Most of the times I’ve arrived at a new place there’s been an adjustment period. Perhaps I felt that stronger in Sri Lanka than other countries. It was very different to Central Asia, obviously, and I very much felt like I was starting a new phase, and the last phase, of travelling.
Adjustment period is usually code for ‘not having a super good time’. Quite soon after arriving I was efficiently ripped off by a tuk tuk driver, which pissed me off for a full 48 hours, and I also found out it was the off season on Sri Lanka’s South coast. The mosquitoes were savage and relentless.
The hostels I stayed in for the first 3 days were almost empty. I stayed in one hostel for two nights outside of Galle. The only foreigner there was a British guy who’d been living in this small town for 6 months. He was a lost soul, flotsam and jetsam from Liverpool Street’s financial offices, running from some bad habits. He had run from these habits into the arms of the local hostel owners who drank here. We had a few bottles of whisky together. The owner told me to move on, there was nothing happening around here. I went to bed when they were escalating to things I had assumed were punishable by death in Sri Lanka. The next evening I avoided them, as an even more sinister group of characters were sat round the table. In the day, I looked around Galle. It’s a colonial fort town that’s now evolved to taking money from Europeans.
There were some things I really liked as well though. I made a list in the first few days:
– The bats are huge
– People smile here
– The food is great, coffee too. I’ve missed gentrification style coffee shops
– I loved getting the train and standing in the open doors, watching the sea go past
– The brightly coloured buses speeding down the streets are fun
Weligama
I got to Weligama, where I’d be doing my surf camp, a day early. I stayed in a hostel that finally had 3(!) blokes in, so we went out to a party. On the way the taxi driver ran over a dog. Only an exceptionally well chosen song on the aux (Temperature by Sean Paul) brought back the mood. The next morning I was the perfect level of hungover to be pleasantly introspective, reading No Country For Old Men in a cafe. I did think a bit about the dog going under the car.
Surfing
It was great. Exhausting, and really difficult. By the end I wasn’t as intimidated by the waves rising up towards me, becoming more relaxed as I stood up on my board. I was still falling off most of the time, but when you get a wave and rush across the beach it feels amazing. I had fun. The hostel was fun, with some cool people, still not very busy as it was off season but a small family for a week. Nobody ever wore shoes or t-shirts.
I don’t really have any photos so far. I’ve either been in the water or lounging around. I’m waiting to meet Adil now, and we’ll follow his itinerary across the rest of the island.
Infinity, Oroboros, Permanence and Impermanence, Eternity and a Lifetime
Why are the characters in no country for old men so alluring? They’re hard men (and almost all men, I think there is only one female character that speaks), they’re hardened on the land, and by the things they’ve had to do survive. There is more about them than those who have had it easier. Their experience of the world has cracked them in some way and had to rebuild themselves.
They are of course fictional, but they are based on something people can relate to, even if we haven’t served in ‘Nam or fought the cartels.
When the mirror in your soul cracks slightly, after something has turned your reality upside down or you’ve brushed up close against your mortality, something new seeps through those cracks, more substance, and you start to see the depths beneath. For some people this substance is too much and gives them an excuse to do bad things, for others it makes them better. I’m too young to say if everyone experiences this, but surely most do at some point.
The substance that comes through the cracks is from the infinite depths of your subconscious, is the stuff of infinity. There is the infinite that is within us, and there is the infinity out endlessly in the stars, and they are connected, one and the same. By its nature it is all round us, and only through our consciousness, held in our skull and brains and organs, does it exist. Our mortal bodies are a separation from the cosmos, enclosure within limits, to enable existence becoming conscious of itself, a completion of the loop. Our mortal body means we obsess and worry about infinitesimal things because we have been given a finite body, set within the infinite. Our mortal body is the link between the two, the point of intersection between the infinite within and without, the jaws of the snake as it begins to devour its own tail, the hinge of the Oroboros, small but the most important. Once our mortal body is spent the infinite within us flows back into the infinite outside.
I think these cracks are the most authentic way to begin to pull back the doors of perception and get closer to the infinite even if you’ll never be reunited in your lifetime. I’m not sure trekking in Tajikistan, manufacturing this hardship, really helps come to terms with our separation from the infinite as you’re reaching to feel something you’ve only just touched the fringes of and want to chase down further, but you can’t, because it’s false. It has to come to you.
But yeah, it’s crazy our consciousness sits inside a body that grows and ages and decays, and is something we have no control over, struggle to even use. It’s a bag of tools like hands and fingers held together by muscles and tendons and I can’t even use my left hand for anything because it’s too difficult, I never learned how. The rest of our physical body, the nerves and chemicals and hormones that make our personality and thoughts, we can just barely control or understand that too. It’s weird we’re a vessel containing an infinitely deep subconscious, continuously generating new thoughts and reality, in such fragile shells.
Planet Caravan 
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