Urban Reverie's Travels

Sydney, Australia
Thursday, 17 October 2019

"Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. All the dreary, uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains fall about your feet. . . . There were thrushes in the Richmond Road, and a lark on Putney Heath. The freshness of dew was in the air; dew or the relics of an overnight shower glittered on the leaves and grass. . . . He wheeled his machine up Putney Hill, and his heart sang within him."

--"The Wheels of Chance", H.G. Wells

Now that I have almost reached the maximum amount of annual leave one may accrue in the service of my employer, it's time once again to explore the world, only the sixth time I have left Australia, and the first time I have went overseas twice in the one year.

It will be a welcome break. It is not that my life is particularly unpleasant. My job has become far more tolerable this year, perhaps even approaching enjoyable at times. I am grateful for the company of friends and family when I get the chance to see them, I finally met some long-lost cousins I never knew existed before I signed up for an ancestry.com account, my health both physical and mental is improving.

It's just that life as a white-collar inner-urban middle-aged bachelor tends to be rather Groundhog Day. It sometimes feels as if my life is a never-ending hamster wheel of crawling out of bed in the morning, catching the 480 or 483 bus down Parramatta Road to work, doing enough work to keep my manager and the long-suffering citizens of New South Wales happy, hitting the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre after work for some laps, grocery shopping, cooking, dreary household chores and sleeping, only to do the same thing the next day and the day after that. It often feels like the only relaxation I get is learning languages on Duolingo on my phone during the commute to and from work.

Duolingo, the famous mobile phone app that has revolutionised how people learn foreign languages, is my inspiration for this journey I am about to take. About four months ago I was looking for a new language to start on Duolingo and unable to decide on one, I picked the weirdest, most esoteric, most difficult language on offer just for the hell of it. I then got sucked into the vortex of learning more about the country where this language is spoken and its history and its culture, and then I searched for air fares on Google Flights, and well, here I am.

So it is time for me to jump off the hamster wheel and go on another one of my adventures for a few weeks. And as always, I will be sharing tales of my adventures on Travellers Point. I would be enormously honoured if you were to follow along with me.

Sydney, Australia
Thursday, 21 February 2019

About halfway through the eight-hour flight from Singapore to Sydney on Singapore Airlines Flight SQ 211, I saw a coastline hove into view. It was a desolate, messy sort of coastline between Derby and Broome, a spilled trifle-bowl of mangroves, desert scrub, sand dunes, beaches, serpentine estuaries and mudflats where the border between land and sea wasn't entirely clear.

I still smiled though because although it was an unattractive coastline, it is my coastline. On my mother's side I descend from Aboriginals of the Birpai tribe on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. On my father's side I descend from a female English convict and a Royal Marine private who were sent out on the First Fleet, that armada of Royal Navy vessels carrying prisoners and soldiers from England which founded Sydney, Australia's first European settlement, in 1788.

I'm as Australian as you can get and however much I might occasionally wish it were otherwise, there is no changing it. I might criticise my country - and only the most blinkered jingoist or Liberal Party member could deny that Australia has its serious flaws, flaws that a country so wealthy and fortunate should not have; I might even laugh at it, I might whinge about Australia's crappy weather and dream about rolling around naked in a snowbank in Finland during yet another heatwave, but this country thirty-eight thousand feet below me is my home.

The past two times I went overseas, I visited Europe. Both times I returned in a jealous rage. Why can't Australia be as civilised and educated and cultivated and efficient and orderly and egalitarian and environmentally sustainable as Northern Europe? Not fair!

What a terrible lack of perspective. Yes, I still believe that Northern Europeans enjoy, on average, better conditions of living than Australians and the people there in general entertain far more progressive political attitudes that are more in line with my own. But, as I said in the prologue to this blog, there are some two hundred countries in the world. And how many are truly more pleasant to live in Australia? Maybe ten or twenty, if that? That's a pretty good innings.

So what I lacked was perspective. Going to Sri Lanka helped sharpen my focus. This was the first time I have ever visited an underdeveloped country. (Middle-income Malaysia and six hours in Bali don't count.)

I come back with a greatly enhanced appreciation for the benefits of Western civilisation. If you have never been to a Third World country - Sri Lanka has a gross domestic product per capita of around US$4,000 per capita; Australia about US$50,000 - you simply cannot appreciate how lucky we are to live in the West. You might be aware of our relative good fortune in the abstract, you might even be able to recite GDP per capita figures by heart, but you cannot have the full emotional awareness that makes you think to yourself, "gee, what did I ever do to deserve to be born into such a fortunate country?"

Australia, and all Western countries, enjoy not only a high average standard of living. We enjoy something a bit more important, the thing without which that standard of living would be impossible - good government. Ignore individual buffoon politicians like Donald Trump or Scott Morrison. You can trust our government officials to perform their duties with integrity and relative efficiency. Our police services enforce laws fairly, rigorously and competently, including the highway codes and food safety regulations. Few bureaucrats will ever solicit a bribe. Railway employees won't lie through their teeth and tell you that the train will be moving in fifteen minutes when they know it will be stuck for six hours. (Yes, I am still cut up over that frustrating night at Bandarawela. Just thinking about it elevates my blood pressure.)

This integrity extends to the greater citizenry. Foreign visitors to Western cities will rarely encounter touts or con artists. Taxi drivers will charge you the metered price and not a cent more. Restaurant owners won't knowingly put unsafe tap water on guest's tables just to save money.

So I come back to Australia more grateful for the benefits of Western civilisation. I can also see more sharply the detriments of Western civilisation. Life in the West can be lonely. So many of us live atomised, unhappy, lonely lives isolated from everyone else, even isolated from our true selves. With nearly every Sri Lankan I met, the first thing they would talk about was their family. They would recite their children's names and ages like some monastic chant. In many houses, multiple generations live under one roof. Sri Lankans might be much poorer than us, but they do seem happier. I don't even remember seeing a mentally ill person, certainly not one whose affliction was obvious. On the streets of Sydney the mentally ill are sixpence a dozen.

