We spied him out of the corner of our eye.
We were sitting down enjoying our well earned 5 o'clock beer in the garden of the Milano Hotel in Anuradhapura in Northern Sri Lanka. We had left the beaches and the pink tourists of the south coast behind and obtained our Indian travel visas. We' watched 'Avatar' at the cinema, laughing at the absurdly named planet 'Pandora' and the insultingly obvious mineral called 'unobtainium', cheering and clapping with the chaste, modest, local crowd as the two main characters kissed for the first time.
We'd had the third of our musketeers disappear into the smoke. A baby elephant had taken a shine to Jackson’s company and a desire to headbutt me in the dying sunlight of a big day. By chance we had wandered into a local cricket ground to watch some young kids play and in doing so, bumped into a coach that had convinced a young cricketer named Muttiah Muralitharan to give up fast bowling and batting at the age of 15 to take up spin bowling and become the greatest bowler of all time.
We had left Kandy behind, the town seemingly devoted to the storage of a tooth that once belonged to The Buddha, we'd seen the sun set and sun rise over the jaw droopingly beautiful Sigiriya – a thousand year old city and monastery built atop a massive boulder. We (or more correctly, 'I') had lamented on the fact that there seemed to be so few places where we could get a beer to end the day with. Bus upon rickety bus we had taken, overtaking on blind corners, an unwavering faith in reincarnation pushing the driver on to our destination.
Figure 1. Sigiriya.
We spied out him of the corner of our eye, carrying a cricket bat.
Game on!
We leapt out from our chairs and skipped down the drive to meet this young man of 8 years old. As is the case in Sri Lanka, within 30 seconds of leaving our beer behind, we had set up a wicket in the middle of the street and started a game of impromptu street cricket. Locals that walked past jumped into our game. Jackson talked up a storm, bowled hard at our wickets fashioned from a garden chair. Jackson batted confidently at the crease as the workers of the hotel railed down balls upon him. I with all the talent I could muster, couldn't bowl at all and when batting, struggled to hit the ball and when I did, very juniorly hit them for six, forcing us to search the front gardens of the surrounding houses.
A great game. I put my wallet down on the side of the road as we played the sunlight away.
All good travel stories require the loss of a wallet at some point. To further this point, I walked away from my wallet with a spring in my step, leaving it there to have its own travel adventure. We finished our beer, shared another one and went to our room to enjoy the luxury of watching Al Jazeera before heading out for a spot of dinner in the local roti house.
There was a knock on the door. My wallet! It had returned. For some reason, no matter how many times I leave my wallet somewhere, it always comes back to say hello to me. I put this good karma down to having been someone very nice in a past life. It was a welcome return and the three of us – Jackson, my wallet and I went into a great sleep in the warm air of Anuradhapura.
Waking up to have Jackson complain about more mosquito bites, 'Cheeky buggers' is what I said when I realised that the money in my wallet was now gone. Always finding the silver lining to a grey wallet cloud, the money I lost was clearly worth the inconvenience of having to replace the cards and identification contained within. It was when Jackson couldn't find the cash that I'd given him the previous night that something twigged. I actually had all my money the previous night after getting my wallet back. The only explanation was that while we had been sleeping, someone had come into our room and brazenly stolen the money from us. It didn't seem possible, but when we counted back our steps, the bedroom door had been ajar when we'd woken up and there was no other explanation. I should have felt a little violated that this had happened, but instead I had a cool anger that someone was trying to disrupt the good direction that my travels in Sri Lanka had been taking.
Robbed!
Figure 2: It was like playing the French in football
This was worse for Jackson. While I had already fallen in love with this beautiful little island of friendly people, he was still making up his mind whether he liked it or not. The thief had taken some money for us, but also made a significant withdrawal in the happiness account of Jackson's bank. We politely got angry with the hotel staff knowing that it would be to no avail – they had honestly returned my wallet earlier, full of cash. They felt terrible, we weren't happy and I was beginning to think that in my past life I mustn't have been as perfect as I thought I was. In a situation like this, there is very little you can do apart from hire some bikes and go for a bike ride.
And that's what we did. Like every single bike ride I've ever been on, the frustration and anger ebbed away little by little with every pedal stroke. We rode through town, over the railway and in the direction of a large dome shape of bricks. We thought that if we could get away without having to buy the $25 entry fee, we'd feel a little bit better about the money we lost. Sure, Anuradhapura was one of the great sites of the ancient world, several thousand years old and beautiful beyond belief, but if we were able to scam our way in for free, we were sure as hell going to try.
We checked the map. Got a little lost and ended up at a road that led to a set of gates that led to a Bodhi tree. The religious ignoramus that I am, I didn't know that the bodhi tree is the species of tree that the Buddha gained enlightenment under. In a nutshell, Buddha was a guy who lived in Northern India, had a wife and family, left them and went on the road. He thought about life a bit, and came up with a philosophy of living. H worked on being happy and content – not a bad life really. After a while, like Newton getting hit in the head with an apple, contentment came to the Buddha in the form of enlightenment, enlightenment found chilling out, sitting under the shade of a Bodhi tree. He did this about two and half thousand years ago and in the time since then, he’s attracted a lot of followers and years after his death he became a religion of sorts. Contrary to what I thought of with Buddhism, he wasn't Chinese and apart from a throng of attention seeking Hollywood actors, the great holders of the faith seem to live in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka – that tiny country you might have head of where 70% of the population of the country are Buddhists.
