Kandyland

DONATE -- click on this link

Gampola to Kandy
Kilometres: 24      Elevation gain/loss: 214m/167m


Two roads lead out of Gampola towards Kandy, one slightly more direct, faster and infinitely uglier, chock-a-block with garages, hardware stores, roadside restaurants and shops selling everything from furniture and kitchenware to bicycles and cheap fashions. It's congested with traffic, speeding buses, screeching tri-shaws. The air is thick with exhaust fumes and dust, litter lines the curb, and aesthetically-challenged concrete boxes pass for architecture along the route. The allure and popularity of this road completely escapes me, but there you go...

The second road, ever-so-slightly longer and with a slightly more beat-up surface, is a quiet, small route, almost free of traffic, that winds through small villages and rice fields and emerges at the edge of the Peradeniya University grounds.

The campus is extensive, serene, with huge shade trees draping themselves luxuriantly from one side of the road to the other. The cool and rarefied atmosphere of the university grounds is so peaceful and green, it came as an ugly shock when I exited and was plunged into five congested kilometres of bumper to bumper, hot, impatient traffic, everyone jostling to be one extra car-length ahead of the next. Crowds walking on either side duck in and out of the oncoming stream of vehicles, further slowing things down and increasing the annoyance of both drivers and pedestrians. But there was no way around it; all roads into Kandy are equally horrid.

Kandy is centred around a man-made lake, edged with a cluster of colonial era buildings and crammed with hotels and guesthouses, with a warren of backstreets filled with seedy bars and equally seedy characters behind the picturesque lakefront. To understate things just a tad, Kandy has an abundance of accommodation, all because, primarily, of one very famous temple. Most Sri Lankan Buddhists believe a pilgrimage here is necessary at some point in life, and it would appear all foreign tourists to the country have it on their Must Do List.

The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic is perhaps the most important Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka, housing (supposedly) the tooth of Lord Buddha himself, snatched from his funeral pyre by a disciple apparently not bothered by the macabre. Huge significance surrounds the ownership of the tooth, for with ownership follows the rightful rule of the country, or so the legend claims. The tooth never actually goes on display, but you can catch a glimpse of the box holding it twice a day. Actually, what you'll see is the box containing the box containing the box containing the box containing the box containing the box containing the tooth. Some say the Portuguese destroyed the original tooth; some claim they were fooled and instead burned a decoy. Some believe the tooth is actually inside the gilded casket; others think the real tooth has been scurried away to a more secure hiding place. Still others believe if there is a tooth, it could be anyone's but is probably not the Buddha's. This latter view is not exactly popular. Forensic dentistry aside, the temple is an icon and one of the lovelier examples of art and architecture to be found in the country, with a two-storied, gilt-roofed main shrine housing the relic, ornate decorations, intricately painted ceilings, and some beautiful statues of the Buddha.

A few more days to explore Kandy would have been ideal, but I was still only about half way along my route north wanted to get out of the bustle of the city and onto the back roads again. In the morning, I would wake before dawn and begin walking before the sun was up. Wattegama was calling.

Down, Down, Down

DONATE -- click on this link

Nuwara Eliya to Ramboda Falls to Pussellawa to Gampola
Kilometres: 63.5 Elevation gain/loss: 1186m/2659m


The route down from Nuwara Eliya promised spectacular views, stunning vistas over tea plantations and rippling mountains falling away below me as I walked. But promises are not always kept... As soon as I hit Toppass, a few kilometres out of town, I was enshrouded in thick - THICK - fog, the dense clouds sitting smack on my head, making it difficult to see the oncoming traffic and for them to see me, so I found myself diving into the roadside ditch on more than one occasion to avoid an unobservant truck.

For several hours little improved, with a complete whiteout hiding everything but the sight of my own feet in front of me. I reached a small rest house and was offered their finest room, the one with the huge windows looking out over the dramatic scenery. This was the view for the best part of the day:

Only by late afternoon had enough of the cloud lifted to offer a glimpse of all that I had been missing.