We Westerners have loose-knit extended families we only occasionally see that we can't really rely on in times of crisis. But during the twentieth century thanks to the uniquely Western innovations of socialism and trade unionism, we built comprehensive welfare states that would catch us if things went awry in our lives - a chronic illness, a family breakdown, a factory that went bankrupt throwing thousands out of work. Conservative parties are currently very busily and happily destroying our welfare systems.

On the train from Anuradhapura to Negombo, I was reading Australian news on my phone. I read a news story about how there were hundreds of excess deaths among vicitims of the robo-debt scandal. (For my non-Australian readers, the robo-debt scandal consisted of Australia's social security department sending thousands of debt collection notices to welfare recipients for entirely fictitious computer-generated debts of thousands of dollars with demands to pay immediately or face criminal sanctions. The onus was placed on the recipients to prove that they didn't owe these fake debts. Of course, few people keep pay slips and tax assessment notices from seven years ago and can't prove they don't owe the government money.) The stress and anxiety caused by robo-debt likely tipped some of Australia's most vulnerable people over the edge.

So Westerners can't really rely on their distant, loose-knit families. Increasingly we cannot rely on the welfare state, in the English-speaking countries at least where the free-market neoliberal cancer has metastasised the most. In the West, we are on our own. Is it any wonder that half the population in Western countries are doped up to their eyeballs on anti-depressants, that the suicide rate is so high? Next time you are on a bus or a train in a Western metropolis like Sydney, look at the passengers around you and take note of how many are unhappy. It's a lot. I don't mean merely bored or indifferent or blank-faced, but actively, oppressively unhappy.

In Sri Lanka I saw few truly unhappy people. Poor people, people doing it tough, people who work harder than they should just to get enough food for the day, people desperate enough to lie and cheat and beg, certainly. But very little unhappiness.

Western civilisation has given us many blessings. This epidemic of loneliness, anxiety and depression, this growing sense of helplessness and that there's nobody we can rely on, is not among them.

It will be a very long time before Sri Lanka joins the ranks of the developed countries. Things are progressing. The country is having a massive tourism boom, the government is going on an infrastructure spending spree with new motorways and ports appearing everywhere, I have never seen so many cranes in my life as I did in Colombo. But it will take a lot of effort and discipline to bring the bloated bureaucracy under control, bring the education system into the twenty-first century and improve the efficiency and skill base and accuracy of its workforce so that it produces high-value, high-quality goods and services that can bring in export revenue and raise the standard of living.

But I have no doubt that Sri Lanka is capable of joining the First World. There is so much untapped potential in that beautiful country. If Sri Lankans can marry the very best that Western civilisation has to offer - rationalism, liberalism, democracy, equality before the law, respect for human rights - with the very best of their own imperishable traditions - compassion, hospitality, politeness, supportive close-knit families, respect for animals and nature - then their future is assured. Japan and the other East Asian democracies have pulled off something similar. I believe Sri Lanka and other countries like it can do the same. I have faith in Sri Lanka, that marvellous, magical island of which I shall have intense memories both good and bad for the rest of my life, and I wish her all the best on her journey and will watch her with interest from afar.

As for my journey, it was almost over. I got no sleep on the flight from Singapore. I was just about to fall asleep a few minutes after Singapore Airlines Flight SQ 211 took off from Changi, but right at the moment I was starting to sleep a baby started screaming. And that set the other babies off. There must have been about four infants in my section of the cabin alone. They didn't stop until we reached Sydney. I got my free earphones, plugged them into the Krisworld in-flight entertainment system, played ABBA at maximum volume and I could still hear them screaming. What angered me was that there was no effort on the part of the parents to soothe and quieten their howling brats. Surely airlines can slip a small dose of Valium into the infants' meals just to give the rest of us a chance to sleep? I was meant to return to work the next day. Needless to say, I didn't. Thankfully my boss is understanding.

We flew over the Simpson Desert, the ruler-straight red sand dunes stretching to the horizon. It looked like a vast Martian ocean. The shadows cast by the dunes became thicker as the sun sank in the sky.

The sun set as the plane was over the Central West of New South Wales and we began our approach to Sydney from somewhere near Goulburn. We landed a bit early at nine o'clock and I set foot in my native land for the first time in three weeks.

Baggage claim took forever as it usually does at Sydney Airport. The chute would spit out maybe one or two bags onto the carousel every minute. I declared souvenirs and the fact that I went to wilderness areas at quarantine, was cleared, and at ten to ten I finally emerged into the arrivals hall and met my friend Alan.

Alan is a good friend of mine, we are both transport and urban planning enthusiasts, and we meet for dinner every Wednesday to engage in long, nerdy yet mutually satisfying conversations. I flew into Sydney on a Wednesday night so it should have been no exception. After all that I had been through in Sri Lanka it was so awesome to see a friendly face.

Both of us being cheapskates, we caught the bus to Mascot station and the train from there to Central. It was my birthday so Alan shouted me dinner - McDonald's at Railway Square. It was the only thing still open. I shared some of my travel stories, Alan asked me lots of questions about Sri Lanka, I gave him some souvenirs.

At midnight we farewelled each other, I had to go to the bathroom. The one in McDonald's was locked so I went to a pub across the road. I ended up buying a beer to soothe my nerves and relax and unwind after an unpleasant flight. But the pub was so full of boorish, drunken loudmouths that it did exactly the reverse. That's one thing I did not miss about Australia - how loud and uncouth the people here can be.

