This post is mostly about barfing.

Hello all! From my limited exposure to travel diaries out there, there always seems to be a pattern. It begins with frequent writing and good intentions, is followed by a steady decline in entries with diminishing detail and is finally ended on some anticlimactic note to the effect of "Wow! hard to believe it's been November since we've written. Where to start!? Last week a monkey took Dan's glasses while we were at a temple and broke them! Tomorrow, we are taking a break from our week of fire juggling classes here and going to the local hot springs." And in their defense, I can now see the pitfalls clearly. Either you find yourself falling behind a day, then two, and suddenly the chocolates are coming so fast down the conveyor belt that you're just stuffing them in your mouth to keep things from falling apart, or you start wondering how much time you have to reflect on things as they're happening and filter them down to a series of grammatically acceptable entries on a computer whose cord never seems to fit in the socket on the wall. By my abacus, it takes about 10% of the trip. But in truth, neither of those are my excuses.

Apologies in the lapse to [both of] you reading the journal, but in all honesty, I've actually been out of commission, seeing a neat line of evil-doing viral, bacterial and electromagnetic guests take categorical plunder of my tender frame. Let me start by saying it had been a long while since I literally projectile vomited. Maybe some fuzzy pubescent experiment mixing gin and raspberry cider? I can't say. But after a cyclone of severe food poisoning whirled through our apartment, I can tell you it's almost comically vulgar. Regular puking I am totally OK with. I've long stood by a chinese/roman policy which decrees that if your body doesn't want something in it anymore, don't argue; be discreet, get it out of there and then get back on the horse. But those rules of composure went out the window like a defenestrating stream of stomach bile.
As a defensive preamble, after about a month here, I can safely say that Sri Lanka kind of puts out the welcoming mat for food contamination. If it would please the jury to examine exhibits "A" through "F": Not a ton of refrigeration; a hand-to-mouth meal delivery method; a profusion of luke-warm milk products; a field guide of origin-questionable meats; a country-wide extinction of public hand soap, and a huge question mark sitting with its head between its knees where toilet hygiene should be. All in all, I really shouldn't have been surprised to have been watering our hedge mid-sentence with a firetrucksworth of leaf-withering stomach acid, but there I was. It probably just looked like I paused to search for the right word, maybe a little confused; pensive, my eyes rolling back and lips tight, then, like a regurgitory express train from Sicksville, USA- HuUUUUUURRRRRGGGGGGAAAAAAgggGGHHHHHPphhhhlll. We're talking official Ghostbusters (TM) arc of radioactive throwup. This surprise party continued in my guts for about 60 hours. I was the last to go. AT ralphed first in the house, and Barnaby was hit mid-business meeting, managing to excuse himself in time to a rubbish bin in a hallway. Me, I was the Magellan of retching: I tossed up in our alley in the shrubbery, spewed out of a moving tuk tuk, hurled up and down a resort-laden beachside and totally lost it on the sand floor of an outdoor chinese restaurant.

So I was food poisoned for a good 3 days, which crippled my immune system, which opened me up for 3 days of old fashioned stomach flu, which shapeshifted into a further 5 days of bronchial/sinus misery, during the second of which I fell asleep alone in the sun on cold medication for 4 hours, which led to the worst sunburn I've ever experienced, which prevented me from walking normally for a week, and which, 10 days from conception still looks like someone painted my thighs with cadmium red acrylic. So that's where I've been! How are you? Trust that I'm feeling better and have barrels of photos and stories, so I'll get back to posting post-haste. Talk soon.

ANIMAL MORNING!

Welcome, one and all, to ANIMAL MORNING at Koggala bay! A wake-up rap on the door from AT comes with a promise to see a ton of monkeys, so I'm dressed and outside in a flash. The golden furred criminals have been antagonizing the dogs for an hour already: chattering at them, shaking nuts from the branches on their heads and throwing down coconut husks. We follow them around the yard for a good while until the nimble gang slips away up the electrical lines at the edge of the property, stopping to pee on the guesthouse in defiance. Cheeky!

Out to the water, we check the second drop of the crab trap, and pulling up the cage find a tenacious specimen clinging to the outside. It's not of the size to cut a sailor's legs and head away from his body and smash a lifeboat to bits, but it's a crab! We toss him back into the water to let him grow to hotel-razing proportions and live another day.