And by evening, the same clouds that had ruined my morning view put on a dramatic show.

The following morning I continued down to Ramboda, famed for its huge waterfalls. From the road, the public view of the falls is impressive, but the messy little town that the road passes through, with its profusion of tea stalls and greasy restaurants, the noisy families of picnickers bathing in the falls, the litter of discarded shampoo packets and empty water bottles, all detract from its beauty. It's a sad reality that many of Sri Lankas most picturesque spots are being ruined by a complete lack of environmental sensitivity, and I quickly moved on.

If you continue down the road a few hundred meters, on your left you will come to the Ramboda Falls Hotel, the town's one "expensive" hotel. The lower levels of the hotel and the viewing area of the restaurant offer unbeatable views of the bottom of the falls, which can't be seen from any other position along the road, and it's well worth a small detour here even if you don't plan to spend the night.

One need not worry too much about seeing this particular set of falls or another, for several unnamed, unfamous, but lovely little waterfalls tumble down along the route, each with its own charms and most ignored by the cars speeding past.

The cool damp climate is a tea grower's paradise, and the flanks of the hills are carpeted in the green of tea bushes. Huge plantations like that of Labookelie and Rothschild dominate for miles around. In between, where there are villages, gardens are awash with colour and young boys run alongside the road to flag down traffic and sell their bouquets of bright flowers.

As you descend further from Pussellawa, the temperatures noticeably rise, the clouds are left behind, and the sun comes out again. Fruit stands display their luscious wares, pomellos and avocados and cocoa, and roadside vendors offer up boiled corn.

Eventually, I hobbled into Gampolat at the base of the hills. Little more than a transit point out of the high country and into Kandy, it offers little for the tourist, but I had come 64 kilometres from Nuwara Eliya in two days and was knackered. Accommodation is extremely limited in Gampola, but I managed to find a humble yet adequate home-stay. My 84 year old hostess, a sweet old woman with the short-term memory of Dory (the blue tang fish in Finding Nemo), kept me amused. We had this conversation no less that seven times:

Will you have chicken for dinner?
No, I'm vegetarian.
Will you have sausages?
No, I'm vegetarian.
What do you want for dinner?
Vegetables.
Will you have some chicken?

I humoured her. Hell, with the semi-permeable, molten-cheese like excuse for a memory I have, it's a future I can look forward to myself.

Fog and Cold on Horton Plains

DONATE -- click on this link

Horton Plains World's End/Baker's Falls Loop to Pattipola
Kilometres: 23 Elevation gain/loss: 603m/923m

Horton Plains offers scenery unlike anywhere else in Sri Lanka, a combination of windswept grassy moors, bogs and dense forests, more like what you would expect someplace in Scotland rather than on a tropical island 6 degrees from the equator. It's stark, bleak, the colours muted and the soil blackened. The kind of place you'd expect to find a tormented Heathcliff standing atop a crag, cape flapping in the wutheringness.

Scene from the movie

Horton Plains

I'm Canadian. From the Great White North. Land of blizzards and ice storms, igloos and the world's finest ice hockey teams. I'm supposed to be genetically able to handle the cold. My national identity demands it. But not so. Doubly not so when it's foggy, dark and windy. Horton Plains can serve up a bitter chill so by mid-afternoon we were happy to get indoors, although staying in the drafty, mist-swaddled Maha Eliya bungalow was anything but cosy. Hot, heaping servings of instant packet noodles (my grandmother's secret recipe) put a little heat in our tums, but we spent the night tucked under sleeping bags and four blankets each, still in our fleeces and fuzzy woolly hats.

