On the morning of the 23rd, my last morning in Sigiriya, I again sat on my veranda before breakfast. I saw the two mongooses together twice, both times down by the stream. At 11 I took the bus to Dambulla, where I boarded a bus heading northeast to Trincomalee, 60 miles or so away on the coast. On the way the terrain became drier and flatter, with fewer and lower trees. Few people or houses were to be seen along the way until we neared the coast. The bus arrived in Trincomalee about 2:30, passing the whitecapped waters of its Inner Harbor adjacent to the city center. Trincomalee is the biggest city on the east coast, though with only 60,000 or so people. It is situated on a peninsula next to a magnificent harbor, one that Admiral Nelson called the finest natural harbor in the world. The city suffered massively during the civil war, but looks now to be in good shape, seven years after the Tamil Tigers were driven out of the east. It was also badly hit by the 2004 tsunami.
I found a room in a hotel overlooking a cemetery and then went to a small but very friendly restaurant for a chicken biryani lunch. I saw a woman drinking an orange Fanta and so ordered one for myself. During my early days of travel in Asia and Africa, 30 years ago, before bottled water was available, I drank lots of Fanta, often dispensed from a cart filled with drinks and a block of ice. Drinking it brought back old times, but I don't think I'll be ordering another one soon.
After lunch I walked to Fort Frederick, with bastions and a gate across a peninsula sticking out into the Indian Ocean that leads off the longer peninsula on which Trincomalee is situated. The original fort was built by the Portuguese after they captured the town in 1623. The Dutch captured it in 1639. It 1782 it was taken from the Dutch by the British and later in the year from the British by the French before being restored to the Dutch by the peace treaty of 1783. In 1795 the Dutch ceded it, along with the rest of their holdings in Sri Lanka, to the British. It was named Fort Frederick, after the Duke of York, second son of King George III, in 1803.
The fort is still in military use, but you can walk through. Just past the gate, marked with the date 1675 on one side and 1676 on the other, are some nice old colonial buildings and several huge strangler figs. Very tame spotted deer grazed here and there, many of them bucks with large antlers. That was quite a surprise. I walked by a very nice two story colonial building called Wellesley Lodge, where Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, is said to have convalesced in 1800, suffering from fever and the "Malabar Itch," before his return home after his successful campaign against Tippu Sultan of Mysore in southern India.
The road through the fort leads uphill, ascending a little more than a hundred feet to the tip of the little peninsula and Swami Rock. On the way I passed four battered tombs, three Dutch and one British. At the top of Swami Rock is Koneswaram Kovil, one of the five most important Shiva temples on Sri Lanka. It is fairly modern, the Portuguese having destroyed the formerly magnificent temple that stood here high above the ocean. A sign in front admonishes you to remove your shoes and headwear and prohibits entry to menstruating women and people who had just consumed non-vegetarian meals. Despite having just had chicken biryani for lunch, I decided to risk Shiva's wrath and entered. I arrived in time for the 4:30 puja, conducted by two brahmin priests and attended by only a few people. I followed the priests around as they rang bells, waved plates of fire, and dispensed flowers at various shrines. At the end only two sari-clad women and I accompanied them.
Just outside the temple are cliffs plunging directly down to the ocean, a more than a hundred foot drop. A Dutch woman is said to have leaped to her death from the cliffs in 1687 after her lover sailed away, though records apparently indicate that she was married eight years later. The view from the cliffs was excellent. I stayed there for quite a while as fishing boats approached the cliffs below the temple before heading out to sea. The fishermen, usually two to a boat, would splash some water from the sea below the temple on their boats. Some lit little fires and prayed before the temple high above. Twenty to thirty boats must have come by to pay their respects while I was up there. Most then headed out to sea to the northeast, though some headed in other directions.
From the cliffs I could look southeast and see the lighthouse across the mouth of the wide bay, maybe four or five miles away. To the west I could look across a much smaller bay, called Back Bay, speckled with fishing boats, towards the town and the setting sun. To the south is another small bay, called Dutch Bay, where the Dutch landed before attacking the fort. In the dusk I walked down Swami Rock and through the fort to the walls, which I climbed just at sunset. Spotted deer were grazing atop the grass covered walls and bastions.
