The importance of earned success

30.01.2019 - 20.02.2019 19 °C
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Ella, Sri Lanka
Friday, 8 February 2019

I set my alarm for a quarter to five; I had planned to spend the morning doing a return trip to the Main Line terminus at Badulla and back over the famous Nine Arch Bridge. But when the phone honked its alarm I decided that I needed a sleep-in instead. I haven't had many recently. I also had difficulty getting to sleep the night before. Ella is full of tourist bars and clubs that are open twenty-four hours and the doof-doof-doof of the dance music from many of the establishments echoed across the valleys and into my room. Also, Ella might be cooler than the coastal plains but it is still very humid. A fan would have been wonderful. There is a wall-mounted swivel fan but there is only one power point. The opportunity cost of having a mobile phone without a flat battery was difficulty getting to sleep in a stuffy room.

I slept through to a quarter to eight then just spent a lazy hour playing with my phone. I'm on holiday. I'm allowed to chill occasionally. I bathed and dressed and went upstairs for another breakfast included in the price of my accommodation.

I then strolled down the highway into Ella's town centre. I came across Jason and his young family. Jason was a bit worse for wear having drunk far more than I did. He expressed hope that he could come to the bar again tonight for drinks, but if he couldn't make it, which in his hungover state was more than likely, we exchanged our goodbyes.

The first item on my agenda on Ella's main street was to buy a hat. This is more important than it sounds. Of all parts of my body, it is my head that has always been most susceptible to sunburn. I have now used two-thirds of the tube of sunscreen I brought from Australia and I am only nine days into my three-week holiday. Sunscreen is rarer than unobtainium in Sri Lanka. I am rationing my sunscreen by spreading it as thinly as Vegemite on toast. The less of my body that I have to apply sunscreen to, the longer my supply will last.

I walked down the main drag looking at every single building to see what they sold. There were huge tacky tropical beach-style pubs with thatched roofs and log railings, there were henna tattoo parlours, there were herbal remedy shops, there were hair-braiding joints, there were massage therapists, there were all the useless things that you find in tropical holiday destinations popular with dirty smelly feral hippies of the sort who think "vaccine" is a dirty word.

I was about to give up when I saw a little shop that sold things like purses, shawls, belts and the like. I went inside and saw a small assemblage of men's hats in the back left corner. I made a beeline for them. Most of the hats had brims that were far too narrow and would be pretty useless as protection from the sun. But I did see a stack of cricket hats. An acceptable temporary substitute for my beloved straw hat. I tried them on. They were designed for tiny little South Asian skulls and not big fat European skulls like mine. They had no chinstrap so there is no way they could have stayed in place on my head.

Oh well. I would have to make do without a hat for the time being. I had an active day planned. There are two major peaks popular with hikers near Ella - Ella Rock to the south and Little Adam's Peak to the east. Ella Rock is an enormous precipice that looms over the A23 highway like Emperor Palpatine's hooded cloak. It seemed well beyond my ability. So I chose the somewhat less challenging Little Adam's Peak.

You can reach the trail up to Little Adam's Peak by walking east along the road to Passara for a couple of kilometres, then following the ant's trail of all the other travellers turning off the road and up a side lane. The lower part of the trail goes through tea plantations. This is the first time I have seen tea bushes. I stopped at one bush, plucked a tender bright green young leaf, and smelled it. It didn't smell like tea at all, it just smelled like a leaf. I tried crushing the leaf by rubbing it between my thumb and fingers. Still no tea smell. I decided to chew the leaf. Wow! It was like drinking ten cups of tea at once. My mouth was immediately assaulted by the bitter tannins and the heady aroma of a nice cup of tea went down the back of my throat and up into my nasal cavity. It was powerful stuff.

Soon I reached the Ravana Zipline where souls braver than mine paid US$20 for the privilege of being strapped into a harness and sent flying at speed hundreds of feet over the tea plantations across the valley. One young lady ended up chickening out and tore her harness off and ran away. I can't say I blame her, it looked terrifying.

At the zipline the trail, which until now had been a gently graded vehicular track, became a very steep staircase. Some steps were very narrow, other steps were wide, some were unevenly spaced. As I ascended the air got cooler, the wind got stronger, and the shade got thinner until it was completely absent.

After a while I reached the ridgeline of Little Adam's Peak. Little Adam's Peak is actually a northwest-southeast trending ridge a few hundred metres long with three distinct peaks. The northwestern peak seems to be the highest, featuring the remains of a survey trig station and two golden Buddhas sitting in small shelters. The middle peak is the easiest to reach and is separated from the northwestern peak by a shallow col; the trail delivers hikers to this col.

The southeastern peak at the end of the ridge is separated from the middle peak by a very steep V-shaped col. The tracks to the middle and northwestern peaks are well-graded and smooth, they are negotiable by people with minimum hiking experience. The track that traversed the deep col to the southeastern peak was rough, narrow and steep.

Being at the end of the ridge, I knew that the southeastern peak would offer the best uninterrupted views south along the deep valley towards the southern coastal plains. I just had to give it a try.

I set myself a goal and took off and almost instantly regretted it. The descent down the V to the southeastern col required much scrambling. There were several places where I had to sit down and slide myself down from one step to the next. I reached the bottom of the V and instantly the descent turned into ascent without any flat interval.

The ascent was almost as hard. It required getting my hands dirty as I clung to rocks and handholds to lift myself up to the next step. While I was doing this, stopping frequently to puff and pant and sip my bottle of water, I was reminded of this blog I follow called "Ask A Korean!"

The Korean, the anonymous brains behind AAK!, once wrote an excellent post wherein he discussed the nature of happiness. His central concept is that happiness does not come from pleasure. If happiness depended on pleasure, then we would all just spend our days hooked up to a morphine drip until the day we died.

