so many other good-looking men here with nice personalities. They are nearly all Australians. There are three brothers travelling together – one with his wife and another with his girlfriend. The other brother saw me and invited me to have lunch with them – curd and fruit and treacle which they mix up themselves. Bruce also suggested that in the mornings I go up to the ‘point’ of the bay where they all surf.
There is a small hut tea-shop there, selling tea made with tinned condensed milk, coconut cakes and bananas. The tea-shop is really a thatched palm parasol supported by sticks, with a wooden table under it. It is set in a little sandy grove up in the dunes surrounded by palm trees, bushes and undergrowth. There everyone sits around and chats and drinks tea in between surfing. There are a few new people here now – but very few women – four of us now in the whole company, I think, and I am the only free single one!
One of the Sri Lankan boys who live in the beach village here runs the tea-shop. He is thirteen years old and everyone is very fond of him. His name is Pali. Another small boy helps him. They open their tea-shop at the break of dawn when the surfers go up to the ‘point’, and in the evening they serve tea to us at a little table in a different, similar tea-shop – another thatched parasol in the hut area where Pali and the Australians live. There are several compounds of huts and each compound has a palm fence around it. There are quite a few monkeys around and some beautiful, brightly coloured birds which I have seen amongst the palm trees on the beach. We also saw a scorpion the other night and some people saw a snake up a tree at the ‘point’.
Quite a few stray dogs are also running around. They wander about eating whatever they can find, which mostly consists of any scraps thrown to them – not many. The dogs are scraggy and thin. The locals sometimes treat them cruelly and often hit them with sticks if they come too near or try to steal food. The dogs, however, are so gentle, it is unbelievable.
Doug’s wife, a Japanese girl, feeds the dogs in her area and so I decided to feed the black puppy that is in my compound. It is a dear little thing, so gentle and loving. There are two more dogs in this area. I gave two of them something to eat today and they both waited patiently while I fed the other and watched me so trustingly.
I can’t believe that dogs which are often treated so brutally should be so gentle, but they are. I think that not all stray dogs would be, though, and I am still sometimes afraid of dogs that I don’t know, but I know these dogs well enough now to know that they are not aggressive.
The dogs came to see me tonight and I fed them again. They rush up to me, licking my hands and wagging their tails, but when I go into my hut they don’t venture in. Probably too many times they have been turned out of huts. I wish I could take that puppy home. It has got such lovely, endearing dark eyes.
More Island Adventures
Tuesday, 15th June 1976
I have now left the paradise of Aragum Bay, after staying eleven days. I left on the 5.30 bus on the 12th June. If the bus had not come that morning I would not have gone. Never have I felt so sorry to leave a place – I thought I was going to cry. I did not realise how fond I had grown of that black puppy either, but I did know, every minute that I was there, how much I appreciated living in that little fishermen’s village on the beach. I felt so rich there – richer than I have ever felt in my life. There I had my own little house in that idyllic place with all facilities that I needed and all comforts, although actually I had nothing.
What I loved most, was that I could live so simply and so close to the earth; I could live life in all its fullness and yet I had so few needs. I lacked nothing. I used to wake up in the morning and rejoice that there was another day to live. I wanted to wake up early so as not to waste any of those precious hours of daylight. The morning sunrise was especially beautiful – the sun’s rays shed a kind of translucent light over everything, which is special only to those early hours.
I sometimes used to ask my neighbours to wake me up at sunrise or just before when they went out surfing, and then after a few moments of lying peacefully on my bed I would get up and slip on my bikini and fetch my towel. If it was early enough, I would go over to Raja’s hut where his wife, Barby, cooked hoppers in a metal pot over an open fire on the sand floor. They cost 25 paisa each, and an egg hopper cost 75 paisa. (There are a hundred paisa in each rupee.)
Hoppers are made of brown rice flour and have a soft bread-like consistency. Barby would spoon the batter mixture into the pan – making thick rounds, and when they were nearly cooked she poured a little coconut milk on the top or broke an egg onto it. These hoppers were always served at about six o’clock in the morning. If I got up too late I would go straight down to the sea to swim, sometimes stopping at Raja’s tea-shop for tea made with condensed milk, or a ‘drinking coconut’ with a straw. At other times I would swim first in that beautiful clear blue sea – it always felt wonderful to swim on an empty stomach. I took delight in feeling fit and trimming up my body as I swam so much and I did not think much about food.
After swimming, I would wander up to Pali’s little tea-shop amongst the palms at the back of the beach, then I would go back and swim in the sea again until lunch-time when I would go back to Raja’s hut and eat salad, or curd and fruit, or coconut hoppers. They were delicious but I never had more than two at a time. I used to rest around midday when it was hottest and the sun was high in the sky, because I had got sunburnt when I first arrived. In the afternoon I went visiting for a short while, and once I attended the ‘Bong Session’ – a whole group of the Australian men would sit and smoke marijuana for a few hours and get stoned every afternoon! I didn’t share in the marijuana – but I sat with them.
The water was not too salty or sandy, but after swimming I went to the village well and drew out cool water to pour all over my body. The bucket was extended on a rope from a large wooden stick and swung from its support like a see-saw. Drawing up water is so easy and effortless – it is a marvellous invention. I would always go swimming again in the afternoon – the afternoons are beautifully breezy.
Sometimes I would go walking before sunset along that lovely desolate beach or along the little winding road into the town. It was quite a long but beautiful walk. Once I sat down by the bank of a small, still lake on which there were primitive wooden boats – probably for fishing – and I watched the sunset. The sunsets are as beautiful as the sunrises.
One day I was there looking at the beautiful coloured birds in the trees and a lot of monkeys playing, when suddenly someone called out my name – it was an American guy that I had met on the bus on the way to the Rest House. He had been travelling with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend and had left with them, but now he had come back. He is a very nice person. I think he liked me, but I did not want to have any kind of relationship with him. When I left Aragum Bay things were getting a bit awkward because both he and my Australian hut neighbour were getting a bit friendly with me and I would have had to choose one or reject both in the end!
I went for a moonlit walk with my Australian neighbour one night. His name was Bruce and I was very physically attracted to him, but he was too extrovert a personality for me.
&nbs
p; Every night after sunset, we all went to the tea-shop for a couple of hours till about eight o’clock, after which we went back to our huts to sleep. On the night of the full moon just before I left, we had a party on the beach.
I love living without electricity. I only had to light a couple of small candles at night for a few minutes while I found my toothbrush and laid out my sleeping bag on the camp bed.
Sometimes at sunset I would eat the meal of fish and rice for three rupees that Raja’s mother cooked. I felt that it was good to buy their food as the village people do not make much profit and this is a way to help them, but I was giving half the meal to my stray dogs. That little puppy used to dance after me when I took the plate of food into my own hut.
One evening Raja’s mother saw me feeding it and she did not look happy. The locals used to laugh at me when I fondled the dogs. They could not understand us westerners for our treatment of the dogs. I suppose they are so poor that they cannot afford to have pets – they need to feed their families – and mostly they and their children all sleep in the same one or two roomed huts. They rely on the money the men make from fishing. The surroundings here are much more idyllic than those of the beach hut villages in India though.
Wednesday, 16th June 1976
I wish now that I had stayed longer in Aragum Bay. Here I am stuck at Talamainar Pier, where I can’t even swim, for they tell me there are dangerous shell fish in the water with sharp spikes, and anyway, it is dirty. I have to wait until Friday morning for the ferry. I am finally going back across to India.
The Road East to India Page 12