I could have caught a bus home down Parramatta Road but I couldn't have been bothered. I splashed out twenty-two dollars on a taxi. The driver was a polite young student from Pakistan. I described some of the things I saw in Sri Lanka and he said it was similar to his homeland.

I stepped over my threshold, turned the hot water system back on, and sank into a deep sleep until four in the afternoon, interrupted only by a phone call from my manager to ask me where I was.

This adventure is at an end. But not the adventure called life. Tomorrow I return to my work, the soul-crushing routine of a white-collar government job in a stuffy little office with stuffy little people which I only put up with because of the salary that enables me to save up enough money to travel overseas, the job security and the fact that I actually get a thrill out of knowing that my work isn't about making some rich posh bastard even richer but benefits all the people of New South Wales. My job also enables me to pursue my new life goal - to save up a million dollars in superannuation, savings and investments by the time I am sixty. If all goes to plan, I will have enough money then to quit my job, cash out my superannuation and unused long service leave, put all my stuff in storage, and spend the rest of my life travelling the world exploring everything this amazing planet has to offer until the day I drop dead because I am only ever happy when I travel.

And I know with certainty that, starting from tomorrow as I sit at my desk in that stuffy little office, I will start dreaming about my next overseas adventure.

Simpson Desert sand dunes

Bali Strait separating Bali on the left and Java on the right

Sunset over Central West New South Wales

The journey ends

Singapore
Wednesday, 20 February 2019

It was time for my last tuk-tuk ride. And what a ride. After I finished watching the sunset on Negombo Beach I returned to the Heritance Negombo resort, collected my backpack, showered, changed into my plane clothes, and walked onto the street outside and waited for a tuk-tuk. It was a long wait. Thousands of Sri Lankans had headed to the beaches for the Poya public holiday and the roads in Negombo were choked. Every tuk-tuk that farted past me was engaged. Finally, an empty tuk-tuk stopped, the driver quoted me eight hundred rupees to go thirteen kilometres to Bandaranaike International Airport. As soon as we took off he upped the quote to a thousand rupees. That would constitute false or misleading conduct under the Australian Consumer Law but such legal provisions must not apply here. I didn't complain, two hundred rupees is nothing to me.

Every railway station, every government building, every neighbourhood has a Buddha statue in a glass case illuminated at night. Being Poya day, the monthly Buddhist full moon holiday, every one of these shrines had massive crowds of devotees standing next to them. My driver took off down Negombo's back streets. When I questioned him he said it was a short cut. Maybe on any other day. At each shrine we encountered an immovable mass of people who seemed completely deaf to the sounds of the tuk-tuk horns and the horns of every other vehicle trying to get through. "Get off the road, you stupid bloody morons!", I think I shouted at one crowd.

The driver extricated the tuk-tuk from the labyrinth of back lanes crowded with worshippers and turned south on the A3 which was just as congested with traffic headed back to Colombo from the northern beaches. Thankfully my flight wasn't until 00:45 and it was only eight o'clock.

After about half an hour we arrived at Bandaranaike International Airport, a few hundred metres from the terminal because tuk-tuks aren't allowed to enter the terminal roads. I had a long wait. Not many restaurants were open in Negombo due to the public holiday and I thought there would be more to eat at the airport. Before security screening there is an ice cream shop, a place that sells short eats, a mini-Cargill's supermarket, and that was it. It was still too early to check in and there was no seating. I ended up sitting on some large stainless steel box that was used by the luggage trolley collectors as their rest area.

Someone soon joined me, Carmel, a young British traveller. She had missed her flight back to Heathrow due to the insane Poya traffic and had a very long wait for her next flight. Here's the thing - there is actually a railway line that goes nearly all the way to the airport terminal, but it is only used to deliver avgas. How great it would be if passenger trains ran on this branch line, even if it's only once or twice an hour.

We chatted for a while then Carmel left the airport, she was staying with a friend nearby until check-in for her next flight opened.

Bandaranaike is unusual in that security screening is before check-in and baggage drop. I went through security and waited until my flight, Singapore Airlines Flight SQ 469, was ready to check in. All the other flights were shown with green blinking "Check-ins" on the departures screen but not mine.

I waited long enough then decided to walk around. I found the Singapore Airlines queue in a hidden corner. When I dropped my baggage I let them know about the mistake. They were very apologetic and rectified the issue immediately.

I passed through emigration where my passport was stamped out by yet another po-faced, silent, sloth-like immigration officer. Goodbye, Sri Lankan bureaucracy, and good riddance!

There wasn't much food on the other side of emigration. There was a Burger King and a generic bar-restaurant, both selling exorbitant US dollar-priced meals. The Burger King looked slightly less unappetising. I was starving so I paid eighteen American dollars for a Whopper with Cheese value meal. That's twenty-five Australian dollars or about three thousand two hundred rupees. Outside the airport it would have cost one thousand rupees. Outrageous.

I boarded the Airbus 330 at Gate 7 shortly before midnight and we pushed off on time. As soon as we took off I fell asleep for about half an hour, then we were woken up for a meal. I couldn't get back to sleep after that. Red-eye flights are unavoidable for Australians who want to travel the world because, as former Prime Minister Paul Keating said, Australia is at the arse end of the world. They might be unavoidable, but red-eye flights can still go to hell.

We landed at Changi Airport as the peachy sun rose over Singapore. This holiday is the third time I have passed through Changi and each time I visit it seems more impressive. Changi is the only airport I have visited that I don't want to leave as soon as possible. It is part-glitzy shopping centre, part-entertainment complex, part-botanic garden, part-transport facility. Most airports are sterile, generic places but Changi's architecture is interesting and inviting.