By morning, most of the clouds and fog had lifted, promising clear (enough) views if we could get to the cliff edge early. After 9:00 or 10:00 a.m., the clouds will usually roll in again obscuring any view down below. From the Farr Inn (no longer an inn, now the information centre) at the centre of the park, it's about a 10-11 kilometre loop to World's End, the dramatic drop off which overlooks Belihul Oya some 1000 meters below, on to Baker's Falls, and back again. Circular, it's impossible to get lost on the route, which is well sign-posted at any junction, and in fact it's forbidden to walk off route to protect the fragile ecosystem. The beauty of Horton Plains, though, is not just the spots where everyone - and I do mean everyone - whips out their cameras and takes the mandatory shots (see pics below). The beauty is in the wide open spaces, the long, undulating grasslands, and the completely "other" feel it has. One thing you'll note, thanks again to the ever-guilty British, is the presence (infestation) of invasive, exotic species which are now near impossible to eradicate.

World's End

Baker's Falls

One joy of walking is that you make almost no noise, and so the wildlife doesn't take off running as you approach. You also go at a pace which allows you to really see, to look into the trees and find the bear monkeys, or get up close to a sambar, or watch a tiny lizard burying her eggs in the ground, things you can't do from inside a comfortable, speeding metal box. In the dim light of the foggy plains, it's easy to miss the wildlife, but it abounds. Horton Plains is unique in the country, the only national park you can actually walk through, and that alone is enough to earn it top marks.

From the exit gate of the park, it's a steady six kilometres downhill to Pattipola, the highest train station in the country, a pretty little depot that takes unusual pride in its display, with cheerful florals, and a dapper little station master who, quite obviously, daily polishes the antique-but-still-working-fine tablet machines. Unchanged from when the British first built the railroads into the hill country, key-like tablets are taken from and exchanged with each passing train to ensure there are no collision. The system has been used for hundreds of years, but hey, if it ain't broke...

Here in Pattipola, my friends departed home, and I spent a not uncomfortable night having rented a room in a local family home. There are no "proper" guest houses in Pattipola, so you take what you can get and are grateful for it. I had no complaints, but by morning - another long walk ahead of me - I was gone.

To the Top

DONATE -- click on this link

Haputale to Ohiya to Horton Plains
Kilometres: 29.5   Elevation gain/loss:  1014m/352m

A long stretch of being alone, walking alone, dining alone, dealing alone, was finally broken when my friend Priyanjan and his son decided they just couldn't pass up a good hike and joined in for the walk up to Horton Plains.

Setting out in the morning from Haputale, we walked along two quite different routes to reach Ohiya, the tiny railroad stop below Horton Plains to the south. Head from the town on the road leading up and to the west, towards the stone-block Adisham Benedictine Monastery, a landmark building once the home of British tea-planters, and you will find a small footpath trail that starts just to the immediate left of the gate entrance. It winds through the Thangamale Forest Sanctuary, through eucalyptus groves and dense jungle. Some attention is required to follow the trail, which at times becomes thin and indistinct, but then picks up easily a few meters ahead. Fast burning fires have charred some of the area, not damaging the trees badly but blackening sections of earth and clearing out the undergrowth.

After about nine kilometres, the trail then emerges just above the rail tracks at Idalgashinna station. Signs along the railroad, antiques from colonial times, still warn (in dire tones) of the unforgiving punishment that awaits anyone who walks along the track. Of course, the track is used by all local villagers as the main footpath between Idalgashinna and Ohiya, and the slow moving trains that pass offer ample warning and little danger.

The weather began to close in on us, heavy fog clouds completely obscuring the view, then suddenly blowing apart to reveal a stunning panoramic view far out to the mountains in the north. We marched on following the tracks for a further nine kilometres, along an easy gradient, passing through some 15 railway tunnels. It pays to know the train schedules, as getting caught in a long dark tunnel, with a locomotive bearing down on you, can ruin a good day. The guano on the tracks, fluttering overhead, and constant clicking noises would lead you to think these tunnels are home to colonies of bats, but surprisingly it is hundreds of swallows nesting on the ceiling that are causing all the commotion.

