If only all of our days could be spent soaking up the wonders in various carefree paradises. I may highlight some of the better moments but there are plenty of days in between that make us feel like we’ve earned the good times…
When I think about our introduction to Sri Lanka, I do not get warm fuzzies. I don’t long for those days or wish I could do it again. Quite the opposite. We eventually found our groove and had some great experiences but it was a rough start. The welcoming warmth and kindness of southeast Asia had softened us and the time came for us to harden up, to build some travel callouses.
Our first few stops were devoid of any glamour. Negombo gave us a taste of what we could expect in the tourist sector. Services and accommodations were ridiculously overpriced and low quality, especially considering how little things actually cost in Sri Lanka. Most of the people (not all) we encountered at first were also very unfriendly. Every word out of anyone’s mouth, no matter how nice it seemed at first, would eventually build up to the point of extracting money from us. They saw us as walking money bags and assaulted us with ridiculous offers and cons while appearing to hate us at the same time. Sitting down at a fairly expensive restaurant (that’s all that we could find near our first room), not one member of the staff made eye contact with us or smiled during the entire time that we were there. Of course they didn’t hesitate to include an automatic gratuity on our bill. We also had our first experience of many with people flat out lying to us about hotels, guesthouses, and homestays during the booking process. If we book a room online and it says the room includes a private bathroom, well, where I come from it’s reasonable to expect the room to have a private bathroom. Not in Sri Lanka. I know this will seem like a harsh generalization but I’m going to make it anyway. Nearly everyone we did business with in the realm of accommodations was lying to us on some level, even the ones who actually had honorable intentions.
We spent a few days in Colombo to attempting to get a visa for India, which would be our next destination, something Fern and I were both very excited about. The first visa attempt was a failure and we basically wasted a few days riding the city bus back and forth through the hot, noisy, polluted, and crowded neighborhoods of Colombo, partially because the Air BnB property at which we were staying grossly misrepresented itself. Again? Really? By this time things were getting a little frustrating and we were developing a negative attitude toward Sri Lankan people but then something happened. Walking through some quiet side streets in Colombo we met a man, Shawn, in his thirties, who had a big smile and spoke very good English. He was a nice laid back guy and we chatted for a while. Then he invited us into his home to have some tea with him and his parents, whom he lived with. He wanted nothing from us. Of course we accepted his invitation, knowing that it could be a little awkward, especially since his parents weren’t nearly as fluent in English as he was. We hung out at his place for a couple of hours and his sweet mother invited us to come to their Baha’i church service with them later in the week. We were going to be gone by then (and we also knew absolutely nothing about the Baha’i religion) so we had to decline but it was a nice thought. Aside from Shawn offering his services if I “needed anything”, it was the kindest and most welcoming interaction with anyone that we’d had so far in Sri Lanka. Two extremes coexist and it was our first glimpse of the other side. It can take a lot of work to find that warm, open, welcoming side but it’s there, away from the tourism bubble, away from the influence of money.
Due to the sensory overload of Colombo, hassles with people in general, and the ridiculous Indian visa process, we needed to relax. Soon. We got on a train to a small town up in the mountains called Ella, which is widely considered to be one of the most beautiful towns in Sri Lanka. Everybody goes there. The weather is cool and comfortable and the train ride cruises through some very scenic foggy mountains, rural towns, and beautifully sculpted tea plantations. This was exactly what we needed. We met a lovely and feisty Irish woman on the train and her company really helped to lighten things up. Feeling a bit better, we left the train station in Ella to look for the place where we had booked a room in advance.
A spot on the map showed where the place was and with all our possessions strapped to our bodies we hiked through town and climbed a steep hill only to find that it was not there. Some nearby locals seemed to think that it was in the middle of town, about a mile back in the direction from which we had just walked. So off we went, and after asking around several times we found the place and told the lady in charge that we had reserved a room. She told us that we had the wrong place and that she had no record of our reservation. And she had no empty rooms. We booked our room at a place called Beauty Mount Cottage, and this place was Beauty Mount Inn. Where was Beauty Mount Cottage? She waived her hand off in some vague direction.