I had three hours until my next flight, Singapore Airlines Flight SQ 211 departing Singapore at 10:30. I ambled in sleepless awe around Terminals 2 and 3. I checked out Terminal 2's orchid garden, its sunflower garden, the free cinema that shows free short children's films to keep the little ones amused. I activated my Changi wi-fi account (free for three hours but you have to scan your passport at dedicated computer terminals to get your wi-fi password), looked at all the birthday congratulations flooding through on Facebook. I withdrew fifty Singaporean dollars and grabbed a meal, only seven Singaporean dollars, quite a decent dry chicken curry with noodles. I caught the Skytrain to Terminal 3, the cute little driverless trams with rubber tyres that shuttle people and their luggage between terminals every two minutes.

I changed about forty Singaporean dollars to Australian dollars and asked if I could change the two remaining dollars to the full set of the new Singaporean coins for my collection, which the friendly lady did without any rancour. Often bureaux de change won't do this or they do it with a massive sigh as if I am asking them to do the impossible.

Terminal 3 is the jewel in the Changi crown. It has a butterfly garden. Yes, there is a whole garden, walled off from the rest of the terminal with double plate glass doors and hanging chains, full of tropical plants and butterflies. How many other airports in the world have beautiful butterflies? And affordable good-quality food, and free cinemas, and sunflowers, and cute little driverless trams, and toilets that are constantly cleaned at all times by rotating crews, and bureau de change employees who don't resent innocent coin collectors, and little touch screens outside each toilet asking you to rate your toilet experience, and such well-oiled clinical efficiency in every aspect of airport operations? It was a bit of a shame that I had to board the Boeing 777 back to Sydney.

Butterfly garden at Changi Airport

Butterfly garden at Changi Airport

Koi pond at Changi Airport

Orchid garden at Changi Airport

Free sleeping pods at Changi Airport

Sunflower garden at Changi Airport

Bandaranaike International Airport
Tuesday, 19 February 2019

The reception desk at the Heritance Negombo resort gave me a late checkout of one o'clock after I told them that my flight home didn't leave until after midnight, an offer which I gleefully accepted. They also offered, without me asking for it, the right to use the shower in the evening for free as well as luggage storage.

I woke up at eight, quite a bit later than when I have been waking up lately. (This is just wrong. I thought people were supposed to get up early on their work days and late on their holidays. With me, it's the other way around. I guess if you hate your job, there is an incentive to keep hitting the snooze button until the latest possible minute at half past eight.)

First I went to the Blue Tan hotel restaurant for a breakfast buffet. This was very good, there was a massive selection of dishes - continental breakfast foods such as croissants and fruit, full English breakfast foods like bacon and baked beans, cereals, a cheese platter, yoghurt, bread rolls and Sri Lankan breakfast fare like egg hoppers and string hoppers. My stomach cramps had disappeared, I didn't eat much the day before so I was starving and I certainly got my money's worth. It was a lot of money - I think Rs. 2,800.

The restaurant was packed with guests at breakfast time. They were overwhelmingly from Britain and Europe, a very large proportion were Eastern European. The guests were a mixture of young families, young couples and older couples, and unsurprisingly considering how expensive it is to stay here, they were all upper- or middle-class.

I changed into my swimmers, put my valuables in the safe in my room, grabbed a bath towel and went for a swim in the large figure eight-shaped hotel pool. It was a nice pool, the water was a perfect temperature, and in one corner was a bar with a thatched roof cover you could swim up to. You could order drinks and just give them your room number and it would be added to your bill. There were even bar stools under the water you could sit on while drinking. I tried to do some laps, as I often do after work in Sydney, but every muscle was sore and tired and my heart just wasn't in it. After all the strenuous activity of the past three weeks, I just wanted to float in serenity and enjoy just paddling around aimlessly. There is also a gym available for guests that I couldn't bring myself to use.

The Heritance Negombo is luxurious but it is not a sociable place. I had hoped when I booked my room on Booking.com that there would be a hotel bar that was vibrant where I would meet interesting people on my last night in Sri Lanka, that the pool would be like the Blue Lagoon in Iceland where we were all one big happy family, and that I would be able to regale other guests with tales of defying the Grim Reaper himself on faulty bicycles, dangerous buses and dangling live wires while they listened with mouths agape.

I was disappointed. Everyone else just socialised within their little family groups. At all the guest houses I stayed in outside of Colombo, I had lengthy conversations with other guests. We would compare our travel itineraries, talk about our lives back home, give each other restaurant tips or public transport information, swap social media details. It was one big community of travellers, constantly shape-shifting across the country, and it was a community I was thrilled to be part of. There was no community here.

As much as I wanted to just chill and relax, there was one last challenge I had promised myself. Every single pereon in that community of travellers I met were spending lengthy periods of time at beaches. Many seemed shocked that I had had no beach destination at all on my itinerary. It was time to change that and go for a dip in Neptune's kingdom.

Negombo Beach is Sri Lanka's Gold Coast or Cancun or Benidorm - a long, narrow strip of yellow sand fringed by a succession of resort hotels stretching to the horizon. There is a small gate attended by a security guard that connects the hotel grounds to the sandy beach. I walked through the gate, past some traditional catamaran sailing vessels for hire attended by touts who didn't understand that no means no, and walked into the Indian Ocean.

I am naturally most familiar with the beaches of New South Wales so I will compare Negombo to them. Beaches back home have massive surf. Powerful waves that stretch one arm that way, one leg the other way, and somersault you through the rushing water while water goes up your nose and into your lungs are quite common. The west coast of Sri Lanka is much more sheltered, presumably by being closer to the bulk of the Indian subcontinent; the waves on the south coast are much bigger and more like those in New South Wales. There are waves in Negombo, you just won't be able to surf on them, nor will they bury you head first into the sea bed. The biggest waves were perhaps one to two metres tall. They came in a pleasing rhythm, gently washing back and forth over me.

