It's in to town. . .

. . to get the necessary pieces. First to a gents' clothing store, where stock and style have been frozen since the invention of polyester. We pick out some fine inflammable slacks and wide-collared dusty dress shirts. Then, it's next door to the shoe store for the cheapest pair of black slip-ons rupees can buy, the price actually dyed into the shoe sole. We're almost there, but glancing at each others faces, we realize we still look like unkempt bushmen. Wandering around looking for the final touch, we end up talking with someone who introduces themselves as a private jeep driver and touring railway station master. After a short round of bargaining, he promises us an escorted day trip the next morning up to the top of Adam's Peak (allegedly holding Adam or Buddha's terrestrial footprint) and guaranteed first class tickets for the sold-out train tomorrow. Serendipity! How nuts is that? He offers to drive us home for free, but we ask him to point us in the direction of a good barber, and ten minutes later there is a straight razor at my foamy jugular.

It's my first time getting a classic barber shave, and I am trying not to give off the stench of petrification, as barbers can smell fear. Now I know it's widely spoken that a classic shave is one of man's great pleasures, but the knife wielder can't be over 16, there's no running water, and I have a beard so complicated with whorls and cowlicks it looks like a meteorological map. It doesn't help that the only barber scenes I can envision while this is happening either involve
grisly mafia assassinations or the Three Stooges ("Excuse me sir, were you wearing a red bowtie? No? Well, here's your ear back. Nyuk Nyuk"). I get through 95% of the shave and all that remains is to rid me of a strip of mustache, when Barnaby starts making jokes. This is deadly serious, because I'm fucking hopeless at keeping a straight face in a serious situation when there's something funny in my brain. Come to think of it, I believe that's why the debating team I joined in high school for a semester was expunged from the city finals. Anyhow, if my pubescent caretaker had slower reflexes, I might currently have a harelip wicked enough to guarantee casting in the next batman movie, but I walk out with the supple, floral skin of a baby and nary a nick. Success. So, walking coiffed and cologned out of our hotel to the Hill Club, we finally look the part, but maybe also a little like extras from a 70's commercial for fondue. We have a dinner reservation, of course, and plan on taking them up on their free loan of jacket and tie for members. We're welcomed in by the maitre d' and led to the motherload: a witch-and-the-wardrobe sized armoire of mind-bendingly bad jackets, blazers, sport coats, ties and cravates. It takes way too long to choose, as we keep on finding more and more synergetically terrible combinations. I'm in tears and basically holding my crotch not to pee my pants looking at us in the mirror. AT has found a thick blue velvet coat with jutting shoulder pads and sports a tie he's just purchased with the club's emblem on it. Barnaby has squeezed into a hounds tooth maroon number and short, wide tie in psychedelic paisley. I change about a dozen times, but settle on a slim, grey Pee Wee Herman suit jacket and long, slender red woolen tie. Barnaby is the Texas oil Baron on a world trip, AT a young and industrious tea plantation owner, and I'm a reclusive sci-fi author looking for peace in which to complete my next novel about moon travel. We saunter into the bar for cocktails where a career Bartender is more than pleased to whip us together every antiquated drink we can think of under the cross-eyed, demented growl of a mounted mountain lion head. A Rusty Nail please! Brandy Alexander for me! We try Russians black and white, whiskey sours, a martini, and more, none of the drinks costing more than a dollar. But let's not fill ourselves up; It's time for dinner.

The menu is awesome, in an old-world, Joy of Cooking fashion. We have shrimp toasts and a plate of paté extruded into repulsive rosettes. For mains, the boys elect for racks of New Zealand Lamb, but i gravitate to the steak and when it arrives, it's the size of a softball and perfectly cooked. Even the french fries are incredible! You can taste the stubborn pickiness of thousands of frumpy diners in these recipes, and we kill a couple of bottles of red wine to help them along, finishing 4 hours later with the giant room to ourselves. We can't leave without seeing the eccentric gift shop, where AT picks up a powder blue cravat for a friend, and I'm lured by a bone china tea set stained with the club's logo. Beautiful. We stumble back to the hotel laughing at the absurdity and perfection of the night, and pack it in. There is a jeep picking us up at 5am. A very uncomfortable jeep.

