A Short Ride in Sri Lanka

Cars are expensive in Sri Lanka. 

Even second-hand cars. 

In fact, the only cars you can buy in Sri Lanka are second-hand, because there are no car factories on the island, and car imports were banned when the economy went into a tailspin in 2020.

Prasang was driving me 100 km south to Hikkaduwa from Colombo’s airport, my bicycle box wedged into the back seat of his second-hand Renault Kwid. He bought it when it was five years old, and paid 24 million Sri Lankan rupees for it. I hit the calculator buttons on my phone, and figured that’s as expensive as a brand-new Kwid in Delhi. In Colombo, my college-mate Sarath told me he sold his 10-year old Toyota Land Cruiser for the equivalent of one crore Indian rupees. That’s a staggering sum, I exclaim to Mohit Oberoi,

“Few cars is good for us cyclists, Babajee!”, Mo replies, as we ride from Negombo to Chilaw, the traffic sparse and unhurried, the two-lane road shaded by vast, leafy trees, reminding me of road trips in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in the 1960s. The air is unforgiving - hot and humid, with a ‘real feel’ of 43 degrees. My body overheats frequently, and we supplement the rehydration salts in our water bottles with vast servings of fruit from roadside stalls - the bounty of the tropics on vivid, luscious display.

It’s our second day on the road, and we’ve already settled into a pattern - swim in the morning, when the sea is relatively calm, shelter during the day, and ride out at 3:30, when patches of road are shady, and evening sea breezes hold out a breath of relief.

Ten kilometers beyond Chilaw, we turn off the highway, into lengthening shadows, and cycle along an empty road, to the Anantaya Resort and Spa, a collection of large, modernist buildings set between a lagoon and the ocean. Smiling and gracious, Sanjana checks us in, insists on escorting us to our room. We ask about the pool, She points it out to us, but warns that it closes at 7:30. Like the sunbathing western guests, the pool attendants have disappeared, but we relish the water taking over the weight of our fatigued bodies. The pool is enormous, and we argue about its length. I count the strokes as I swim from end to end, and concede that it’s longer than an Olympic pool.

In the clear light of morning, we see that it’s dwarfed by the front lawn, which sprawls along the beach. “I think you’ve tweaked your account on Booking.com to get us rooms within a hundred meters of the ocean”, Mo remarks. 

The sand is already scorching as we finish our ocean swim, and ready ourselves for an enormous breakfast buffet. Egg hoppers are our culinary discovery of the ride - appams, with an egg cracked into them as they sizzle to perfection. By way of dessert, I spoon helping upon helping of buffalo curd into my breakfast bowl, and ladle treacle onto it - between the heat, and sixty kilometers of riding, I figure one can afford the calories.

By dusk, we’re wheeling our cycles along a gravel village path, under the whoosh of a wind turbine. The wonders of the internet, Mo remarks - the stratospheric cloud of data steers us to remote places that would have been invisible behind the blur of the highway, known only to frequent visitors to the region. This evening, Booking.com has done us proud, and our room, the last in a small row of modern shacks, is forty meters from the beach.

We step through a gate in the morning, and slip down to the water. Once we’ve stroked beyond the breaking waves and the clusters of rock, the shoreline is surreal - palm trees, a fishing village, and a row of gigantic wind turbines. A kilometer to the north, a thermal power plant seems to have taken a break for the New Year’s holidays, its smoke stacks quiescent, but the transformers routing the wind-power into the grid.

Wind turbine, Mampuri

We are now at Mampuri, at the lower end of the Kalpitiya peninsula, a long limb reaching out to the north, carving out a lagoon to our east, hosting salt-pans and wetlands. The wintering birds have now left - tourist birds, one local called them - but we spot the occasional egret and heron, and once, the ponderous flight of a pelican. 

