Sri Lanka 1, The driving

Last weekend Andi and I took a quick trip to Sri Lanka.  It was absolutely amazing!!  We'll try and share our experiences with you all in a couple of posts.  Enjoy!

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After a month of living, and being driven through, Bangalore, we thought we had gotten used to crazy traffic.  Oh, how we thought wrong. 

There are at least two kinds of white knuckle driving in Sri Lanka.  First, there is what we can call the “No Passing on Curve” driving.  Now it took us a while to realize just how wild the driving is in Sri Lanka, as Sri Lankan drivers are much more subtle with their crazy than Bangalorean drivers.  We were met at Colombo airport by our driver Hermal, and enjoyed a calm and quite wonderful drive to our hotel in Negombo.  No honking horns, lane discipline was followed, no swerving darting veering in and out of traffic.  A peaceful drive to a beautiful fishing village. 

 Negombo, Sri Lanka

Our second day in Sri Lanka was taken up primarily by the drive from Negombo to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve.  The drive is 140 km, but Hermal said it would take about 6 hours.  I’m still not sure of conversions, but that seemed a bit off.  But, whatever, after an amazing breakfast on the beach, we all piled into our van and settled in for a calm, peaceful and beautiful drive through the country side of Sri Lanka.

And the country side of Sri Lanka really is beautiful.  Rolling hills dotted with rice paddies, all in an explosion of greens of every shade set against a perfect blue stormy summer sky.  And every few kilometers, we would pass through a small village or town.  An idyllic drive.  As this was all on winding two lane roads, we quickly realized why 140 km would take 6 hours; in the country we averaged about 35 km/h, and through the villages it was much less.  But with no horns, what started off as minimal traffic, and the amazing scenery, we were all OK with a long lazy drive. 

 Fallow rice paddies.

Rice paddies being worked. 

Then we met our first bit of traffic.  Two lane road, no shoulder, thick forest on either side, uphill, on a blind curve – yeah, that seems like the perfect time to pass.  And pass he did.  Hermal was an amazing tour guide, but he was a crazy ass driver.  No other way to say it.  He had absolutely no fear and no hesitation in passing into oncoming traffic.  A blind curve uphill?  Perfect time to pass.  Three cars on a straight away with a bus coming from the other direction?  Sure, we can make that.  Three rickshaws, a bike, and a cop car in a busy village with pedestrians horse carts cyclists everywhere?  Why not.  The 6 hour drive was quickly filled with a constant fear as we came within inches of head-on collisions with bikes and rickshaws and cars and trucks and busses and….  And this is how everyone in Sri Lanka seems to drive.  It was so strange coming from Bangalore: no horns, no aggressive swerving, no race to the next stop light; just straight bat-shit crazy passing anywhere and everywhere.  

Second, there is what we can call the Death Roads.  I doubt that anything we were on would ever actually qualify for the World’s Most Dangerous Roads, but still, it was pretty crazy.  Our first Death Road was on the way up to our hotel in Sinharaja.  In looking up reviews of the hotel on the google, Andi had come across some strange but persistent advice:  “leave your car at the bottom of the hill and take a rickshaw up the last road.”  This didn’t make any sense until Hermal pulled off the road onto what seemed at best to be double track bike trail and started fiddling with the shifter, dropping down into another set of gears and engaging 4wheel drive.  It really is impossible to describe just how steep and rutted the road up to the hotel actually was and we unfortunately didn’t get any good pictures.  But there were times when the left side of the car was scraping the side of the mountain, the right side of the car was inches from thin air, and at best three tires were making contact with the ground.  Luckily we were the only ones staying at the hotel, so no one was trying to come down the road. 

It begins.  

Our hotel is in sight!

We made it.

The view from the "parking lot."

Our second Death Road was the drive from the hotel into the Sinharaja forest itself.  Our rain forest driver guide picked us up at the hotel at 6am, and we all climbed into the back of his jeep.  The drive down the hotel road was much quicker but still scary, and then it was a fairly easy drive to the entrance of the reserve.  The only excitement was when our driver stopped at home to pick his kids up for a ride to school and to grab the burlap sack in which he had trapped a python that needed to be released back into the rain forest.  (Two things: first, he told us the “snake” was dead.  He lied.  Second, this snake was MASSIVE, filling a large sack, and seeming to outweigh our driver by a good bit.)  After a quick sampling of coconut water and a few bites of our packed breakfast, we climbed back into the jeep for the drive into the reserve.  This section of driving was about as crazy as the road up to the hotel, but much longer, way steeper in sections with impossible to imagine hairpins, and ridiculous scenery the whole way.  It was simply stunning. 

Much easier going down than up.  

 

Ok, so there were a few close calls. 

 

 Our guides preparing some coconuts.

Tasty, nutritious and convenient!

 

Photo stop.

Keep your arms and hands inside the car at all times.

 A mild turn down the mountain.

Our third Death Road was the final road up to our hotel in Kandy, although there were a number of roads in Kandy that would qualify for the Deathly moniker.  Kandy is the second largest city in Sri Lanka and is absolutely gorgeous.  Part of its beauty is that it is spread out across and through a number of hills and valleys; maybe seven main peaks.  All the roads and the city itself wind up and down and in and out of these hills and valleys.  Clearly most of the roads started off as cow and horse paths before they were roads.  Many of them were barely one car wide, even though they were all two lanes.  In many ways, Kandy reminded me of a small, sleepy San Francisco; if that is right, the last road up to our hotel was a narrow Lombard Street made a two-way road.  At least three of the hairpin turns required a three-point turn about to get through.  And there was definitely on-coming traffic.       

   Ok, so not really of the road, but a panorama from our balcony in Kandy, 

with a sliver of the road in the corer.