After my late lunch I wasn't very hungry and about 7:30 set out from my hotel to walk to the Inner Harbor. Only a block or so from my hotel I came across a small group of people in the dark street in front of a Hindu temple. A bare chested, pot bellied man in a dhoti said hello and told me that a puja was about to begin. I stood next to him and watched the ceremony as he explained what was going on. In front of the altar to the deity Ambala were plates and plates of fruit and a big basin full of oil lamps. A drummer beat his drum as priests waved candelabras of fire in front of the altar.
After they finished this portion of the puja, a man, not a priest, kneeled before the idol and, as my companion explained, became possessed by the goddess. He emitted a few screams and vigorously waved his arms and then his head. The priests handed him two bunches of leaves and he waved those, too. He then stood and looked over the offerings. My companion told me he, or rather the goddess, was deciding if she was happy with the offerings. Apparently happy, the possessed man and the priests went into the nearby main temple, where he spoke with some of the devotees. I stood outside talking to my companion. He told me he had two sons, an engineer and a doctor, in Sydney, and a daughter, who is an accountant married to an engineer, in Toronto. There was a great exodus of Tamils during the civil war.
The possessed man came back to the smaller shrine, and with a few more screams, the goddess left his body. This ended the puja. The priests began passing out the fruit that had been before the shrine, first to several old women. Then one gave me from the collection a banana, a large wedge of watermelon, and a big brown betelnut wrapped in a green leaf. I pulled out the betel nut, looked at it, and chuckled at it. A man then took it from me, saying I wouldn't need that, which was true, as I wouldn't have chewed it. The guy I had been talking to had me sit down and we talked a bit until another guy brought me a plastic bag full of very hot, sweet pongal, a rice and sugar dish often given out at Hindu temples. With my gifts I headed back to my hotel and ate the delicious hot pongal, followed by the watermelon and the banana. I figured I had better have something a little more substantial for dinner, so after 9 I headed to the friendly restaurant where I had eaten lunch and ate an egg hopper, a sort of fried egg in a rice pancake, and a sweet hopper, with some sort of sweet filling in a rolled up rice pancake.
I spent the next morning exploring more of Trincomalee. The day was sunny, but with a good wind blowing from the west. I was up and out early, soon after 7, visiting St. Stephen's Cemetery right below my hotel, with both colonial and modern gravestones in a weed choked, littered yard. The grass and weeds were yellow. Most of the colonial graves were topped with rectangular blocks of brick and plaster raised above the ground. The earliest I saw is dated 1804. One obelisk commemorated 56 people who died within a month or so during a cholera outbreak. Another gravestone noted a death due to dysentery.
From the cemetery I walked a short distance, passing a large, white, colonnaded, two story colonial building on the way, to Dutch Bay, with a good view of Fort Frederick. From there I walked through some uncrowded streets with friendly people across the narrow peninsula to Inner Harbor, and then walked north along the shore in the strong wind before doubling back to my hotel. I had breakfast about 9:30 and then walked around town some more, first to the fish market, with rays, an eel, a big yellow fin tuna, and lots of other fish, including lots of cuttlefish. From there I walked to the dirty beach covered with fishing boats on Back Bay, and then across the narrow peninsula again to Inner Harbor. Just north of windy Inner Harbor is Orr's Hill, separating Inner Harbor from a lagoon further north. I walked along the south side of the hill and the north shore of Inner Harbor for about a mile until I reached the guarded entry gate to residence of the Governor of Eastern Province, where I turned around and headed back, making a slight detour up to the crest of Orr's Hill.
I got back to my hotel a little after noon, checked out, and had lunch before boarding a bus that would pass through Uppuveli, less than four miles up the coast from Trincomalee. After a long wait, the very full bus finally departed about 2. It only took about 20 minutes to reach Uppuveli, a village with guest houses stretching along a sandy beach. I found a beach side guest house and sat on the second floor of a thatched beach side building looking out over the ocean until about 5. Quite a few western tourists, and some Chinese, were staying at the guest house. There was a very good wind from the west and it felt great to sit with a view of the beach and ocean in that cooling wind. Down the curving coastline I could see Trincomalee and Swami Rock.
