A weekend of bus problems

Monday 20th June 2016

Wednesday lunchtime last week marked the start of my five day adventure up to the north of Sri Lanka to the town of Kilinocchi. The twelve hour minibus journey was made slightly more bearable by the presence of air conditioning, and the driver was the same awesome driver we had last weekend. A much needed food stop occurred around 9.30pm at Pizza Hut and we all filled our bellies with deliciousness. Once back in the minibus, the driver demonstrated that the bus would not start and then proceeded to laugh at me for ten minutes, whilst periodically saying “push”. We thought he was joking and had called someone to come and help. Eventually we realised he was being serious and wanted us to get out and push the van to help it to start. This was the first bus problem of the weekend and caused much hilarity. We arrived in Kilinocchi gone midnight and were informed we had an early start in the morning to arrive at the hospital for 7.30.

Nobody got much sleep that night due to the stifling hot bedrooms, which made Thursday a long day. We shadowed a psychiatrist for the day which was so interesting but also quite hard to see at times (blog post on this will follow). By around 5pm we were on the bus to Trincomalee which was fairly uneventful until we were only a few miles from our destination when the bus came to a sudden stop. The driver opened up the engine inside the bus, directing a wave of heat over us, and fiddled with it for a few minutes. This was the second bus problem of the weekend, though we were back on the road again fairly quickly.

We explored Trincomalee the next morning which was beautiful. The beach views were stunning from the temple, I’ve never seen such clear waters. We took the bus to Nilaveli beach and found a hotel on the beachfront where we sat with cocktails and food all afternoon. It was a hidden paradise. We swam in the sea which was so clear and so warm and we had an incredibly relaxing afternoon. It was actually rather perfect.

On the way back to our hotel that afternoon, our bus was pulled over by the police. The driver was taken to one side for around five minutes by the officers, whilst every single person on the rather crowded bus craned their necks to see what was going on. This was the third and final bus problem of the weekend, and I still have no idea what happened. When we returned to the hotel it was already getting dark, and we arrived to find a table of party food, with a beautiful pink birthday cake at pride of place in the centre. A candle in the shape of the number eight was lit in the middle and a smiling young Sri Lankan girl in her party dress was stood by it. We were ushered over by the family and enthusiastically invited to join in the celebrations. The family all lived at the hotel, I assume they were the extended family of the owner. This little girl had so many people at her birthday party and she did not stop grinning all night. She cut her birthday cake and carried out the Sri Lankan tradition of feeding bites of cake to all the guests before finally getting to have some herself. We told her, in Sinhala, that she looked beautiful, and she giggled and smiled. It was one of those moments where despite being so far away from home, I felt so at home. We had been completely welcomed in by this family and made to feel like we belonged.

The next day, we took a boat over to Pigeon Island National Park. To be honest, it was the first time this trip that I was actually a little disappointed. I know that parts of the coral reef were dying, but that didn’t prepare me for the actual sheer volume of dead coral on one side of the island when we arrived. It was actually a little heartbreaking. The entire beach was just dead washed up coral, and there was little to see in the rough waters. After some time battling against the waves with my snorkel I gave up and got out. It was then that I realised there was another side to the island, and I went round to find a beautiful bay, protected from the waves and tide. The water that side was much nicer. It was easy to just float in and I saw so many beautiful fish. A lot of the coral was dead still though, because the activity on the island is so unregulated. It saddened me that human’s determination to witness beauty was the thing that had destroyed the natural beauty of the coral. Had I known the extent to which the coral was destroyed, I probably would have chosen not to visit. But then hindsight is always a wonderful thing.