The sand at Negombo is much nicer too. The sand in New South Wales is very pale gold, almost white in some places, and consequently gets very hot. New South Welsh sand is also fine and very squeaky when you step on it. It sticks to every surface of your body like talcum powder, even parts of your body that never came into direct contact with the sand. The sand at Negombo is a bit darker, maybe a light beige, and somewhat coarser. It was compact, almost like a well-graded dirt road, and didn't stick at all, barely even on my soles.

Australia, and the Southern Hemisphere, has ghastly intense sunlight. Australia must be the only country on earth where people look forward to cloudy days. People of British heritage like me often burn to a crisp within half an hour - even with sunscreen. This is why I generally do not go outdoors in the summer in the daytime if I can possibly avoid it. In Sri Lanka the sunlight is much more muted even though it is so much closer to the Equator (seven degrees versus thirty-four degrees in Sydney). I put on one medium coat of sunscreen - careful rationing of my supply resulted in more than enough left over for my last day - and I was outside for two and a half hours and did not get burned at all.

The one thing where New South Welsh beaches win is the water. The sea back home is a brilliant, pure cobalt blue with crystal clear water. The sea in Sri Lanka is a weird blueish-brownish hue and is quite opaque. Oh, the lack of touts and tacky souvenir sellers too is another good thing about Australian beaches. But they don't have surf gangs or race riots at Sri Lankan beaches, so that counts in their favour.

Excepting the water quality and the touts, I wish beaches in Australia were like Negombo. I might not hate Australian beaches so much. I redsicovered the childlike innocent joy of swimming at the beach in Sri Lanka, of being rocked back and forth as the waves wash over me, of the rhythmic incantations of the water coming to and fro over the sand.

As great as going for a dip in the ocean was, all good things must come to an end. I went back to my room, packed my things, stored my luggage, and checked out of the Heritance Negombo resort hotel. I do not regret coming here, a night of luxury is probably what I needed. The service was professional, the rooms were comfortable, the food was good, the amenities were excellent. But I found the experience oddly dissatisfying. I missed the guest houses with their achingly slow ceiling fans and hard matresses and mosquito nets and dribble-like showers. Here at the Heritance, I was given great service and treated like a prince, but it was impersonal. I was just another sixteen-digit credit card number. At the guest houses I might not have been treated like a prince, but I was treated like family. The owners were interested in me, my story, my family back home, what work I did, and I was likewise interested in them. I ate the same meals they served their families.

Also, staying at a luxury beach resort was like staying in a bubble. All your needs - food, drink, exercise, entertainment - are met within the boundaries of the land parcel the hotel was on. You could spend an entire holiday here and never actually experience Sri Lanka. Travel is a very individualistic hobby; there is no "right" way or "wrong" way of travelling and no traveller has the right to lecture other travellers on what to do. So if you want to spend your holidays in some hedonistic luxury utopia by the beach where you are hermetically sealed from the real world, go for it.

I can only speak for myself - being pampered and living in luxury is not why I travel. I don't travel for pleasure. I travel to see things I have never seen, taste things I have never tasted, hear things I have never heard. I travel to immerse myself in other languages, to be stupefied by some historical site, to understand how other cultures tick, to challenge myself by climbing some moderately tall mountain. In short, I travel to be educated. And there isn't much lecture material on offer in the curriculum at luxury resort hotels.

After I checked out I caught the lift up to the fifth floor. Up there was an ayurvedic spa. Wherever you go in Sri Lanka touts and accommodation providers are always trying to sell you massage treatments and alternative therapies at ayurvedic spas. I just knew I had to try it before I left and so for Rs. 10,700 I had my own masseur for ninety minutes.

I had booked something called the "full body deep tissue repair therapy" or something like that. My body was aching all over after doing so much hiking, climbing and cycling. I thought this might be the thing that would help me get some sort of sleep on the flights home.

I waited in the reception at the spa. Incense was burning and soft flute music was playing. It reminded me of the final scene in Soylent Green where Sal goes to the euthanasia centre and soothing music and relaxing film scenes are played as the lethal injection is administered. The kindly masseur shook my hand and he led me into the treatment room.

I had to change into special underwear. It looked like a piece of black stocking a few inches wide. But it was so stretchy that it fit comfortably. I laid face down on the table and the masseur buttered me up with scented oil and started nice and gently. Then the "fun" began! His knees, elbows, fists, the entire weight of his body were used to press into the deepest parts of mine while all I could do was clench my teeth in agony. I felt like a ball of pizza dough in the kneading machine at the pizza restaurant I worked at when I was a teenager.

There was one part of my body, in the flesh of my lower right back near my kidney. There was possibly already a bruise there, perhaps it was a knotted muscle, maybe the masseur had caused a bruise there with his pressure. But for some reason the masseur kept returning to that spot over and over with his sharp elbows pointing all the way down to the inner organs.

I couldn't help it, I screamed in agony and my feet flailed up and down in reflex. "Stop! Stop! For goodness sake, just stop!"

"Why, is it painful?" he asked.

"No shit! Why do you think I'm screaming!" But he didn't stop. All I could do was breathe tightly through gritted teeth and sigh in relief when he turned his attention elsewhere.

After ninety minutes it was over. I showered to wash the oil off me and was offered a cup of tea with jaggery in the spa's lobby. It was weird - how is it that something so painful is so relaxing? I felt so good leaving the spa.

There wasn't much more I wanted to do. My flight didn't leave until 00:45, most places even in a tourist strip like Negombo were closed due to the Poya public holiday. I got my hair cut at a salon that was still open for eight hundred rupees, saving myself about fourteen dollars compared to if I had waited until I returned to Sydney. My hair had grown quite fuzzy. I looked like a mad Austrian scientist who had stuck a butter knife into a power point. I like to keep my hair neat and short and normally I would have got it cut well before now but I reasoned that longer hair meant less sunburn on my scalp.