We wake. . .

. .and head a short distance into town (village?) to catch the morning train west to Nuwara Eliya. The train system is a purposeful single line colonial-era project of British tea merchants and investors, an artery leading to and from the healthy heart of the country. The train station is scale-model quaint and looks unchanged since its construction over a century ago. Gorgeous hand painted signs announce track times and a manpowered rail cart clacks past like a cartoon. The heavy coal-bellowing engine pulls in and we take a seat in second class.

We chug out of the station and begin one of the most memorable, heart-hurtingly beautiful trips I've had. The weather is perfect, and time dilates looking out on a pretty fair definition of paradise. Undulating hills are pocked with low tea shrubs, each one a slightly different green. Creamy lozenges of clouds filter dappling yellow light down on distant miniature farms. We punch through a mountain in a dark minute, the kids on board hooting out to hear their echoes ricochet back. Rail-side houses empty to wave the approaching train, their corrugated roofs laid with the colours of the day's drying laundry. Mammoth trees remind me of childhood dinosaur books, bone coloured trunks blurring by like a monstrous picket fence. There are clackety bridges crossing bouldery ravines and wide leaved banana trees ripe with fruit.

The hypnotic sway of the coach is lulling, but I'm startled by a hollering voice outside our window. I look out to see a wild eyed man the size of a jockey swinging from the steps of our car, holding on casually with one hand and shouting through a few missing teeth. Now with an audience, he starts to make more of a show, but is silenced when a thick sapling whips him audibly in the face and he almost falls from the train. He comes in and sits with us, not speaking a word of english, but loquacious nonetheless. Actually, he's mostly repeating something that sounds like "HORSE" and making the gesture of what I think is a waterfall. He talks for about an hour and a half, and in honest appraisal, we think it was mostly about an old horse he owned with 4 penises. I'm serious! I'm not even being crass; you would have gotten the exact same thing out of the conversation. His breath is atrocious, however, and there's a very real fermented-milk-product smell in our area by the time he changes seats.


The trip is suddenly over, and we disembark to walk to our hotel, stopping at a fruit market to be royally ripped off by duplicitous vendors offering samples to eat, and eat and eat, and then to be charged an arm and a leg for. Lesson learned: I will never eat fruit again. We check into our hotel, it's bizarre but fun. By the looks of the overdressed English bar, they went back in time, hired a prominent saloon architect/interior design firm from the wild west, then brought them to the future and fed them acid until they came up with the drawings. We unpack and then walk up the street to explore a previous hotel candidate, the austere Ceylon Hill Club. The Hill club was constructed in the late 18th century, a towering stone gentleman's retreat to offer displaced English dandies a taste of home. It's off-season and rather empty, smacking ominously of scenes from the Shining. Conforming to club doctrine, we purchase a temporary day membership each, signing in under pseudonyms, though the most flowery name I can muster is Ted Theodore Logan, Esquire. Not sure what that says about me. As expected, the place is so surreal that it's hard to keep a straight face in front of our dry, white gloved tour guide. Pretty much every wall panel supports a brain-damaged taxidermy animal bust of some sort, coated with at least a half inch of yellowing shellac. We walk under drooling mongoloid bears and squishy faced fawn lobotomies, past weathered area maps, inscrutable cartoons about polo and fox hunting trophies presented to someone named "Old Scrubby". There is a "mixed" lounge where ladies are allowed, and a billiard room for the good old boys. Next over, a long dining room fans outward from a vast fireplace, windows facing a grand topiary garden and manicured lawn. We collect ourselves, peruse the menu, smile at each other, and formulate a plan for the night. This will take some finessing.

Music: Helios: Coalescence

.

Over the next few hours

we climb steadily in altitude, greenery returning, the thin, mountain-hugging road studded with bleachy, paper skinned eucalyptus. Sticking my head out the window, I look down over the vertiginous, van-exploding cliff that edges the road and faint a little. We stretch our legs at the base of a waterfall sluicing through a high cliff face and trade foreign coins for flashy chunks of agate and mica gathered by entrepreneurs from the riverbed.