Not an hour later, another exclamatory call from AT. Somehow a falcon has gotten into his room. Ha ha! Im serious. It's an actual, taloned, face-pecking, absolutely-dangerous-looking red-eyed capitol-f FALCON. And it's screeching, taking turns perching on the bed canopy and smashing into the bay window, getting exponentially more and drunk and dangerous each time. We feel terrible, and take brave turns running in to open the tall windows and running out again, hands covering our heads. It's not until Shiva (named for the Hindu god of destruction?) comes to the rescue and manages to shoo the wyvern out of the room with an Oskar broom, first try. Hail Shiva!

In to Galle, we pick up our cricket tickets and after some time find our seats in the 1st class section. 1st class in this case being identified by tattered red upholstered chairs, loosely arranged on a rough cement bleacher facing the field. For a newly constructed stadium hosting an international match of the national sport, there is a lot more broken glass and rubble around than I expect, and the preferential washroom looks like a set from a documentary about dysentery. Luckily we've been informed of the long, lazy, four-day pace of a game, and come outfitted with a backpack of beer and snacks. As cricket is a confusing sport with many rules, I'll endeavour to go over the details of our game:

We arrive during what looks like a short intermission performance of fancy dressed men running and throwing a small ball at some sticks, many of them standing completely still for the duration. It's tearfully dull, but it only lasts a good ten minutes before a "tea break" commences and the game begins. As you may know, cricket is always played in the rain, and with dark clouds gathering on the horizon, we are set to begin! By rough estimate, there are abut 80 players on each team, clad in uniforms of shorts and a simple white shirt. The players race onto the field in ordered lines, placing themselves at intervals along the outer edge. A signal is given, and each team must race to pull their tarpaulins towards the centre, covering as much of the field as possible as it begins to rain. It's a sport which requires much teamwork and endurance, and after a drenching 30 minutes, the teams look tired and have only covered half the field. Now my favourite part: each team rolls heavy tires onto the field to secure the tarps. Who will collect the most rain?! The suspense and drama of sport! It's really heating up now as the rain turns torrential and the last of the field is covered. Ah- but short minutes later, an upset: the rain has stopped. Now the teams hold ends of the tarps and in careful synchronicity wave the water to wards the edge of the field. It looks like the team on the far edge of the field is catching up here! Over the next 45 minutes, the tarps are gathered up and the field is back to being empty. End of first inning! By good fortune, we don't have to wait long for round two, as a new downpour suddenly begins and the process starts anew! These men are athletes, and it shows!

The second half of the game sees the addition of a sort of steam roller which each side guides over the sodden, boggy grass, sopping up every drop they can, then racing to fire the diphtheria - conjuring soup into the bleachers. I LOVE THIS GAME! After 4 hours of this excitement, AT and I are drained. What a sport; it's great to learn about such a foreign game, and I'll be trying to get together a cricket beer league back in montreal, as soon as I can source enough tarps.

We head back to the house by Tuk Tuk, sundrained and a little tipsy, (black and white pics snapped during the ride) and have a massage from a local Ayurvedic (?) practitioner, a thank you from AT's mom for our long day of cooking. Well marinated with therapeutic oils, we have a quick dinner and say goodbye to AT, who's heading up to Colombo to retrieve Barnaby after a couple of morning meetings. I stick around for the night and afternoon to soak in some tranquility and write, absently poking my nose into a copy of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by someone I have already willfully forgotten the name of, a blind purchase by AT at our local used bookstore. It is the most insipid, maudlin, treacly sort of fiction money can buy, and I am totally not in the mood for it. I'd really only endorse it to be used page by page to clean up the public washroom at Galle cricket stadium.

The boys return the next day and I have completely decompressed after a great sleep and afternoon on the veranda looking out at the rippling lagoon and nodding palms. Renate says if you spend a whole day looking at the view, you can feel an eternity go by. I can easily accept that. Tonight, it's out to visit Ian and Brian for a drink at their villa, then a party on Unawatuna beach, and finally an early start to a weekend of unmitigated adventure taking us into the dark green crotch of the high country.