Kalpitiya Peninsula -Willpattu Park is the shaded area in the north

Booking.com has found us a room at Kandakuliya beach, a kite-surfing mecca in the winter. The winds have now died, and the ocean crept up to within 10 meters of the fence at the bottom of our little hotel. The beach is narrow, and as we take an evening walk north, littered with bleached coral, evidence of the long, shallow reef that skirts the shoreline. We clamber over stone embankments that buttress the land, weave through beached boats at the edge of a fishing village, then reach Kalpitiya beach, golden in the evening light, where families celebrate the Sri Lankan New Year, and teenage boys share their love of Indian cinema with us. 

We buy ice creams, and soldier on. The beach narrows into a berm of grainy sand, and we climb to a weathered log, with the Kalpitiya lagoon to one side, and the Indian Ocean to another, a strangely desolate spot, devoid of vegetation or habitation.

Ocean and Lagoon

The next morning, we swim across the bay, just under a kilometer, to another parched stretch of land to our south. The wind nudges a sea urchin, and it bounces along the sand to us, like an exuberant puppy rushing out to welcome you home. A crab spots us, tucks itself into its shell, and freezes. A herd of asses graze on a large oval of parching grass, brought here by Arab traders to work the salt pans, now endemic, and known as Kalpitiya donkeys.

We have our sights set on getting to Mannar, almost 100 kilometers to the north, where a spit of Sri Lanka reaches out to India, and the Ram Setu lurks just below the waters of the Palk Strait. We had read of a British cyclist who rode there in 2017, through the Wilpattu national park. Local enquiries are neither encouraging, nor specific, so we decide to find our way to the park entrance, and take it from there. Which leaves the minor matter of crossing the lagoon. The hotel manager, Hadley, is the most friendly and helpful soul, but surprisingly vague about the logistics, so we ride out to Kalpitiya harbour in search of an obliging boatman. Fishermen lounging in the hull of an idle boat smoke bidis, and claim to know nothing about the provenance of empty arrack bottles ranged around them, but they call up Kesang, who rolls up, his mirrored shades glinting in the sun, and cheerfully says he’ll ferry us across next morning, and help us procure a superior bottle of arrack.

Largely in jest, we ask him whether he can take us all the way to Mannar. Sure, he says, and quotes 35,000 Sri Lankan rupees. That’s about 10,000 Indian, and doesn’t seem excessive for a four-hour ride up the coast. But, after we’ve picked up the bottle of arrack from the Rest House bar, the price of the Mannar ride ratchets up, first to 50,000, then to 90,000, and it becomes clear he’s not too keen to brave the strong afternoon winds on his long way home.

There’s more to the ebullient Kesang than meets the eye, we discover the next morning, as he revs his boat up to 40 kilometers an hour, then slows to a halt a kilometer off the opposite shore. 

“I’m dropping you there,” he points to a tiny settlement, “Karativu”.

But he had contracted to take us to Gangewadiya, still ten km to the north, a short ride from the park entrance, at Eluwankulama. 

“Too much petrol cost” he declares, the outboard engine now silent, the boat rocking in the breeze. 

The word ‘shanghaied’ comes to mind, from tales of sea adventure consumed decades ago: ‘Kidnapped, captured, seized, hijacked…’

Kesang names a premium which is surprisingly modest, given our circumstances; we agree, and fifteen minutes later, are deposited in the quiet backwaters of Gangewadiya. A narrow tarmacked road runs parallel to the shore, and 11 kilometers later, brings us to the park entrance.

Beaching in Gangewadiya

The park wardens are helpful - and specific. The road to Mannar cannot be traversed, not by cycle, not by 4-wheel drive. Bridges have been breached by flood waters, and large sections of the gravel turned to squidgy mush. It’s now far too hot to cycle anywhere, so we buy tickets to enter the park, and wait for a jeep driver to return from lunch. We don’t want him to go chasing off in search of a leopard or a bear, we tell him; a slow ride through the wetlands is all we are looking for. And they are charming - little watering holes ringed by thick tree cover, or vast open lakes, fringed by grass, where egrets and peacocks wander. We drive through a brief but sharp shower, and sight a large herd of spotted deer, taking shelter in a copse at the water’s edge. A heron looks up at us, considers taking flight, but settles for a gentle hop, to add a meter to the distance from us. A tusker hoses himself with water, and refuses to turn for our phone cameras, and a pair of golden orioles flash into the tree canopy.