By late morning we had comfortably reached Ohiya, a village consisting of almost nothing, just a tiny smattering of a few buildings, apart from the railway station. The only place to stay (yes! there is a place to stay!) was the infinitely depressing, Egads-no!, only-in-case-of-desperation Suwarna Lelee Rest & Cafe. Basic? This place is a whole new level of basic! Cold, dark, dirty and gloomy, the night here did not promise to be even remotely passable. That said, and to be fair, the owner whipped out a comments book, glowing with warm reviews of the kind hospitality and food, if not the amenities.

We decided the comfort of a house with washed sheets, hot water, and the luxury of eating off of clean plates was too good to pass up, so hopped the train back down the hill, returning to spend the night at Priyanjan's family home. At 4:00 a.m., like a moose creeping on tip-toe into the room, our friend Neranjana arrived, and the party was complete for the next day's trek onwards from Ohiya up to Horton Plains.

Catching the early morning train back to Ohiya, we continued upwards along the 11 kilometres to the center of the national park. The well-paved road, although steep in places, is a straightforward route and you'd have to make a serious effort to lose your way. As the road climbs, the trees of the forest around become shorter and denser, the temperatures dramatically drop and the wind picks up fiercely. Suddenly out came the fleeces, jackets, hats, gloves and umbrellas, as one by one we all succumbed to the cold. 

(continued...)

Passion and Piercings

DONATE -- click on this link

Haputale to Diyaluma Falls
Kilometers: 5 Elevation gain/loss: 582/600

Haputale sits perched on the edge of steep tea plantations, tucked romantically in the fold of the ribboning mountainside, looking from a distance like a little Shangri-la. It's suddenly cooler, mistier, and decidedly unlike the tropical south. You notice immediately that the palm and banana trees have given way to exotic pine and eucalyptus, brought in (disastrously) by the British. Of course, now nothing else will grow in those forests, local flora unable to coexist, but hey... it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You also notice that the ubiquitous Buddhist temples of the Singhalese low-lands are fewer and farther between, and instead roadside Hindu temples to the gods Shiva and his son Murgan begin to dominate. At the base of convoluted and entwined fig trees, impromptu shrines with lingams and tridents are a clear sign that you are in an area heavily populated with Tamils.

Almost exclusively, the Tamil women work the tea fields, and the men the tea factories, all (relatively recent) arrivals from India who migrated under British colonial rule. These communities are distinct from the Tamils of Colombo and Jaffna, who have lived in - and once ruled - Sri Lanka for millennia.

Haputale demands a day trip or two, a walk through the tea estates blanketed in the curling mists, a tour of a tea factory, a photo taken where Mr. Synonymous-with-Tea Lipton used to sit to oversea his empire, and a side trip to the nearest waterfalls.

I headed to Diyaluma falls. From below, is a tall, skinny waterfall, the second highest in the country. You take a snapshot. You move on. From the top, for those willing to slog out the steep climb, it offers stunning and pristine pools, perfect for a quick swim to wash off the sweat of the hike. Always up for a stomp, I knew which way I was going.

To reach the top, head about 500 meters west, where a dirt road heads left, uphill, skirting the outside perimeter of a rubber tree plantation. The road slopes up gently for about a kilometer, to a small village where you will be met by any number of small boys, all keen to show you the way for a tip of few hundred rupees. Definitely let the kids lead you, as the route winds confusingly through the houses and behind a tiny rubber factory, where you can see sheets of raw rubber hanging out to dry, and then heads up the steep hills behind. No fools, these kids, they stop before the difficult part of the climb and point you to the top, to manage on your own.

I had trudged my way up to the top, enjoyed the lovely pools, and was coming back down when the day suddenly turned from scenic to fascinating. Passing through a tiny Hindu village, I stumbled across a festival under way. The entire population was out, colourfully dressed, horns blowing and drums pounding, and the energy of the crowd was completely electric. To the urging of the crowd, women began to sway and shake, driving themselves into trance, some fainting, and losing all normal sense of propriety. One by one, as their possession became more furious, men, women, even children, were grabbed by the hair by the priest and dragged into a small flowing stream. A cloth was then thrown over their heads to hide what was occurring, and they emerged tongue or cheeks skewered by metal rods, or backs pierced with hooks. All seemed unaffected by any pain, caught up in the intoxication and fervor of the ritual, and there was not a drop of blood.