Something was not right here. Confused, we headed back out to the street to look for this other place, which of course didn’t exist. As soon as we got to the street there were several tuk-tuk drivers conveniently standing around offering to take us to other hotels which happened to be more expensive and had no online presence through which we could look at photos or read reviews. By this time it was starting to get dark and we were tired from walking around with our packs so it was tempting to accept their offers but Fern and I had a bad feeling about these guys and everything just seemed to be falling into place, in exactly the wrong way. I pulled up the photos of Beauty Mount Cottage on my phone and went back up to look at the rooms. They matched perfectly. It was definitely the same place but they had changed the name on their sign (slightly). We wanted to talk to the lady at the hotel again and show her the photos, to confront her about her lie. We asked someone who appeared to work there if we could see her and they said they would get her, but actually they just disappeared, never to be seen again. We knocked on the door of her cabin several times and we could see her peeking out from behind the curtains of her front window but she wouldn’t come out to talk to us.
Her little scam was revealed. She consistently overbooked her place which sent tired desperate backpackers into the gaping maws of these relentless tuk-tuk drivers, who just happened to also own guesthouses and who just happened to hang out right by the entrance to Beauty Mount Whatever. She probably got a small cut each time a new person was snagged. Furthermore, she changed the name of her hotel about once a week which enabled her to avoid accumulating bad reviews on Booking.com. When one travels this much, the reviews make a big difference and many people in the tourism industry have made it clear that they need those good reviews on TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Agoda, etc. This was all confirmed by a couple of things. We saw the same thing happen to another young lady at the same time as it was happening to us and another group of three guys a little bit later. Also, several days later when we got online to leave a bad review, we discovered that they had a new name and a new profile on Booking.com but we could only leave a review on the old discontinued profile.
As frustrated and angry as we were about the situation, there was absolutely nothing to be done about it. What was I going to do? Go on a violent rampage, breaking into that woman’s cabin and dragging her out to face us? Somehow force her to kick somebody else out of their room? Ha! Maybe a hundred years ago justice could’ve been so simple. In today’s world she hadn’t technically broken any laws and I was certainly not eager to land myself in a Sri Lankan jail. We just had to let it go and focus on the only thing that really mattered – finding a place to stay for the night. The tuk-tuk drivers swarmed around us like mosquitos. I had internet access on my phone so we walked away from them to find a quiet spot to get online and see if we could find anything, which would be difficult because Ella is such a popular town and most of the decent places were booked full. One of the mosquitos followed us and stood right next to us staring and asking pointless questions making it difficult to focus on the task at hand. He was waiting for us to give in to his offer which was the last thing we wanted to do. That would have been utter defeat.
I managed to find a homestay on Air BnB but we had to wait and hope that they would respond and confirm our request at such late notice. Amazingly, they got back to us pretty quickly. What a relief! There was only one problem. They didn’t give us a real address or directions to their house. The confirmation email included three phone numbers and they said we should find a tuk-tuk driver and tell them to call for directions. The place was somewhat far out on a nameless dirt path and there was pretty much zero possibility of us finding it on our own, especially in the dark. So we wandered off to a different area to find a driver and they tried all three of the numbers. Nobody answered. Great. At that point we just walked around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do next when a man came up and asked if he could help us with anything. He called the numbers for us, got an answer, and talked to the lady for us since she spoke almost no English. Then we knew which number worked and the homestay lady knew we were trying to reach her so we found another tuk-tuk driver, gave him the number, and he got ahold of her for directions.
It was about 10:00 by the time we finally got to the homestay and the lady was kind enough to offer to make dinner for us but we were too exhausted to eat and we didn’t want to be such a burden at that hour. As a side note, she made the best food we had in Sri Lanka for us the next night. Fern was on the verge of an emotional breakdown and, finally able to put down our packs, we collapsed into sleep. As we processed all of this in our dreams something started to shift in our attitudes. It took about another week or so and a couple more unfortunate experiences for the change to fully take shape. As difficult as our first days in Sri Lanka were, it was all a learning experience and Fern and I both feel that it has made us stronger.
jim@snorkelbandits.com