3rd Eye on Snacking: 2nd Edition

Product: Sour Marbels
Brand: Fruit-tella
Ingredients: Sugar, etc.

Straying from our general theme of savoury bites, here we have a tiny 5 rupee (about 3 cents) package of sours. Small, hard-shelled cylinders, I can make a quick parallel to north america's Sour Starburst candies, to which my friend Adam was once addicted on such a scale that if I caught him napping on the couch, I had honest suspicions that he had developed diabetes during the week and was in a coma. Taste-wise, nothing shocking on the sour-scale. These are boring, but I'm not sure 5 rupees goes a long way. As you were. 6/10


Product: Kara Chew
Brand: M.C.M. Sweets
Ingredients: Gram flour, salt, vegetable oil, cumin seeds, omam, gingelly, chillies, curry leaf, curry powder.

Representing a new initiative to stick with local brands after the unmitigated crap-show imported processed snacks have been, here we have something called Kara Chew. Neither the title, appearance nor ingredients list (gingelly? are those like jello shooters?) gives any hint as to what these might be like. Orange, twisty, irregular worms spotted with black seeds. Let's have a try. Wow. These actually smell delicious. Like an Indian Nan bakery. I am eating one of the snakes. . . Ouch! Oh my god. Ok, after the Makanan Ringan, and now these, is there something about the fortitude of Sri Lankan teeth that I'm unaware? These are tantamount to eating raw pasta. I'm not sure you could even describe them as crunchy. When does "crunchy" become "molar-shatteringly dense?" * cut to Sri Lankan denture adhesive commercial* "Now, with maximum strength Mantoothident, you can again enjoy your favourite foods, like corn on the cob, deep fried horse beans, and now, even Kara Chew." After managing to masticate a couple of these, they're actually not half bad. There's a nice paprika heat that lingers on your lips. I recommend finding someone cute with strong teeth, sharing a bag of these, and then having a radical makeout session. 6.5/10


Product: Casava Crisps
Brand: Black & Gold
Ingredients: Manioc, Chillies, Salt fried in veg oil.

These look like some oily kindergarden project of tiny cellophane stained glass windows with red glitter on top. I am beginning to see the ingredient trends in snacks here. Smells like. . . oil. Lots of oil. And they taste liiiiiiiike. . . . . cut up business cards soaked in oil and chili. Failing grade! I'm not sure what advantages slicing a Casava has over using the humble potato, as they're not a rarity here. My hands are totally greasy from eating two of these. This bag is a total fire hazard. I wish I had these around when our hibachi wouldn't light and we ended up using wood scraps from the alley and a whole bottle of fire starter and our chicken tasted like it had been basted in lamp oil. Miserable. 3/10


Product: Peanuts
Brand: Some kids in Galle with a cart
Ingredients: Guessing peanuts, curry leaves, salt, chili powder

I bought these from a cadre of young ruffians manning a snack cart in the main intersection of Galle fort. The pygmy nuts came inside a carefully constructed bag, made, without question, from someone's algebra homework from 2006 and glue. The optional addition of salt and and a teaspoonful of orange chili powder were added at request. Now if we assume y in this case represents deliciousness, and the assumed factor of charming was >100, this snack deserved better than it's owner's bright red C-minus.Tastes like math, but not the kind you drop out of in grade 10 because your teacher Mrs Andrews was an asshole. Delicious math. 9/10

Today was a long day of errands

in Galle, assembling the ingredients for a dinner AT and I are cooking for two friends of the family. We come to the city early, having learned that the first match of the national cricket playoffs is happening the next day in the new Galle stadium: India vs Sri Lanka. Tickets are to begin selling at 9. Neither of us know sweet FA about the sport, but it sounds like a jolly-good diversion for two young sprouts, and we get there on time with the intention of furnishing ourselves with a fine pair. Everyone we speak to at the stadium is clueless, and we are sent between cricket ticket wickets to interact with a litany of characters, each more medically-grade moronic than the last. We finally suss out that tickets are not there yet, but will arrive at 10. Shrugging our shoulders, we grocery shop for an hour. Back to the stadium. Tickets are now supposed to arrive at 11. Slightly annoyed, we shop some more. To the stadium! Tickets? Oh! Tickets! Tickets will now most certainly arrive at 12. Oh, Sri Lanka, you crazy country, you. We spend some time at the studio of a jeweler-friend of the family, looking at gems and ingenious rings and a raven-feeding papaya holder on the studio sill. By noon, surprise of surprises: no tickets. Screw this. We sort out someone to pick us up a pair later in the day and go home to cook.