With dozens thus impaled, a procession then lead to the Murgan temple, where the exhausted devotees, drenched with buckets of cooling water, collapsed from the emotional experience. Such powerful Hindu festivals stand in sharp contrast to the placid and controlled experience one has at the Buddhist festivals, where people calmly watch performers or privately complete their own quiet worship. Good old Shiva and sons, however, always put on an amazing show, full of theatre and drama and heavy doses of human passion.

Pain...

DONATE -- click on this link

Belihuloya to Haputale
Kilometers: 36.8       Elevation gain/loss: 1,608m/700m


Today I don't walk for the joy of walking, nor for the challenge, nor to get to my next destination. Today I am heartbroken. Today my stomach has contracted to a tiny hard golfball, and in my throat is a ball of hot wire, and my chest is tight and squeezed with something sharp and glasslike. Under my breastbone, spasms rasp at something which feels very core. My beloved little fellow, my Sausage, has died, and I am so terribly sad. I was not there to hold him in his last moments. I could do nothing.

Sausage was not a cat. He was a mad, loving, funny, crazy little man trapped in a small and furry body. He had more personality than most people I know, and loved with complete abandon. Don't think he was just a cat.

He was unique in all the world.

Today I am walking because I have to move all this emotional pain down out of my vital organs, into my legs and feet, and into the earth, into a much simpler pain made of blisters, sweat and lactic acid. Physical pain is so easy. I do not need complex philosophical paradigms to make sense of a bleeding foot. The snuffing out of the little spark that was my Sausage... that just rips jagged holes in my being. I feel porous. Raw. Gutted. Today I will walk until I am too tired to walk any more, so I can drop from exhaustion and sleep a body sleep, dark and quiet. For a few hours, I will hide in that blackness. Tomorrow I will walk more.

When I walk, I am Present, and I do not feel this loss and pain. When I stop, I only think about how I will miss him, how he brightened my world in such a huge way and how I will never have that again. It's thinking of the past and the future which hurts so badly. The now is easy. So I will use walking as my meditation, and will try to think about where each foot is landing, and which muscle is pulling, and how the pack weighs on my back, and one left one right at a time I will move uphill. I will use the rhythm of my steps to dull my thoughts, until nothing but the sound of my own breath panting and the racing of my pulse enters my mind. I will use the hills to get into my breath. Oh please, let there be hills... many, many hills.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

 ~~Khalil Gibran

Into the Hills

DONATE -- click this link

Pallebedda-Badanamure to Weligepola to Balangoda

Kilometers: 35 Elevation gain/loss: 997m/614m

Kahawatta has a serial killer. To date, some 16 women have been murdered, the last few just eigh weeks back, often mother-daughter pairs, usually stabbed, or burned, sometimes raped. Every time a new murder occurs, a new motive is found -- drugs, politics, personal vendettas, underworld connections -- and the perpetrator is speedily put behind bars. Then a few months go by and another woman is killed. In all of Sri Lanka, nowhere is as synonymous with murdered women as Kahawatta. It has all the makings of a Criminal Minds episode (without the FBI) if I've ever heard of one. I'm just not buying the "we've caught the killer, you're safe now" line. Not on my life. I'm not going there. Nope. No way.

Which left me with a dilemma... Follow the road through Kahawatta and I'd have guest houses, places to stay, reasonable distances to cover and gentle inclines along the road. The shortcut, turning off at Pallebedda and heading due north, goes through Weligepola, where there would be no places to stay, insanely steep climbs, and a long, long way to go to reach Balangoda, nearly double my average daily distance. I had little choice; Kahawatta was not getting me.

