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The Jungle Diaries

The Jungle Diaries

著者： The Ceylon Press
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 Off-grid in Sri Lanka. Deep in the jungle north of Sri Lanka's last kindgom, blooms a plantation once abandoned in war...Copyright 2023 The Ceylon Press 旅行記・解説 社会科学
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  • The Art of Hermiting

    The Art of Hermiting
    2025/05/09
    “It's love,” my music teacher assured us, “that makes the world go round.” He was trying to enforce some degree of harmony in the class at the time, burdened by having to learn yet another Mikado song. He might have cheered us all up had he shared W. S. Gilbert’s other great insight: “Man is nature's sole mistake”.But this he failed to do and so, aged 12, I was left wondering just how on earth the world would motor itself forward, and go round and round, given the unhelpful existence of such hermits as myself. Of course, hermits often love, but given their predictably sequestered impact, the effect is like being licked by a gerbil. Not enough to really help the world go round and round. And round.Quite how I got away with it, being brought up in a country then so explosively fecund that the Prime Minister’s younger son set about furtively and forcibly sterilizing any male within sight, was itself a miracle. Of course, he failed. Utterly. In the ten years from my arriving in India and then leaving it, the population jumped 100 million. And not just there. Everywhere. More and more people, making the world go round, with love. The battalions of shrinks who spent so much effect making me into the balanced, burnished, and pleasing figure that I am today, never really explained what happened when or why to make me so. But hermiting, to coin verb, is a very pleasing occupation. And I am certainly getting better at it.It was a challenge to do well in India, at boarding school, university or in any of the vortex-inducing publishing houses that greedily besotted me during an early career enthusiasm. But here, in the jungles of central Sri Lanka, it works much better.The path of a hermit is rarely straightforward, especially if you are the sort that prefers looking upon caves, lighthouses, and abandoned windswept islands, rather than living in them. Why, after all, should hermitting be shorn of books, champagne, a good chef, or opera? Not everyone is St Paul, content with dates and bread, or likes dining off leather shoes, like the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova.Clearly there are degrees in hermiting, as in any condition or occupation - though my friends still chuckle and snigger at my career choice to run a hotel. That, they claim, is merely a perverse attempt to have ones cake and eat it. For, of course, you can’t hermit 24/7 in a hotel. In a hotel hermitting is intermittent. Like the building of Rome, it cannot be achieved in a full day. There are guests to greet, help, welcome and part with. Suppliers of everything from diesel to devilled cashews to meet. An unending parade of plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, Wi-Fi repairers, gar deliverers dancing up the estate road in duets with government agents, tuk tuks, lost policemen, cinnamon peelers, monkeys and falling mangos.But all of this misses that one essential point: hotels nurture hermiting. Ravi Shankar, Coco Chanel, Clinty Eastwood all lived in hotels. And look at what they achieved. “When you get into a hotel room,” noted Diane von Furstenberg, “you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.” Amongst well-informed hermits, arguments rage gently over what type of hotel offers the best hermiting. And at first glance you would seemed utterly spoiled for choice here in Sri Lanka. It lists over 10,000 places as providing accommodation. However, closer inspection shows that just a quarter of these places are classified as hotels And of those just 8% (200) are rated as 5-star. For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of these 200 hotels are small private operations - authentically boutique in a world that has heartlessly commoditized the word. Thankfully, the hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world – Taj, Sheraton, Marriot, Starwood, Meridian, etc. – have yet to put in much of an appearance here. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality. My Colombo hermitage of choice is the Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, a much overlooked habitat of calm sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road. Alternatively, Tintagel offers unquestionable peace, a far cry from its 1956 tabloid moment when the radical Prime Minster S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, seated on its veranda, was shot dead by a Buddhist priest whose business affairs had gone awry - the first leader of the modern state to be murdered – but not the last. For those who prefer Colombo hermitting in massive edifices, there is Cinnamon Grand; the Hilton, one of the first globally branded ...
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  • A Little Bit of Expert