Neither Mo nor I were particularly keen to visit the sanctuary, but there is something immensely restful about its vast spaces, the silence when you turn off the engine, and the ease with which the birds and animals claim primacy over the habitat. 

Our jeep’s tires skid over a dry, sandy patch, we slow to a crawl, and barely two meters ahead of us, a young male leopard strolls at the edge of the bush. The low thrum of the engine doesn’t worry him, he looks back briefly, then saunters on. We shoot videos on our cheap phones, then try to track him into the jungle, as he slips into the brush. 

When we exit the park, I send this photo to my trekking companion Kutty, in Ranikhet, where I saw my first leopard. You had the luck I’ve never had, he replies. It’s true, I text back, but the park - even without the sight of a big cat - is quite magical.

Mannar now out of reach, we decide we’ll end our ride in Anuradhapura, the sacred city of Sri Lanka. It’s 120 km away, and we plan to do it in three stages - a quick dusk ride to Puttalam, a long ride to the eastern park entrance tomorrow, and a fast, early ride to Anuradhapura on the third day. But the dark settles early, and the sight of elephant turd on the edges of the road makes the prospect of a night ride a little unsettling, so we find a cheap roadside room, try to sleep through a raucous group of truckers who arrive at 1030 and argue until midnight, then ride to Puttalam for breakfast. 

Off the tourist trail, food in Sri Lanka is unbelievably cheap - two hungry cyclists devour dosas, omelettes, vada and milky chai for the equivalent of two hundred Indian rupees, then ride fifty km to a stylish hotel near Nochchiyagama, where an indifferent dinner costs exactly ten times as much.

Blue Waterlily

The first pictures I send home from Anuradhapura are of flowers, fragrant offerings at its sacred sites. White lotus, water-lilies tinted with the colours of dusk, and the blue water-lilies that are the national flower. Dressed almost exclusively in white, devotees stream up the path to the Shri Mahabodhi tree. Planted over two thousand three hundred years ago, from a cutting of the original bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, the tree symbolises the transplantation of Buddhism from India to Sri Lanka. 

“When the Emperor Ashoka’s son and daughter brought Buddhism to our land”, our guide puts this event in historical context, “we had no religion, no temples, no priests. We just worshipped nature, the sun…” 

Inside the Shri Mahabodhi complex, groups sit in silent prayer. The crowds are gentle, respectful of  each other’s space; the grounds are clean to a fault, the paintwork gleaming in the harsh tropical light. The leaves of the ancient tree are young with the green of spring, but its limbs are old and frail, supported by crutches of beaten gold.

“People come here to make wish for healthy baby, for success in career”, our guide patters on. 

I chuckle to myself at the irony he has sketched for us. An animistic tradition embraces a religion of the deepest philosophy, of enquiry into the nature of being. And twenty three centuries later, the manifestation we see is of people asking a tree to grant them their worldly wishes. This, too, is the nature of being human.

Meditation pond, Kaludiya Pokuna

Our last ride is a dawn dash from Anuradhapura to the ancient monastery of Kaludiya Pokuna, set among hundreds of acres of parkland at the base of the Mihintale hill. We climb up a short slope, threading through large boulders, to an oasis of peace and beauty. Stone ruins sit among trees that dance between light and shade. A temple tree reflects its beauty in the meditation pond. The quiet forest invites me to walk through its being, to sit in its heart, to observe the monitor lizard who observes me from atop a pile of drying leaves. A lone visitor places his hand over his heart in veneration of another being.

I bow, silent.