As I started off, the overcast skies and refreshing drizzle promised a cool and comfortable day. By the time I had reached only half way, however, the clouds parted, the sun came screaming out with a vengance, determined to make up for lost time in the morning, and the heat began to climb. The road dragged on and on, my overloaded pack growing heavier with each passing hour, and the kilometers never seemed to end. At times, with the steep inclines, I barely covered two or three kilometers in an hour. I staggered into Balangoda finally, dripping with sweat, bedraggled, panting. Back cramping. Legs trembling. Feet angry.

I hauled my saggy ass up to the Rest House, and after a dramatic collapse in the lobby (one of my theatrical finest), followed by a shower and a brief snooze, I was temporarily revived. Balangoda proved to be surprisingly pleasant for an overcrowded, cluttered little town, with a you're-almost-in-a-city feel to it. I was invited to the family home of my Panamure friend, the smiling policeman Sangadasa, and was taken up a local hill to the Buddhist temple for a late afternoon worship, where views of the mountain ranges can't be beat. The panorama before you stretches from Sri Pada to Horton Plains and Haputale, but my favourite -- as was specially pointed out to me -- were two twin peaks, affectionately known by a local name.

My shortcut had brought me into the hills ahead of schedule. I was excited, as mountains always get my blood pounding and heart racing. There's something about them that calls to me, something that resonates with me in a way no other landscape does. The ocean? Eh. I can take it or leave it. But the mountains? Mountains lift me. For all my huffing and puffing and fainting as I climb them, there is no where else I would rather be. And well, here I am...

Where Are You Going?

DONATE -- click on this link

Thimbolketiya to Pallebedda-Badanamure
Kilometers: 25.46 Elevation gain/loss: 629/527

Where are you going?" "Ko-hed-duh yaa-nawa?"

Sometimes it comes out a little grammatically challenged as,
"Where are you?" or
"Where you go?" or
"How are you go?"

or simply just,
"Where?"

A command of the English language is not a requisite to starting a conversation.

There's no getting away from it. Every encounter opens with this question. Sri Lankans are a curious lot and you have to give an answer, they want an answer, though what they will do with this information is lost on me. As you pass a stranger on the street, they'll ask. From out of a kitchen dooi, even before you can see the face calling out to you, you'll hear it. Sometimes they will shout it out to you from the window of a passing car as it speeds away, with no possibility of hearing your reply. Many foreigners here, tourists and residents alike, find the constant curiosity, the incessant questioning, to be intrusive, annoying, even harrassing. But I get it. There is no offence meant. Neither do they really care where you are actually going. It's their own version of "Howzit going? Whachcha up to?" You expect a reply, of course, but really are not that interested in how it truly is going. A simple "Ya' know, that way." will do the job just fine.

I rarely tell the truth, as just about any plausible answer will suffice, and my true destinations usually cause too many further questions. I'll name a the immediate next town, whatever that may be, or better yet a local Buddhist temple showing up on my GPS and give that as my stopping point. As long as I give these replies, heads will nod, as if to say "yes right, carry on then." It's when I tell the truth, that I'm walking twenty or thirty kilometers, or more incomprehensibly that I'm walking to Jaffna, that I open myself up to a barrage of further questions.

As I trudge along the roads I get many reactions, but shock tops the list. Followed by complete disbelief. A foreigner. A woman. Alone. Sometimes in a part of Sri Lanka that rarely sees a white face. And to top it off, she's WALKING, pack hanging heavy off her back. "PINE? Pine yaa-nawa?" "ON FOOT? You're going on foot?" Why?, they want to know. Is something wrong? Have I run away from my guest house? Has my car broken down? Did an unscrupulous driver abandon me on the road? Am I very, very lost? Could I be searching for a bus?

Nope. I'm walking by choice.