I decided to head back to the beach to watch the sunset, my last ocean sunset for quite some time, living on Australia's east coast. It was as glorious as the others. Because of haze on the sea, the sun actually disappears from view before it reaches the horizon. It gradually gets redder and dimmer before it is extinguished completely. It was so glorious that I decided to stream the sunset to all my friends on Facebook Live.

While I was filming the sunset, my phone held in front of me as I was sitting on the sand, a Sri Lankan man came up to me. He introduced himself, I forget his name - it's very easy to forget Sri Lankan names - and he sat down next to me. We talked about my travels, he asked which Australian city I was from, he asked what the climate there was like. He seemed like a friendly, genuine guy.

Then the scamming began. His wife was suffering blood cancer! He was out of work! He couldn't afford to buy powdered milk for his baby! Please, please, could I help him?

There was a slim possibility that he was right and he was truly in dire straits. Most likely he was yet another one of the plague of locusts who hang around tourist areas looking for a sucker.

"No sorry, I'm not giving you money."

"Then can you give me milk?"

"Milk? It's a public holiday, the supermarkets are not even open."

"Yes they are, the shop across the road is open. Please! Please! Please!"

I know that in Australia there is currently a problem with black market milk powder and infant formula. Chinese groups are buying up a huge percentage of Australia's domestic powdered milk and infant formula supply to sell on the black market in China. The problem is so bad that supermarkets introduced limits on how many tins you can buy at once. The thought occurred that perhaps a similar thing is happening in Sri Lanka. Maybe I go and buy a tin of powdered milk for, say, five hundred or a thousand rupees or however much it costs, give the tin for free to this con artist, and then he sells it on the cheap at his market stall or out the back of his tuk-tuk and makes a tidy profit.

"No, sorry, I'm not giving you money or any milk."

He then got on his knees and made a praying gesture. "Please, please, I need milk! For my baby! My wife has blood cancer! You can come and see the baby! Please!"

This is the moment when I definitely knew he was a con artist. Real beggars are too ashamed of their penury to act like this. Real beggars know how to take no for an answer and move onto the next person. Real beggars wouldn't trap someone with what seemed like genuine friendly innocent conversation and then segue into a sob story.

"Listen, I am just watching the sunset and--"

"Please! Give me milk! You must give me milk or money! Please!"

"I'm very sorry for your misfortune, but I'm not giving you money, sorry."

"Please, give me milk!"

"No! You are not getting any milk or any money! Now leave me alone! For f#$k's sake!"

He finally got the hint and tried the same thing with another tourist also watching the sunset ten metres along the beach. The scammer was such a moron he didn't realise the whole exchange was being recorded and streamed live for all my friends to see on Facebook. I will miss Sri Lanka. I will not miss the teeming masses of slimy con artists and touts. I don't care if Sri Lanka doesn't have a Western-style welfare state. The vast majority of Sri Lankans do it tough. The low wages are not adequate for the cost of living, secure work is hard to come by, the tuk-tuk is always just one bad month away from repossession, an accident or a chronic illness often means disaster. But the vast majority of Sri Lankans still go about their lives with dignity, integrity and amazing resilience. The sleazy scammers have no excuse for dishonesty.

And so I watched the sun set on my last day of my three-week adventure in Sri Lanka. I will miss Sri Lanka, the warmth and friendliness and hospitality of its people, its divine curries, fruit and vegetables, its incredible natural beauty, its mountains, its beaches, its wildlife, its rainforests, its uproarious energy, its ancient ruins sticking out of the verdant plains.

Sri Lanka, thank you. You challenged me, you inspired me, you frustrated me, you helped me, you entertained me, you scared me, but most importantly of all, you educated me.

Traditional boats on Negombo Beach

This Negombo convenience store is not a ripoff of a UK supermarket chain at all

Negombo Beach

Heritance Negombo

Negombo sunset

Negombo Beach

Negombo, Sri Lanka

Sunday, 18 February 2019

Call me un-Australian, but I do not like the beach very much. After that admission, I now expect Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to strip me of my Australian citizenship. But I will say it again: I do not like the beach. I simply don't get it. To me, "the beach" means my skin burning to a crisp after five minutes, saltwater stinging my eyes, ears and nasal mucous membranes, being dumped head first into the sand by a rogue wave, the moronic tribalism of surf gangs, the posturing narcissism of bikini-clad bimbos and their equally vacuous male counterparts, and sand stuck for days in bodily orifices hitherto unknown to medical science.

I don't care if you think I am not a real Australian, but beaches to me are torture. I think I have only swum at an ocean beach twice as an adult while visiting family on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Both times were thoroughly unpleasant.

I have also never stayed in a luxury beach resort. It would be an odd choice of accommodation for someone who does not like beaches. But I will try anything once. Well, maybe not incest. And definitely not folk dancing. But a luxury beach resort? Why not.

But I had to get there first. Thanks to the rumbling of the wheels and the blaring whistle of the up intercity express departing Anuradhapura for Colombo at twenty to seven, I woke up before my alarm went off. The good news is that my sweating fever had stopped and that I had gotten about eight hours of solid, restful sleep. The bad news is that my stomach still felt like I had been punched in the guts by Mike Tyson.

I showered and dressed and went gingerly downstairs, Purmina and her family were having breakfast. She could instantly see that I was not well. I told her what happened at the restauarant, and how stupid I was to assume that water put on tables for paying customers was safe to drink. She told me that it was common knowledge among Sri Lankans that water provided free of charge in jugs at restaurants is never safe. This still raises the question - why would any human being knowingly offer unsafe tap water to other human beings? And why would restaurant owners willingly do something that would deter customers coming back to spend even more money? If this happened in Australia the restaurateurs would be slapped with a massive fine, have their restaurant closed down by the state Department of Health, and perhaps even receive a prison sentence if intent or criminal negligence could be proven.