Though the southwestern monsoon, blowing across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, is now bringing lots of rain to India and to the southwest coast and central mountains of Sri Lanka, the rest of Sri Lanka, which is most of it, is in its dry season. Its rainy season is from October to December, when the northeast monsoon, blowing down across the Bay of Bengal, brings rain.
About 5 I started walking down the beach south, in the direction of Trincomalee. Only a few guest houses front the beach, with even fewer inland. I soon passed all of them, and a cement bunker just beyond the beach which may date from the civil war but also may date from World War II, when Trincomalee was an important Allied naval base.
I soon reached group of about 25 fishermen pulling ropes attached to a big net that had been pulled by a boat far out into the ocean and was now being pulled by the men back to the beach. Half the men were on one side and the other half on the other side of the two ends of the big net. Finally, the end of the big net, full of thousands of frantically flapping fish, was dragged up onto the beach. The men waited for the fish to settle down, though some remain flapping, before they began to sort the fish by species into several big wicker baskets. Most seemed to be of three species, the biggest maybe three or four feet long. Lots of jelly fish had been caught in the net, too, and they were discarded, thrown onto the beach. Several dozen crows stood on the beach nearby, waiting for any small fish thrown away. After the fish were sorted, two men carried the big wicker baskets to the ocean to wash the sand off the fish. Then the fish were weighed on an old fashioned balance and packed into styrofoam boxes.
After all that was done, I noticed another group pulling in another big net and went to watch them. They had a smaller haul, yet still well more than a thousand fish. They also had a bunch with needle-like snouts maybe two or three inches long. A very big puffer fish had also been caught in the net and had inflated itself as they do when feeling threatened. It had pretty much deflated by the time the fish had passed the height of the frenzied flapping and the sorting began. Eventually, one of the sorters picked the puffer up and threw it towards the ocean, not quite reaching the water. A few of the crows pecked at it, but it was too big for them. A few waves reached it, but it seemed the puffer was too far gone. It tumbled through the waves, being washed up the sand and then back. But finally the puffer regained its vigor, a wave reached it, and it rode the wave back into the ocean. I walked back to my guest house, reaching it just before dark. After dinner I noticed there were maybe 50 to 100 lights, from fishing boats, out on the ocean.
The next morning about 9 I set out in a small boat with an outboard motor with three other tourists and a boatman, heading north along the low coast. We passed the headland to the north and a long beach north of that, passing another beach community with guest houses called Nilaveli, about eight miles north of Uppuveli. A little north of Nilaveli are some rocky islands maybe a half mile off the coast. We landed on the beach of one, called Pigeon Island because rock pigeons nest on it, for three hours or so of snorkeling. The snorkeling was magnificent, one of the best places I've ever been snorkeling. I found one little cove filled with all kinds of colorful coral, a cornucopia of coral, while there was coral in other spots, too. And there were all sorts of colorful fish. One school remained almost stationary as I swam through it. At one point I spotted a black tip reef shark. It looked six feet long, so it was probably four or five feet long. It swam past me into shallower waters and then quickly turned around and circled me, heading back out to deeper waters. I got a good long look at it. After about two hours I came ashore to check the time and then went back into the water.
We left about 12:30. The ride back, into the wind, was bumpy until we neared the shore. I ate lunch and then sat above the beach enjoying the view and the breeze until about 4, when I walked to a very well maintained Commonwealth War Cemetery along the main road in Uppuveli. The caretaker introduced himself to me, bringing a book to help locate graves. I walked along the several hundred white headstones, with army, navy, and some other insignia, along with names, ranks, and dates. Several deaths were on April 9, 1942, when the Japanese launched an air raid on Trincomalee, sinking several ships. I suppose most of the bodies were lost at sea. The Japanese sank an aircraft carrier, the H.M.S. Hermes, off Batticaloa and it remains there in about 200 feet of water. You can scuba dive on it, though that is pretty deep. The earliest grave was dated 1940 and the latest 1961. I think the British must have had a base in Trincomalee after independence. Most graves were British, but there were also Dutch, Italians, Indians, a New Zealander, and a Burmese buried in the cemetery.