    A Little Bit of Expert
    2025/05/02
    A Little Bit of Expert, 14th February 2024There is the BBC of course. CNN. Reuters. The New York Times. All News, if you will. And then there is real news. Recently, I have taken to walking the dogs up Singing Civet Hill, down the Coconut Gove, through the jungle path and out onto the newly planted Chocolate Walk that links back to the Spice Garden and the estate entrance.As subjects go, dog walking routes are way up there - with global warming, or the Oscars, choices of totemic influence, able to steer the whole day this way or that. And where the day goes, the week, the year, the millennia follows.Bertie is still gated so cries in the office or has a private garden-only walk with Ranjan. I take the other four into great, occasionally tamed, wilderness. There are wild boar prints to smell, the track of a mouse deer, porcupine a plenty, wild dogs, and of course, monkeys. For Archie, Bianca, Coco and Nestor, the stroll is akin to entering naked into a cream cake shop and letting rip. A golden sun filters through jungle trees. Dry leaves shift underfoot. A vast blue sky implies itself from above. Apart from the excited sniffs and scratches of the dogs in their virtual cream cake shop, it is silent. Meditation silent. Soul silent. The sort of silence impossible to image within a yard of asphalt.Even so, there are traces of human activities. In this case, young Mr Goonetilleke’s attempt to keep wild animals off his plants. Thin strips of steel wire had been stretched on boundaries and anchored to electrical forces so strong as to give me a nasty jolt when I walked in to one. It certainly deterred me. But not the animals, who hopped across, or simply waited for a coconut leaf to fall on the wire and short it.Occasionally Mr Goonetilleke attempted to revise his technical masterpiece, but in the end, he refocused his ubiquitous expertise into solving other problems, leaving him, and us, a little wiser than before about the uses of electricity. Experts, like love bombs, are everywhere on this island. It is one of its principal human features; one of Sri Lanka’s many little bits of lovely. Not for these shores, the remote and gifted expert, given to Deus ex Machina pronouncements, rare as Burmese rubies, on what should be done in this instance, or that case.No. In Sri Lanka, the expert is there right next to you, just like Mr Goonetilleke, ready to intervene. On the train, in the street, at the doctor’s waiting room, his expertise in whatever the matter in hand, worn since birth, and so much a part of his physiology that you might as well try to sever an arm or ear, as to sever this part too.The journey to this remarkable state of national know-how has been long and meandering, journeying past centuries of want, and decades of central bureaucratic incompetence, enlivened with parrots like flashes of glittering arrogance. From banking, electricity, and tea, to fish, drugs, cement, and chickens, state owned industries remain wedded to The Frank Sinatra Dictum:– “I've lived a life that's full / I've travelled each and every highway / And more, much more / I did it, I did it my way.” Whisper if you will that they are largely technically insolvent or as dated as dinosaur in a poodle parlour – it is to no avail. Their expert song sounds on. And on. The elites rule. Their way, or no way.Sometimes – not often – it all breaks down. The Civil War, JVP Uprisings, Hartal, Aragalaya. People get fed up with experts. And all hell breaks loose. But Sri Lankan society is nothing if not civil, and in between these moments of madness a kind of gorgeous mannered existence runs along paddy tracks from village to village. The Emperor has no clothes? Of course he hasn’t. He’s so naked you can count the mosquito bites on his buttocks. But such a lovely hat. And the scarf he is imaging he is wearing. That too is beautiful, offsetting the make-believe sarong, just so.As the experts busy themselves choosing their special clothes for the day and getting ready to advise those few people they have time to see, the rest of society just get on with it. Everyone is an expert in almost everything. They have to be, or life would simply stop in its tracks like a perfumer with a pegged nose. Expertise is not something you can outsource. To make the right choice you have to know so much as to leave you cleaving to the wings of a rocket as it does it 360 orbit of any problem or issue.“Generator blown,” observed Kasum, the chef. “I’ll fix it.” I begged him not to. But he did it anyway. And it sort of worked.Its mildly terrifying, marginally irritating and wholly discombobulating when suddenly you need to be the expert. And nowhere is this more true than in matters of health.Soft westerner as I am, I’m accustomed to seeing a general practitioner for anything from a head bump to a throat sniffle. With celestial expertise, the GP will point me the right way – this specialist or that; this test or that;...
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  • My Missing Sapphire Tiara