Ever-connected AT has furnished us with a house at a childhood friend's resort in the tiny mountain town of Ella. We arrive and lug our luggage up a steep, rocky road, rewarded with a funky collection of Miami coloured houses and a magical 360ˆ view over the breathing, vapoury jungle. We settle in, are served tea and I take a picture of a turquoise bee the size of my fist. The rooms are neat and comfortable. The bathroom is crowned by a hyper intelligent japanese shower pod like something out of a William Gibson short story on bathing. The Japanese are light years ahead in washroom tech, aren't they? This thing has at least six modes, a light, nozzles everywhere, an LED screen, radio, fan and a mysterious hair curler hose box that I think you clamp over your feet. The shower loses all its cache however, when I learn shriekingly that there is no hot water service and I am locked for a good 30 seconds in what is now a slippery, frigid HAL 9000 torture box.


We're the only guests there, and the young superintendent prepares us a dinner of three top notch curries, one with crisp red beets and another of crunchy snake beans, garlic and shallots. We drink beer and retire with open balcony doors welcoming in the forest air, exhaled by the uncountable tea plants of the plantation bordering the house. It's a great sleep.

Music- Brian Eno: An Ending (Ascent)

We have booked a driver and van

to take us 8 hours through the south east of Sri Lanka, north into the jungly, tea-dotted hills of the high country. We are up at 6 for a 7am pickup, and AT and I are packed and in decent condition. But Barnaby? Barnaby is dead. Something has happened overnight, and from his peaceful position in bed, he has silently migrated to being half-draped over a small ivory loveseat and soaked in gallons of water. His condition and the source of the liquid remain a Poiroit - scale mystery to this day. We manage a hard-fought victory to get him back to the bed, but the couch is ruined, two geranium coloured stains bleeding out from the throw pillows like stab wounds. Barnaby is a writeoff in the way that a car that has fallen off a bridge into a ravine is lost. He is doing his masters thesis in being poisoned. After 40 minutes of cajoling, encouragement and light threats, the best we can coax from his drooling, pillow-stuffed mouth is a carefully chosen "go.... f@&k..... yourself." We are now an hour late for our departure, and the trip is in actual jeopardy. Our waiting driver sports a large silver watch and neat, thin moustache. He has been patient and professional, but there is an air of severity to him and something military about his physique and movements. This not someone to keep waiting. At this point, we've bribed Barnaby with money and even offered to carry him fireman-style to the van, but he is catatonic and inexorable. We are deciding whether to call the whole thing off or leave our foul-mouthed death-rower for the weekend, when, like a grey-eyed ghost, Barnaby shambles bravely past us, suitcase in hand, and passes out in the back of the van.

We're off, Barnaby stuttering sweaty vowels in the back while throwing up in a bag, with AT and I on sharp lookout for the nearest pharmacy. 20 minutes later we have our friend subdued like a circus tiger with a single cream cracker, high-powered anti-nausea pill and a pair of diazepam. Our driver is awesome, and we make great time, only slightly delayed by a transport truck that has fallen into a deep gully. The landscape quickly turns flat and arid. And dry. And lacking water. Trees give way to spiny shrubs and roadside huts look like hastily-assembled target practise for the nearest wolf to blow down. We're stopped and briskly questioned at a very serious military installation bordering the Katawalua national park. We pass muster and speed into the preserve. The road is serpentine and potholed, sandwiched by a hundred meters of clearcut forest on either side, a measure against Tamil Tiger ambushes. It's obviously an area of tight military importance, and every half kilometer is marked by the blue sandbags and barbed wire of just-erected sniper dugouts. We coast through the park without incident, noting electric fence fringed moats keeping wild elephants wild.

