Heavily medicated with Nyquil, nose lined with Vics Vapo Rub and sprayed with decongenstant, I settled in with my last cup of ginger tea before the flight and begin reading the final chapter of The Golden Spruce. What an amazing book. It takes place throughout BC and, especially interesting to me, in Lillooet and Gold Bridge, where Grant Hadwin, the book’s very real protagonist spent most of his early days in the logging industry. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning about the starting days of logging, where Vaillant talks about the dangers of the job, the move towards mechanized operations and what that meant for the efficiency of felling previously unreachable stands of old-growth forest. A little depressing, for it discusses the sentiments of fallers who felt the old growth was a virtually inexhaustible resource, and now the province has been virtually wiped clear of what took hundreds and hundreds of years to grow.
And now I am in a seriously luxurious boutique hotel room in Sri Lanka. What an absolute contrast to my simple life in the mountains. The plane rides were okay, until the final leg, when we still had 7.5 hours left of the ten-hour flight. I turned to Stephanie, feeling like I had slept for ages before finding out it was a measly thirty minutes, and asked her, with my eyes wild and bloodshot “how are we going to do this? I don’t think I can make it. I feel so trapped!!!”
“Just think, it’s longer than a school day.” was her response. Thanks Steph, for putting an incredibly daunting comparison on an already horrendous amount of time.
To get here we took a three hour plane to Chicago, had a four hour layover, took a nine hour flight to London, where we had a six hour layover, and then boarded our final plane to Colombo which was a ten hour flight. Then once we landed it was about a two hour drive to Why House Resort in Galle on the southwest coast of the country (pronounced “gall”). We took the new highway connecting the two cities, which was completed ten years after construction started and is Sri Lanka’s first highway. It used to take twice the time to drive between the two places.
The highway splits through farms and lush countryside with long-necked white birds dipping their heads in and out of irrigation ditches across the endless fields and roads of rich reddish dirt wandering off into the horizon. It was beautiful. Driving through the towns on the outskirts of Colombo reminded me very much of other areas in Asia where I have traveled: early morning people streaming together and coalescing on the sides of the streets, house fronts and storefronts closed up with what look like metal sliding garage doors, a bit of neon here and there, the familiar tuk tuk, a two-stroke motorbike covered with an open-doored metal casing so that it can carry passengers in the back, usually painted green. Like a little beetle noisily sputtering along the edges of the street.
We were met by some employees of Why House when we arrived, thankfully, because with all the turns there was no way we would have found the place on our own.
And Why House itself? Let’s just say we are living like movie stars or super models on holiday. The hotel is absolutely stunning, designed by some famous Italian architect and bought by Julian, an industrious Englishman and one of my Dad’s very close friends, a couple of years ago.
You see, before 2009 Sri Lanka was involved in a very bloody civil war, and therefore foreign investment and tourism in the country was virtually non-existent. More on this later, but at the moment it seems that both areas are going through a little catch-up, and from what I have already seen and heard I can see why. Apparently Sri Lanka clocked its 800,000 tourist yesterday. I wonder if that could have been one of us.
After dinner Steph and I loitered around the outside dining area and spotted our first fireflies of the evening, pulsating green and yellowish glows as they streaked through the air, flashing when they landed. It honestly looks as if a little tiny bug-sized light bulb is stuck to their backside.
I also went for a swim, incredibly gladly, for there is no place to swim in Gold Bridge during the cooler months, and even the short-lived heat of the summer makes the cold lake swimming in the area indelibly sparse. On our walk back to our room to try to sleep again—we slept away most of the day once we arrived, for it was raining and we were understandably exhausted—we noticed the crescent moon, rotated to take the shape of a smile, and the constellation of Orion, both lighting up the sky as the sounds of an unfamiliar landscape accompanied our footsteps along the cobbled pathway.
Now here it is December 21 here, already my birthday on this side of the globe, and I am hoping to get in some surfing. The rips can be quite bad here, as the natural flow of the ocean was changed because of the tsunami, but there are some locals that a friend of Julian knows, so I will try to get out with them. I’ll let you know how everything goes when I get a chance, and I will also post some pictures.
Below is a one-minute video of Why House if you're interested. Doesn't fully capture the beauty of the place, but I suppose no form of media can ever capture the essence of the real thing.
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