Afterwards, I walked along the beach again, getting to another group of net fishermen just after they had pulled their net full of fish onto the beach. I watched the sorting and weighing, but also noticed this time the crows searching the blobs of jelly fish for little fish entangled in them. After dinner I sat on the beach in the dark until after 9. The ocean was again speckled with the lights of fishing boats.
I found a room in a hotel overlooking a cemetery and then went to a small but very friendly restaurant for a chicken biryani lunch. I saw a woman drinking an orange Fanta and so ordered one for myself. During my early days of travel in Asia and Africa, 30 years ago, before bottled water was available, I drank lots of Fanta, often dispensed from a cart filled with drinks and a block of ice. Drinking it brought back old times, but I don't think I'll be ordering another one soon.
After lunch I walked to Fort Frederick, with bastions and a gate across a peninsula sticking out into the Indian Ocean that leads off the longer peninsula on which Trincomalee is situated. The original fort was built by the Portuguese after they captured the town in 1623. The Dutch captured it in 1639. It 1782 it was taken from the Dutch by the British and later in the year from the British by the French before being restored to the Dutch by the peace treaty of 1783. In 1795 the Dutch ceded it, along with the rest of their holdings in Sri Lanka, to the British. It was named Fort Frederick, after the Duke of York, second son of King George III, in 1803.
The fort is still in military use, but you can walk through. Just past the gate, marked with the date 1675 on one side and 1676 on the other, are some nice old colonial buildings and several huge strangler figs. Very tame spotted deer grazed here and there, many of them bucks with large antlers. That was quite a surprise. I walked by a very nice two story colonial building called Wellesley Lodge, where Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, is said to have convalesced in 1800, suffering from fever and the "Malabar Itch," before his return home after his successful campaign against Tippu Sultan of Mysore in southern India.
The road through the fort leads uphill, ascending a little more than a hundred feet to the tip of the little peninsula and Swami Rock. On the way I passed four battered tombs, three Dutch and one British. At the top of Swami Rock is Koneswaram Kovil, one of the five most important Shiva temples on Sri Lanka. It is fairly modern, the Portuguese having destroyed the formerly magnificent temple that stood here high above the ocean. A sign in front admonishes you to remove your shoes and headwear and prohibits entry to menstruating women and people who had just consumed non-vegetarian meals. Despite having just had chicken biryani for lunch, I decided to risk Shiva's wrath and entered. I arrived in time for the 4:30 puja, conducted by two brahmin priests and attended by only a few people. I followed the priests around as they rang bells, waved plates of fire, and dispensed flowers at various shrines. At the end only two sari-clad women and I accompanied them.
Just outside the temple are cliffs plunging directly down to the ocean, a more than a hundred foot drop. A Dutch woman is said to have leaped to her death from the cliffs in 1687 after her lover sailed away, though records apparently indicate that she was married eight years later. The view from the cliffs was excellent. I stayed there for quite a while as fishing boats approached the cliffs below the temple before heading out to sea. The fishermen, usually two to a boat, would splash some water from the sea below the temple on their boats. Some lit little fires and prayed before the temple high above. Twenty to thirty boats must have come by to pay their respects while I was up there. Most then headed out to sea to the northeast, though some headed in other directions.
From the cliffs I could look southeast and see the lighthouse across the mouth of the wide bay, maybe four or five miles away. To the west I could look across a much smaller bay, called Back Bay, speckled with fishing boats, towards the town and the setting sun. To the south is another small bay, called Dutch Bay, where the Dutch landed before attacking the fort. In the dusk I walked down Swami Rock and through the fort to the walls, which I climbed just at sunset. Spotted deer were grazing atop the grass covered walls and bastions.
After my late lunch I wasn't very hungry and about 7:30 set out from my hotel to walk to the Inner Harbor. Only a block or so from my hotel I came across a small group of people in the dark street in front of a Hindu temple. A bare chested, pot bellied man in a dhoti said hello and told me that a puja was about to begin. I stood next to him and watched the ceremony as he explained what was going on. In front of the altar to the deity Ambala were plates and plates of fruit and a big basin full of oil lamps. A drummer beat his drum as priests waved candelabras of fire in front of the altar.