Dinner works out great; we start with an oyster mushroom tapenade with manchego cheese on toasted olive bread and a dip of pureed roasted peppers and herbs. Next are shrimp and chive dumplings in hand made wrappers with a soy and miso sauce, then baked oysters we snagged from the bay. Renate serves a light avocado soup with hot pepper sauce. Mains are oven-roasted fillet of local fish on a rough potato mash with black olive and balsamic topped with a salsa verde of coriander, parsley, anchovy, garlic and olive oil. Dessert is a cold papaya soup with jellied passion fruit and tea.

Beyond the food, guests Ian and Brian are fantastic company and there's lots of laughter, travel tips and anecdotal stories about the things that pets have eaten. I pack it in, exhausted, but have a miserable time sleeping. Jet lag is an ugly lady. At some point in the night, I spend a long time with my head out the bay window and wake up druggedly at 5 AM with a hot laptop on my belly and this on the screen:

My brain feels small tonight.
Its baleen scope, trawling through and filtering billions of swimming details from the shifting landscape, is full. The uncountable plankton of smell, sight, taste and touch familiar and foreign have filled my head to bursting and I need to sieve through them and digest. It is a memorable moment growing up when your mind first comes against the formidable wall that is the size of the universe and in it our atomic scale. It's also for most of us an infrequent grapple: something internally settled unfathomable and put aside for the constant preoccupations of living and being. What has suddenly and unexpectedly confounded me just the same is the equally infinite detail, in not the scale of our world, but every city, village, jungle and alley in it. It's a newer, much more difficult confrontation to escape. Unable to sleep, looking out the window at the acne wash of the Milky Way and dizzying stars of a tropical sky, the constellations of winking fireflies and galactic hum of cicadas mirroring it below seem just as intangible. I'm suddenly back to square one, twelve years old in a snowsuit, lying on my back on a frozen river at night and staring a hole into the sky.

I'm still trying to grade how cheesy that all is, but I think the gist of it still true: the world is hard to fathom with a human brain.

Music: Goldmund: Door of Our Home

**many thanks to Adam for hosting these files inadvertently**

Change in Plans

Part way through the week, Barnaby leaves for business to Thailand. AT and I sort out long term travel options, and my trip is reconfigured to include Thailand with Barnaby, but skip China, as geographically I've bitten off slightly more than I can chew in the time remaining, and AT heads back to London late August. With shifting travel plans, it's now necessary to extend my 2 week tourist visa; I'll be in Sri Lanka till near the third week of August, whereupon I'll be heading to Thailand, or, as the Thai's call it, "Land:," then perhaps Laos, and perhaps Vietnam. Who knows!? That's how I cartographically roll, G!

The immi-emigration centre is squished into 5 stories of a nondescript brown building, the ground floor occupied by a heavy - smelling food court, photocopy center and women's footwear liquidation outlet. Though we're there early, there are roughly 800 people more on the ball than we, and the wave of body heat on entering the 2nd floor where near a thousand people are queuing for something hits us in the face like two sacks full of old laundry and quarters.

For all the madness one would assume commensurate with a city like Colombo, people here seem fairly unflappable. Taxi drivers coolly handle the kamikaze onslaught of wrong-way traffic, street hawkers are largely polite and inquisitive, and there is an almost Jamaican air of easiness in a countryside where every fourth person is in fatigues and holding an AK-47. This general disposition of calm and warmth makes the perpetual conflict alarm and heavy military pressure all the more sad and surreal.
Thanking the magical Baby Jesus that our business is actually on the third floor, we pass a clerk calmly handling a dozen exasperated applicants waving pink forms in is face, and find the visa extension office, marked obvious by a glittering "MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPY NEW YEAR" banner.

In bureaucratic fashion, the process is a five-person, forty-five minute, two-office scavenger hunt. Why is it that it only takes one sleepy person with a rubber stamp at the airport to do this crap? To our disbelief, the answer appears, etched in formal white government serif on a blue board above the woman taking my processing fee. Hanging in equal importance to other official signage in the office are the following words:
"The secret to success is hard work. That is why it is still a secret."