    My Missing Sapphire Tiara
    2024/02/21
    My Missing Sapphire Tiara, Friday, 10th DecemberIt was Mr Wijeratne from the Water Board who brought the missing tiara to mind when he called on us this morning, his beaming presence foretelling progress in our fixed line water connection.He is a generous, positive fellow, little given to jewellery – except for this fingers. These more than make up for any deficit. They carry a rich selection of rings, the most impressive the size of a small calculator, its flat square surface a golden field on which are displayed, in neat rows, nine precious and semi-precious stones.As he waved his arms about, explaining what pipe would go where and how our deep well water provision would now be enriched by his fixed line water, the sun glinted on his fingers, and the trickle of gloom that I had started to feel at my total lack of commitment to personal jewellery, become a flood.Some people are born with voices that will carry them deep into the world of opera, or a figure on which rags or rich silk outfits can be placed with equal grace. Others are born with no instinct for jewels. I have just sufficient levels of self-awareness to know that toe or finger rings, and necklaces do little for my truculent beauty. But I also know, albeit from school, that tiaras can improve me. Whether it was a tiara or a small gold crown much garnished with glass rubies, I cannot now remember. But it did the trick. My blonde hair appeared more golden, my complexion a more prosperous pink, my head longer - as if the brain beneath my temples had given an atypical opportunity to just smile, and be blessed, and take time off from thinking. Sadly the tiara disappeared once the play we were performing came to an end. I sensed later that earrings would have also done well on me; sapphire or gold nuggets, giving my overlooked lobes something special to hug. This emotional deficit does not stop me appreciating jewellery on others, through here in the jungle, Mr Wijeratne excepted, it is a rare sight. But when it does appear, it makes the sort of glorious waves that Moses must have done as he trekked down from the mountain waving his tablets. Not long ago five ladies from St Petersburg came to stay. They dressed in a rich selection of gemstones for dinner, including two hair ornaments that may or may not have been tiaras; or State Crowns. Often pearls, rings, and earrings catch the gentle candlelight over dinner, but rarely do they offer the sort of overwhelming light force that you might encounter at a coronation, in Hi! Magazine, the Tatler Diary, or on meeting Luke Skywalker’s Cloud City lightsaberWhich is a shame, especially here, for Sri Lanka is practically the home of gemstones. If biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems, are to be believed, the country’s gem mines can be back dated to 900 BCE. "The king of Ceylon,” wrote Marco Polo in the 13th century, has “the grandest ruby that was ever seen, a span in length, the thickness of a man's arm; brilliant beyond description, and without a single flaw. Its worth cannot be estimated in money”. Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks, Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and streams. Twenty five percent of its land is gem-bearing, especially around Ratnapura and Elahera. From here come the 75 semi or precious gems that call this island home: rubies, sapphires, spinels, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, rose quartz, aquamarines, tourmalines, agates, cymophanes, topazes, citrines, alexandrites, zircons, and moonstones. And it was from Ratnapura over the past several years that sapphires the size of supermarket baskets have been found. So great is the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires that the nation might legitimately put in for a name change to be better called Sri Sapphire. They account for 85% of the precious stones mined here – but the colour variant that gets the most acclaim is the Ceylon Blue Sapphire, the blue of cornflowers, clear skies, and inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, they are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”. And so they do. Since Ptolemy noted their glittering existence here, they are much favoured for crowns, thrones, diadems, as well as jewellery for First Nights, hotel dinners and cocktail parties. Sri Lanka’s sapphires have given museums and auction houses jewels of such arresting quality as to gain themselves names and identities in the own right Diana, Princess of Wales’s engagement ring, a mere 12-carats of Sri Lankan sapphire, rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for her in ...
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