After they finished this portion of the puja, a man, not a priest, kneeled before the idol and, as my companion explained, became possessed by the goddess. He emitted a few screams and vigorously waved his arms and then his head. The priests handed him two bunches of leaves and he waved those, too. He then stood and looked over the offerings. My companion told me he, or rather the goddess, was deciding if she was happy with the offerings. Apparently happy, the possessed man and the priests went into the nearby main temple, where he spoke with some of the devotees. I stood outside talking to my companion. He told me he had two sons, an engineer and a doctor, in Sydney, and a daughter, who is an accountant married to an engineer, in Toronto. There was a great exodus of Tamils during the civil war.
The possessed man came back to the smaller shrine, and with a few more screams, the goddess left his body. This ended the puja. The priests began passing out the fruit that had been before the shrine, first to several old women. Then one gave me from the collection a banana, a large wedge of watermelon, and a big brown betelnut wrapped in a green leaf. I pulled out the betel nut, looked at it, and chuckled at it. A man then took it from me, saying I wouldn't need that, which was true, as I wouldn't have chewed it. The guy I had been talking to had me sit down and we talked a bit until another guy brought me a plastic bag full of very hot, sweet pongal, a rice and sugar dish often given out at Hindu temples. With my gifts I headed back to my hotel and ate the delicious hot pongal, followed by the watermelon and the banana. I figured I had better have something a little more substantial for dinner, so after 9 I headed to the friendly restaurant where I had eaten lunch and ate an egg hopper, a sort of fried egg in a rice pancake, and a sweet hopper, with some sort of sweet filling in a rolled up rice pancake.
I spent the next morning exploring more of Trincomalee. The day was sunny, but with a good wind blowing from the west. I was up and out early, soon after 7, visiting St. Stephen's Cemetery right below my hotel, with both colonial and modern gravestones in a weed choked, littered yard. The grass and weeds were yellow. Most of the colonial graves were topped with rectangular blocks of brick and plaster raised above the ground. The earliest I saw is dated 1804. One obelisk commemorated 56 people who died within a month or so during a cholera outbreak. Another gravestone noted a death due to dysentery.
From the cemetery I walked a short distance, passing a large, white, colonnaded, two story colonial building on the way, to Dutch Bay, with a good view of Fort Frederick. From there I walked through some uncrowded streets with friendly people across the narrow peninsula to Inner Harbor, and then walked north along the shore in the strong wind before doubling back to my hotel. I had breakfast about 9:30 and then walked around town some more, first to the fish market, with rays, an eel, a big yellow fin tuna, and lots of other fish, including lots of cuttlefish. From there I walked to the dirty beach covered with fishing boats on Back Bay, and then across the narrow peninsula again to Inner Harbor. Just north of windy Inner Harbor is Orr's Hill, separating Inner Harbor from a lagoon further north. I walked along the south side of the hill and the north shore of Inner Harbor for about a mile until I reached the guarded entry gate to residence of the Governor of Eastern Province, where I turned around and headed back, making a slight detour up to the crest of Orr's Hill.
I got back to my hotel a little after noon, checked out, and had lunch before boarding a bus that would pass through Uppuveli, less than four miles up the coast from Trincomalee. After a long wait, the very full bus finally departed about 2. It only took about 20 minutes to reach Uppuveli, a village with guest houses stretching along a sandy beach. I found a beach side guest house and sat on the second floor of a thatched beach side building looking out over the ocean until about 5. Quite a few western tourists, and some Chinese, were staying at the guest house. There was a very good wind from the west and it felt great to sit with a view of the beach and ocean in that cooling wind. Down the curving coastline I could see Trincomalee and Swami Rock.
Though the southwestern monsoon, blowing across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, is now bringing lots of rain to India and to the southwest coast and central mountains of Sri Lanka, the rest of Sri Lanka, which is most of it, is in its dry season. Its rainy season is from October to December, when the northeast monsoon, blowing down across the Bay of Bengal, brings rain.