Purmina made me a Sri Lankan folk remedy for food and water poisoning, strong black coffee with the grounds in the cup mixed with lime juice. The concotion tasted disgusting but it actually worked, the stomach cramps became a bit more bearable. I just had some white toast with margarine and a few chunks of watermelon for breakfast, I had no appetite for anything more.

I packed my things, said a heartfelt goodbye to Purmina, a truly amazing and intelligent and kind-hearted host, and her two-year-old daughter. I got into a tuk-tuk Purmina had called and rode a kilometre to Anuradhapura station. The current station was built in 1959, a bright white building with neoclassical columns and modernist angles. It was an attractive, airy station.

While I was waiting for my train, another train came from the south. The engine was carrying a banner on its front with the Buddhist dhammachakra wheel symbol. This very long train of ancient red carriages stopped and hundreds, maybe thousands, of schoolchildren all dressed in identical white uniforms got off the train. They were obviously headed to the Sacred City of Anuradhapura on some sort of school excursion.

I sat down on the platform benches. They were rows of moulded plastic seats bolted to a metal frame like what you see at many stadiums. I sat down and almost fell on my back. The seats were so loosely screwed onto the frame that they rocked back at a great angle when the slightest force was applied. I got up and decided to stand instead. A Dutch middle-aged couple sat down on the same row of seats and they almost landed on their backs too.

"I think there's something wrong with these seats, the same thing happened to me," I observed.

"Yes, indeed," the wife said. "And the seats are especially unsafe for you, with your weight problem," she added while pointing at my belly. I love the Netherlands but sometimes I do wish that Dutch people would learn to shut their big fat stupid mouths.

My train, the up Uttara Devi (Queen of the North), a daily intercity express that connects the far north to Colombo, arrived shortly after nine. It was a very un-Sri Lankan train. It was brand new, very sleek, clean, undamaged and didn't look like it belonged in a museum. This was a Class S13 diesel multiple unit, introduced into service in late 2018. I found my seat in the reserved third-class car. First class and second class were booked out, this was a long weekend. Tomorrow is a Poya day, the Buddhist full moon festival that is always a public holiday in Sri Lanka, so public transport across the country was crowded.

The train left on time at a quarter past nine. It might have been new but it was certainly not comfortable. The rigid, straight-backed bench seats, three on one side of the aisle and two on the other, were designed for midgets with scoliosis. At five foot seven I was far too tall. I am sure I would have found it comfortable when I was seven years old. Every window and door was open but there was no breeze save that feeble wisp of air coming from electric fans swivelling on the ceiling far above. The maximum height the windows would open was far below the height of the bench seats. This meant that there was no airflow coming through the carriage, the seats blocked the breeze. Still, my ticket cost me only four hundred rupees. To travel halfway across a country for only A$3.20 ought to give me little room to complain.

The train joined the Main Line at Polgahawela. The line to Colombo from here is double track all the way and the maximum speed increased from 75 km/h to 100 km/h. This must be the Sri Lankan version of the French TGV or Japanese Shinkansen.

The Uttara Devi called at all the larger towns and as it neared Colombo it became ever more crowded. I was glad to have reserved a seat even in third class, though I couldn't want to leave the train. I had booked my seat all the way through to Colombo Fort but my connection to the next train on the Puttalam Line was very tight. The Uttara Devi was scheduled to arrive at Colombo Fort station at 12:55 and the Puttalam Line train was to leave at 13:10. The Uttara Devi was running about seven minutes late. You cannot book through tickets for journeys involving multiple trains in Sri Lanka, you must buy a separate ticket for each leg of the journey at each interchange station. I know just how glacial the ticket queues are at Colombo Fort so I almost certainly would have missed my next train.

So I made the impromptu decision to get off one station before at Maradana a couple of kilometers east of Fort. This gave me a few more minutes of wriggle room. I ran up the stairs, found no queue at the ticket counter for the Puttalam Line, bought my little date-stamped cardboard chip that entitled me to one-way third-class travel to Kattuwa and waited about ten minutes for my train.

Maradana is an interesting station. It is Colombo's version of Redfern station in Sydney and even looks and feels similar. It is a very large interchange station with multiple island platforms only one stop from the central station. The platforms are connected by an overhead concourse and ticket hall on a footbridge located at one end of the station. Nearby are the Sri Lanka Railways' largest yard, depot and workshops as well as the network control centre.

I only had about ten minutes until my Puttalam Line train arrived, a crusty old S8 diesel multiple unit, its exterior panels peeling away with rust, its airless interiors coated in dirt and diesel grime. I have read on the internet that these sooty, mouldy, sweaty rustbuckets have their admirers. It is unfathomable. Those people need to be given a compulsory mental health treatment order.

My train to Kattuwa was crowded when it arrived at Maradana. The Puttalam Line is a reasonably busy line served only by Colombo Commuter services, with a train roughly once an hour in each direction. I finally got a seat at Ja-Ela - not that the seat was anything great, the S8 trains have just a row of hard orange moulded plastic benches running along each side of the carriage - and ninety minutes and thirty kilometres later I disembarked at Kattuwa, one kilometre from my beach hotel in Negombo.

I waved goodbye to my last Sri Lankan train on this magnificent little railway adventure, I wished that my last train could have been something a bit less grotty. I felt very sad. Sri Lanka Railways are like a railway museum on the scale of an entire country. They feature operational practices long abandoned everywhere else perfectly preserved in nineteenth-century aspic. The trains are charmingly antiquated, the staff dress like admirals with starched white uniforms, the stations feature lovingly tended gardens and fish tanks and newspaper reading desks and little libraries.