Our only stop on the way north is a famous multi-denominational pilgrimage site. Hindus and Bhuddists trek monthly to the grounds to camp out in the thousands and present offerings of lotus flowers, fruit and oil. It's a scorchingly hot day, really, hotter that you're imagining right now, and we make our way near a river to jealously witness two elephants bathing. I can't remember the last one I've seen in person - maybe a drugged one from my childhood in a traveling circus in my home town - the ones always announced by a parade of go-karting shriners in Fez caps. Can I stop for a moment to say I never understood that connection? Do the shriners own those karts? When do they practise? - so it's a mesmerizing sight until one of the lazy, half-submerged pachyderms takes a loud, elephant-sized dump in the water. I look downstream to the people happily swimming, washing their hair and rinsing out their mouths in the stream and we turn to leave. Nature, I guess!

We wander through the assembled shrines: blinking, carnival-lit dioramas of hogwild decor and cascading neon that look like they've just paid out some extreme spiritual jackpot. Over and again we obey custom by removing our shoes and skirting the temples barefoot and clockwise, a total pain in the neck with the begrudgingly-purchased snap-fastened mandals I'm wearing (I am historically of the opinion that male toes have no right being shown in public anywhere that does not offer swimming). I am also going on record to say I have truly never stepped on a hotter or more coarse surface than that gravel-impregnated sand, and the black tarmac around one rainbow-striped temple leaves our soles stinging for a half hour afterwards. Sweat-drenched, we retreat for the aspartame A/C of our coach, stopping to marvel at greyhound-sized razor-toothed monkeys and trees inexplicably dressed in license plates. The world is peculiar, eh?

Music: Jessie G: That's Hot!

So where were we?

Right, we were on our way to the craziest house in Sri Lanka.
Smiling politely in the least crumpled of our clothing, we arrive at Brian and Ian's house (actually called The Fortress. Like, actually, in writing) for drinks and a tour. A smiling young manservant, one of several hand-picked from across the country for their trim physique (and I assume propensity to pull off the uniform of an open-fronted transparent mesh shirt and silky Aladdin pants) leads us through the foyer. The house is retarded. An open-concept jaw-dropper fashioned of poured concrete, brushed aluminum and tsunami-rated bullet proof glass, it sits on a white strip of coconut-framed beach on Sri Lanka's southernmost coast. So many questions: How the hell am I here? Is that a storey-tall mural of a topless Mr Universe etched in glass framing the front door? Is that an infinity pool with fluorescent koi in it? And really, just what do I place as my drink order? Questions dissolve as I'm handed one of history's greatest gin and tonics from a silver tray and led outside, passing under the cellular bulges of a hovering commissioned lamp from a spanish designer I should probably recognise, lashed a story above with nautical cord. We toast, talk and eat some great prawns and blackened cashews, the setting sun reflected flatteringly in the surface of a tiled wading pool.


Cut to three hours later AT, Barnaby and I are standing amidst hundreds of people and thousands of watts of heavy house music, lasers and strobes cutting out to the ocean like a hallucinogenic lighthouse. The night's taken us to a beach-side club called the Happy Banana (sigh), elevated stages set on the sand as improv dance floors. I suggest we head inside as I'm feeling rain, but for better or worse, it's actually someone throwing up on my arm from overhead. Right. We drink terrible, terrible beer, avoid a brawl with an arm-wrestling fisherman and end up talking with three Irish girls. One is indecipherable, one is cute but sand-headed and one tells me bluntly I look like Hitler ("did that sound insulting?"). SHE seems someone who has been the brunt of a life of insults, so I leave the conversation magnanimously without letting her know she looks like something an illegal japanese trawler with a harpoon gun might take interest in. She repeats her observation to her cute friend who winks at me and actually says "I always thought Hitler was kind of hot." It's time to go. A blurry tuk tuk ride back to the house sees Barnaby, who has had a full conversation with a stray 3-legged dog and managed to walk out of the club with his last drink, pour an entire vodka collins on our heads. Home, we slink into bed, not entirely worse for wear, but one of us unwittingly pregnant with the Worst Hangover in the Universe.

Music: Magnetic Fields: Young and Insane

Lyrics: in this town there is nothing at all
but a brown school and a dead shopping mall
the record store is execrable
we sit around blowing bubbles

'cause we're young and insane
and we're running away for the summer
we're deprived and depraved
and we won't get away with it
young and insane

when you're free in an antique car
for a week you will know who you are
in uninhabitable we go out to jump in puddles