Um, read that again. AT and I are in hysterics trying to parse what possible reassurance such a message has in a place where your potential deportation lies in the hands of a treasurer who doesn't have change for a twenty. We kill thirty minutes in the food court over a lunch of cold rice, a tiny scoop of dhal curry and chicken part that I could not identify on a detailed map of a chicken. I don't touch it. We get our passports back.

We head by bus back down to the family house for the weekend, looking forward to less bustle and smog, and packed with the selections from our wine budget for a dinner we're cooking for company. The trip back to Koggala bay is uneventful if cramped. I emplore you to show me a bus on this planet that the lower half of my body is compatible with. I burn through the worn entirety of my used bookstore score, a pulpy 60's novella called "Killer Crabs," slightly surprised at the amount of explicit sex. I mean, I know you're a nymphomaniac billionaire widow on a secluded Australian island and the threat of a nocturnal attack of horse-sized crustaceans is inevitable, but boning every disfigured sailor, convict and big-game hunter visiting your hotel lounge is only going to have you re-cast in Killer Crabs 2: VD Clinic.

Colombo

Barnaby and AT's apartment in Colombo is nice. Like, palatially nice. 3 bedrooms, 3 washrooms, huge kitchen, living room with 25 foot ceilings, terrace garden and second rooftop patio. Black granite floors, no prior tenants, and the ocean is an empty-tambili's throw away. As it's sparsely furnished and only two weeks old, we assemble some makeshift lighting from a sack of electrical parts and chicken wire left from the crab trap. I manage to put together a handsome blue floor lamp with a tarpaulin, but not before stabbing a piece of thick wire into the bone of my left hand, sending a ninja-movie-sized arterial spray of blood across the room. Newsflash: I'm clumsy!

Another attractive detail of the apartment is that it's also half as much in rent as my half of our apartment in Montreal. Part of the rent disparity is owed to it being in Wella Watte, a Tamil neigbourhood, which locals might think of as politically unstable, but I've seen no evidence of anything but a bustling stretch of blocks coloured with the pot clatter of cheap restaurants, produce markets, tailors, speakeasy pharmacies and used book stores. Walking home down our alley each night there is invariably a game of badminton between five sisters, parents nearby in plastic chairs, two brothers racing bikes up and down the gravel, slaloming between garbage bags and stacks of dry banana leaves.

Four mornings cycle between traditional English and Sri Lankan breakfasts. I'm always woken early by the monotone songs of roaming vegetable peddlers and harmonic, distorted loops of street carts blaring snack-selling jingles. One afternoon we have some saarongs made at a tailor around the corner, their shop window holding a boy mannequin wearing a bootlegged superhero shirt, the words "SPIDER FREAK" emblazoned above a familiar red web-slinger.

A working week passes, one day is spent in Petah, an grubby industrial area of the city near Slave Island. There, wholesale barrels of Panadol, miles of piping and hundred-pound sacks of chili powder populate hundreds of stalls and makeshift warehouses. Rumbling forklifts driven by teenagers grapple with giant spools of ribbon and palettes of used cardboard. A boy straightens a pile of old nails one by one with a hammer next to a senior assembling a vast net of mini christmas lights by hand. Everything seems slanty and shanty and just-holding together. If the enduring artistic lesson of American Beauty was that discarded plastic bags were heartbreakingly lovely, you could fill a good thousand Tate Moderns with the street art here. Waiting for the boys during a legal meeting in the area, I watch as a stray goat drinks a an entire bucket of bleachy washing water from a food stall, the owner in witness but disinterested. To me, that shit is ten times more beautiful than a shopping bag in the wind.

The national food of Sri Lanka is rice and curry. Rice and curry for breakfast, for lunch curry with a side of rice, and dinner sees rice married with curry. There are different curries, and different ways of getting the curry to your mouth, but the permutations wear themselves a little thin after, ohhhhh, four days. Luckily, there's lots to hunt through at the local markets, and the boys have a decent gas range and compact barbeque. I think I'm going to have to wait till Thailand for some epiphanic food experience.