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.