Sri Lanka's railways desperately need modernisation. No country should be forced to put up with trains that are not safe, not fit for purpose. The over-staffing and inefficiency must be brought under control. What I and other passengers went through at Bandarawela where the train was delayed for six and a half hours without any reliable information being given to the passengers by railway employees who were lying through their teeth should not happen to anyone.

But when Sri Lanka finally modernises its railways, as they inevitably must, I hope they do it in a way that retains that charm, that beauty, that feeling that this is how a railway ought to be - not some sterile glass-and-steel factory silently swallowing passengers at one end and spitting them out at the other like Deutsche Bahn or the Singapore MRT, but a railway that promises adventure, new friendships, an unfamiliar sight at every station, stimulation, camaraderie, character.

I rode a tuk-tuk to the Heritance Negombo, a five-storey resort hotel with two long wings stretching north and south along the beach. The tuk-tuk dropped me off under the portico and a purple-liveried doorman opened the door for me. I was led into the lobby, a glass atrium with beach views, and the solicitous reception manager sat me down on a comfortable ottoman couch while Erik Satie-like piano compositions tinkled on the speakers. It was certainly a big difference from the very basic guest houses I stayed in until now.

I pride myself on my frugality. I have very modest tastes, I am disciplined with my money, the only luxuries I afford myself in my daily life are eating out two or three times a week and drinking expensive craft beer. Normally I would be aghast at the idea of spending three hundred Australian dollars on one night in a hotel.

But I have been through a lot on this trip. I have encountered vicious street dogs, been harrassed by innumerable tuk-tuk touts and beggars and other scam artists who won't take no for an answer, travelled on buses driven by homicidal psychopaths, nearly gotten killed by being given a bicycle without working brakes, endured a six and a half hour train delay without any idea when we would start moving again, lost my hat and consequently suffered severe sunburn, been shocked by the sight of heartwrenching poverty, spent whole days walking in frightful tropical heat and humidity, been given incorrect directions and advice countless times because the locals are averse to admitting that they don't know the answer and just make crap up out of thin air, and now I was recovering from a bout of water poisoning. I also had a fifteen-hour journey home the next evening incorporating a red-eye flight from Colombo to Singapore, a journey I was looking forward to even less than dental surgery, and I wanted to be well rested and at ease before I departed. After all the challenges and frustrations of three weeks in Sri Lanka, surely I have the right to spend my own hard-earned money on being pampered like a spoilt little prince for just one night? I've been such a good boy.

So unusually I craved luxury. Not the refined, pompous, snobbish, intimidating luxury of the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya, but decadent, trashy, self-indulgent luxury. So I made a last-minute booking at the Heritance Negombo and found myself sitting in a frigidly air-conditioned atrium listening to mood music as the ridiculously polite reception staff checked me in.

I was shown to my room on the ground floor in the north wing. It was like any other four- or five-star hotel room - tea and coffee facilities, separate shower and toilet, comfortable king-size bed, flat-screen television with cable channels, minibar fridge - but the main difference was the sliding glass door that gave a great view right out onto the beach. If I so chose, I could step out from my hotel room and be on the sandy beach almost immediately.

I had a very late lunch in the hotel restaurant, Blue Tan, at five o'clock, just a grilled chicken wrap with the tiniest serve of hot chips and garden salad I ever did see. It cost about Rs. 1,600. You'd pay far less in Sydney. I didn't have much of an appetite and even less of a desire to leave the hotel to find some place cheaper. I just wanted to stay in this little bubble, just for one night, insulated from the madness without.

There is a hotel bar on the top floor, the See Lounge, with a nice view looking west over the Indian Ocean. (See? Sea? Get it? Oh, how hilarious.) It was a good place to enjoy watching the sunset and catching up on my blog well into the evening. I had fallen far behind; the exhausting hikes of the past few days had left me too tired to complete my daily writing and last night with my gastric troubles I was in no state to do any task at all let alone marshal my thoughts into several thousand words, do the quickest of proofreads and edits, and then upload them along with a selection of captioned photographs to Traveller's Point.

The See Lounge was a perfect place to enjoy solitude. Throughout most of the evening I was the sole guest. At most there were three other people. I don't know what all the other hotel guests were doing. Presumably watching CNN or The Cartoon Network on the TVs in their rooms.

My stomach slowly got better. Not perfect, but more manageable. I managed to eat a very small tub of Pringles and an equally small pack of peanuts. I tried arrack for the first time. Arrack is Sri Lanka's most famous alcoholic drink, made from fermented coconut palm sap, I believe. It's not very good. I had fifty milliltres on the rocks. It tasted like very rough, cheap whisky, the bargain basement stuff with a brand name you have never heard of that you sometimes find for about thirty dollars a bottle in Australia. Alcohol is not a big part of Sri Lankan culture. It seems that only the most debased dregs of society drink any significant amount of alcohol, others either frown upon drinking or are indifferent to it. Bottle shops do exist, they look like they belong in prisons. They consist of a hole in the wall facing directly onto the street or up the back of a supermarket.. The hole in the wall has prison bars. You can't select your own purchase from the shelves, you have to tell the person behind the bars what you want and they pick it out for you from the shelves behind the bars. These dodgy little shops are surrounded by knots of dodgy little men who look like how I imagine the identikit pictures of criminal suspects would look like on Sri Lanka's Most Wanted. They also look like the sleazy tuk-tuk touts who congregate around bus and railway stations and tell tourists that the hotel they want is closed, their guidebooks and Booking.com are lying, but if only they would get into the tuk-tuk for three thousand rupees, there is a very nice hotel owned by their friend twenty kilometres away ...

Sunset at Negombo Beach from the See Lounge

On the S8 train from Maradana to Kattuwa

S13 train on the Uttara Devi express at Maradana Station

S8 commuter train at Kattuwa station