So happiness doesn't come from the mere hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. Happiness comes from success; specifically, earned success. The success that comes from putting yourself through unpleasant and challenging situations, from going through adversity and coming out of it stronger, from studying hard, working hard, and building a better life for yourself and your family that your parents could never dream of, and presumably from climbing some bloody mountain in Sri Lanka just to get a better view of some valley you travelled through by road yesterday.

I finally reached the top of the southeastern peak. I was not disappointed! The view was divine. Before me was spread a long, narrow valley that got wider as it neared the horizon. At the bottom was a twisting, rushing, rocky river that looked like a whitewater rafter's dream. Either side of this valley to the east and west, giant jagged mountains soared almost vertically out of this valley, the lower elevations garnished with terraced tea plantations. On the western side was the bare face of Ella Rock keeping a watchful eye over the whole scene and just south of that was Ravana Falls gushing down the mountainside. Following the contours on the western mountains below Ella Rock was the A23 highway twisting and turning as it followed the shape of the side of the mountain range. Back to the northwest perched on a high saddle between the two mountain ranges was the town of Ella with a gleaming white stupa perched on a ridge above it.

The Korean is right. Happiness does come from earned success. This view was mostly obscured to the people standing on the middle and northwestern peaks because the southeastern peak obscures it. The view belonged only to those who had the fortitude to set themselves a goal and stick to it.

I sat down on a rock and drank half a litre of water and a whole bag of rambutans I had bought from a hawker on the bus while it was waiting to depart Wellawaya. Firm, fresh, juicy rambutans. I must say this - the quality of fruit and vegetables in Sri Lanka is superb. (Except the apples. But you'd taste disgusting too if you were locked in a shipping container from the United States for a month.) Never have I had tastier, fresher produce than in Sri Lanka, and in such enormous variety. It is nothing like the bland homogeneous rubbish Australians get served by the evil empire of the Coles-Woolworths duopoly like Cavendish bananas that are so huge they don't fit in a lunchbox and taste like candles, or tough, stringy green beans that can only be cut with a samurai sword, or mangoes that break down into messy goo as soon as you cut them open. Maybe Australia wouldn't have such an obesity crisis if fruit and vegetables at the supermarkets were actually appealing.

On the top of the southeastern peak were a variety of hardy, sturdy people, all much younger than me. Two of them were Australians, two lifelong friends not long out of the same high school and who work for the same smoke detector testing company in Sydney. We all agreed that it was a splendid thing that Australian bogans have yet to discover Sri Lanka - just wait until Jetstar flies direct to Colombo! - and that most of the Australians we had met seemed like the more agreeable and culturally aware sort. We chatted amicably for a while and then we all departed at the same time.

The two young whippersnappers left me in the dust. They were half my age and about a hundred times as fit. They turned back half-way up the other side of the V and saw that I was trailing well behind, somewhere in the bottom half of the descent.

"Are you all right, mate? D'ya need some help?" one shouted to me.

"Yeah, no worries, mate, it's all sweet, I'll get there in the end! I'm just taking her nice and slow."

"No worries, mate!" Occasionally, very occasionally, I am proud to be an Australian. I wish more Australians had that good old-fashioned concern for their fellow human beings and that spirit of co-operation. We used to call it "mateship". It's an increasingly rare commodity.

The middle peak was featureless but the northwestern peak had a trig station missing its mast and vanes in between two golden Buddhas. It also had street dogs. A female street dog who had recently given birth was feeding her puppies inside a little cave-like space within a large tuft of montane grass. Yes. Street dogs on top of a mountain well out of town. Street dogs are a problem in Sri Lanka. There are dogs everywhere. They are attractive dogs, lean and of medium build with short fur and perky little ears, and they almost all have little curly tails that are perenially curved upwards. They are mostly harmless. Humans don't interfere with them and they don't interfere with humans. These dogs are lonely, lost looking things who look upon the world around them with apathy and indifference. When they aren't sleeping they just wander aimlessly around.

It is interesting that Sri Lankans treat these dogs with respect. A bus driver who wouldn't shed a single salt tear after running a scooter rider off a mountain road will slam on the brakes just to let one of these mutts cross the road safely. But otherwise there is no interaction between human and dog.

Except in Ella. Ella is crawling with Western tourists, people from cultures where people love doggies and want to pat them and feed them and keep them as pets. So many Westerners have fed and patted these dogs that the dogs have lost all their fear of humans. They will come into restaurants begging for scraps. They will follow humans back to their hotels in large groups. They will fight each other for the affections of some tourist. The dogs have reproduced in such numbers that you can't even kick a soccer ball along the street without hitting a dog. Even an RSPCA pound doesn't have a greater concentration of dogs than the town of Ella.

I then descended the mountain. I couldn't be bothered walking all the way back into town so I just caught a tuk-tuk taxi at the bottom of the trail. I got back to my hotel dirty, sweaty and smelly so I cleaned myself up, got served a delicious rice and curry by my host, and relaxed for a few hours. Shortly before sunset I went to catch the bus to Ravana Falls, I was going to have a refreshing swim there, but the bus never came after waiting ten minutes - an eternity in Sri Lankan public transport - and it was starting to get dark. A tasty dinner (chicken and cheese kottu) and a couple of relaxing beers with my own favourite doggie to soothe my muscle pain (it's OK, the Western bar owner says Jumpy is vaccinated), and the day came to an end before an early night.

My time in Ella is drawing to a close. I am starting to fall in love with Sri Lanka. It is a beautiful, challenging, exhilarating, disorderly, hospitable, messy, surprising country. There is life everywhere - animal, vegetable, human. You can never accuse Sri Lanka of being bland and boring. I do wonder what challenges lay ahead at my next destination.

Tea bush