I get raised eyebrows, waves, thumbs up, the occasional tongue stuck out at me. Every now and then, I'll pass someone whose gob is literally hanging open, as if he has just seen a space alien with forehead tentacles or a three-headed monkey. The trucks peahaps win the contest for friendliness with horn-blows, flashing headlights and salutes, followed closely by the tuk-tuks. The scooters that honk their little horns invariably just sound like they're squeezing out constricted farts, but they mean well. Sometimes I think I'll cause an accident as an entire family piled onto a scooter corkscrews their heads back to ensure they actually have actually seen what they think they have seen, driver not excepted. Village children, shy but wide-eyed, excited and afraid, will peek fascinatedtfrom behind whatever they can hide -- mother's skirt, fence posts, doorframes. Women smile, mostly, or call out from their gardens. The older they are, they more likely they are just to grunt. Men are harder to read, mostly friendly but occasionally slightly disturbing. I've learned when to make eye contact, when to offer a "good morning", and when to look down and just keep walking.

Sometimes, I'll get called over to have a coconut cut from the tree just for me, or invited to share a cup of tea or have a hopper, the Sri Lankan rice pankake. I'll get endless offers for rides, on everything from tractors to bicycles, motorbikes to vans, and unlimited, unsolicited directions to the nearest bus stand. But most of all I get questions. There's no end to Sri Lankan curiosity.

Uda Walawe, Elephants Galore

DONATE -- click on this link

Panamure to Thimbolketiya
Kilometers: 15 Elevation gain/loss: 160/190

The plan was to follow my GPS through the fields and back lanes connecting Panamure to Thimbolketiya, thus avoiding the main roads and the crowded, noisy city of Embilipiitya. Sri Lankans, certainly once you are away from the tourist mad centres, are remarkably hospitable. Even if they have little, they will warmly offer you a coconut from their tree, or a meal, or any help you may need. So, when my plan to wander through unpaved footpaths became known, I soon had a full entourage of guides and guards to accompany me. My own posse! With me was the talkative and well-informed Kanangara, who at 70 years old, kept pace like a man half his age, and the delightful, smiling policeman Sangadasa, who struggled bravely to carry on despite being hindered by a foot injury.

We walked passed banana plantations and fields of vetiver, the area being too dry for much rice cultivation, crossing through impoverished villages where the men don't work (not much) and the children don't go to school (not much). There is little industry in the area, education seems pointless, and a general ennui seems to have settled over many of the people.

In no time, we had reached the main road and found our way to my guest house. Chosen only for its ideal location along the route, the inn turned out to be little more than the Sri Lankan equivalent of the cheap 'n dirty motel on the outskirts of town where you take your one-night-stand for a quick shag. Or worse. No glass in the windows, no lid on the toilet tank, cold water pouring directly from a shower pipe with no shower head, one dim 20watt bulb illuminating a dark room painted dark red. A single dubious sheet on the bed and pillowcases I didn't even want to touch with my bare hands. Nothing but the best for me, eh? My posse was suitably unimpressed and advised me to avoid all but minimal contact with the dodgy staff (lest they get the wrong idea).

I comforted myself with the fact that it was only for one night, and struck out for Uda Walawe, the national park famous for its elephant population of almost 500. Go to Yala National Park, deep in the south-east, and you can enjoy a great number of different species, most notably leopards. You, and the 400 other jeeps EACH DAY that roar along the dirt roads jostling for position, causing knotted traffic jams and scaring away all but the most intractable and inured buffalo. Uda Walawe, by contrast, has a wide open feel to it, much like the African savana, and you're unlikely to see another jeep during your entire trip.

Of course, you're not likely to see the full zoo of animals Yala offers, but if it's elephants you're after, you can't beat Uda Walawe. There's also a great little orphanage nearby, where they ready the elephants for rehabilitation in the park, and it's encouraging to see so many of the now-wild elephants (about 50) wearing radio collars, proof of their successful reintegration. At sunset, head for the reservoir, where large herds gather.

After a bumpy afternoon of being thrown and jostled about in the back of a jeep, photo-op happy and having had my pachyderm quota thoroughly satisfied, I returned to the flea-pit where I was to pass the night. I threw a clean sheet over the bed, ate a packet of bisquits for my dinner (deciding not to risk the dining room), and hightailed it outta there come first light of morning.