Looking in the guide book, the Bodhi tree in Anuradhapura is the oldest historically authenticated tree in the world, weighing in with a hefty two thousand years of monk maintained history behind it. Unbeknownst to us at the time, it is considered the most sacred Bodhi tree in the world, itself born from a cutting of the original tree that our friend Buddha gained his enlightenment.
'Walk in like you own the place' was my bit of advice to Jackson when we made our way up to the gate. Immediately we looked a bit stupid when we were told to take our shoes off – clearly if we'd owned the place, we would have done so already. Damn. The good news was that we didn't need to pay to get into this one and we walked barefoot up to the tree to see what all the people had come to see.
Score! We were making money!
We walked up to the front gate to see a golden Buddha sitting as though he was sitting under a tree, his expression of half smiling giving off the impression of total contentment. Well, if I was covered in gold and spent eternity sitting under a tree without a care in the world, I imagine that I would look pretty darn contented too. We snapped some photos, looked up into the branches of the tree and did some people watching on the crowds that had come to visit this bit of wood.
We rounded the corner and found somewhere to sit in the shade. We sat alone in the coarse sand, Jackson several metres to my right. The wind rustled through the heart shaped leaves of the tree, the warmth of the sun drenched gardens caressed us, the scent of the flowers laid out as an offering danced around us in the midday heat, the smoke of the burning incense wafting to and fro around us. To my left, a man stood in a small alcove chanting with the Buddha in a loud and searching voice. To my right, a woman and her daughters sang prayers softly. Layers upon layers of voices could be heard murmuring around us.
It was a serene calm of people sitting and praying in what seemed total peace. Words cannot describe the sheer beauty of the hour we must have spent in the sand.
The Real World™ of work, travel, commercialisation, modernity and progress didn't seem to make sense under the tree. All the thoughts of money being stolen, getting in for free and sarcastic quips about a religion based around tree and a 'dude' were lost. The idea of Enlightenment and Contentment made sense in a beautiful and perfect moment. And while I'm not about to convert to a religion that I don't really believe in, I don't think I will forget that moment as long as I walk this earth.
FIgure3. The Bodhi Tree
I'm not sure about a lot of things, but if there's one thing that I know about religion, is that after a few hours of it, it makes me hungry.
As such, we joyfully drifted off on our bikes for some food, returning to our ruin walking mission at the site of a big dome of bricks. The Buddhists call this style of pile of bricks a dagoda. The one we came across is called the Jetavanarama Dagoba. Built in the 3rd century AD, it stands at 70 metres tall, it's tall steeple now broken, taking it down from its original 100 metres of height. At the time of its construction, it would have been the third tallest structure in the world, only overshadowed by two piles of sandstone blocks in Egypt. That gives an indication of how impressive the ruins of Anuradhapura are. The ruins surrounding this temple housed 3000 monks and the sheer scale of the place is unbelievable. Jackson and I walked up to it. We were the only people within earshot. We had this magnificently magical structure all to ourselves. Unbelievable.
Eventually some local tourists came to pray at the temple and we took this as our cue to move on to another site. Spying an equally impressive, more modern white and gold dagoba through the trees we trundled off. Again we walked through to the temple unimpeded by tickets, everything was falling into place, the path before us was being laid out. We walked the path with happy and light feet, the path bringing us to a massive procession of worshippers. All dressed in white, their deeply brown limbs carried a length of orange fabric to the grounds of the temple. 150 people carrying a length of orange cotton into a temple, we followed them. With dozens of people chanting, the heavy smoke of the incense clouded the sky they carried the gift of cotton into the grounds. Was it a funeral? Was it a ceremony? Was this put on for the dozen or so European tourists that were there?
We followed the orange train around the huge white arc of the dome. The river of orange cloth came to rest in the arms of some waiting monks, beautifully dressed in robes of the same colour. A ceremony started, prayers were sung, candles were lit in memory. Jackson got to talking to one Grandmother and her family. They were from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. 150 of them had got up at 3am that morning and made the long journey north. All funded by one quietly pious lady, they come up to Anuradhapura every year on January the 10th to show their respects and bring this length of cotton 365 metres long. We sat and watched as the resident monks and the men of the contingent jumped up on to a brick wall encircling the dagoda and wrapped the cotton around the circumfrence of the white dome. The orange of the cloth contrasting with the white of the dome and the brilliant blue of the afternoon sky.
She explained to us that this length of cotton would be used to make robes for Buddhist monks in the poorer temples of Sri Lanka, in villages where they couldn't afford to donate the cotton themselves. We sat with them, playing with the giggling granddaughters and their lotus flowers for a long time in the shade of the dagoba. Serenity.
We thanked them for their time, donned our shoes and left the temple, whiling away the last few hours of sunlight riding through ruins, looking at trees and grinning marvelously at the setting sun. Sri Lanka had shared its beauty with us.
We ended the day running barefoot through the streets in a heavy downpour of tropical rain. Life was beautiful.