About 5 I started walking down the beach south, in the direction of Trincomalee. Only a few guest houses front the beach, with even fewer inland. I soon passed all of them, and a cement bunker just beyond the beach which may date from the civil war but also may date from World War II, when Trincomalee was an important Allied naval base.
I soon reached group of about 25 fishermen pulling ropes attached to a big net that had been pulled by a boat far out into the ocean and was now being pulled by the men back to the beach. Half the men were on one side and the other half on the other side of the two ends of the big net. Finally, the end of the big net, full of thousands of frantically flapping fish, was dragged up onto the beach. The men waited for the fish to settle down, though some remain flapping, before they began to sort the fish by species into several big wicker baskets. Most seemed to be of three species, the biggest maybe three or four feet long. Lots of jelly fish had been caught in the net, too, and they were discarded, thrown onto the beach. Several dozen crows stood on the beach nearby, waiting for any small fish thrown away. After the fish were sorted, two men carried the big wicker baskets to the ocean to wash the sand off the fish. Then the fish were weighed on an old fashioned balance and packed into styrofoam boxes.
After all that was done, I noticed another group pulling in another big net and went to watch them. They had a smaller haul, yet still well more than a thousand fish. They also had a bunch with needle-like snouts maybe two or three inches long. A very big puffer fish had also been caught in the net and had inflated itself as they do when feeling threatened. It had pretty much deflated by the time the fish had passed the height of the frenzied flapping and the sorting began. Eventually, one of the sorters picked the puffer up and threw it towards the ocean, not quite reaching the water. A few of the crows pecked at it, but it was too big for them. A few waves reached it, but it seemed the puffer was too far gone. It tumbled through the waves, being washed up the sand and then back. But finally the puffer regained its vigor, a wave reached it, and it rode the wave back into the ocean. I walked back to my guest house, reaching it just before dark. After dinner I noticed there were maybe 50 to 100 lights, from fishing boats, out on the ocean.
The next morning about 9 I set out in a small boat with an outboard motor with three other tourists and a boatman, heading north along the low coast. We passed the headland to the north and a long beach north of that, passing another beach community with guest houses called Nilaveli, about eight miles north of Uppuveli. A little north of Nilaveli are some rocky islands maybe a half mile off the coast. We landed on the beach of one, called Pigeon Island because rock pigeons nest on it, for three hours or so of snorkeling. The snorkeling was magnificent, one of the best places I've ever been snorkeling. I found one little cove filled with all kinds of colorful coral, a cornucopia of coral, while there was coral in other spots, too. And there were all sorts of colorful fish. One school remained almost stationary as I swam through it. At one point I spotted a black tip reef shark. It looked six feet long, so it was probably four or five feet long. It swam past me into shallower waters and then quickly turned around and circled me, heading back out to deeper waters. I got a good long look at it. After about two hours I came ashore to check the time and then went back into the water.
We left about 12:30. The ride back, into the wind, was bumpy until we neared the shore. I ate lunch and then sat above the beach enjoying the view and the breeze until about 4, when I walked to a very well maintained Commonwealth War Cemetery along the main road in Uppuveli. The caretaker introduced himself to me, bringing a book to help locate graves. I walked along the several hundred white headstones, with army, navy, and some other insignia, along with names, ranks, and dates. Several deaths were on April 9, 1942, when the Japanese launched an air raid on Trincomalee, sinking several ships. I suppose most of the bodies were lost at sea. The Japanese sank an aircraft carrier, the H.M.S. Hermes, off Batticaloa and it remains there in about 200 feet of water. You can scuba dive on it, though that is pretty deep. The earliest grave was dated 1940 and the latest 1961. I think the British must have had a base in Trincomalee after independence. Most graves were British, but there were also Dutch, Italians, Indians, a New Zealander, and a Burmese buried in the cemetery.
Afterwards, I walked along the beach again, getting to another group of net fishermen just after they had pulled their net full of fish onto the beach. I watched the sorting and weighing, but also noticed this time the crows searching the blobs of jelly fish for little fish entangled in them. After dinner I sat on the beach in the dark until after 9. The ocean was again speckled with the lights of fishing boats.
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