Baby, You Can Drive My Car.

On Wednesday, I went to get my Sri Lankan drivers’ license. Here, the place you get your license is not called the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s called the Department of Motor Transportation. When we pulled in the gates, I was pretty sure it was going to be different. There was a Buddhist shrine front and center between the buildings. That alone told me this wasn’t going to be a typical DMV (or DMT) experience.

Actually, it turns out, with the exception of the ability to be able to give an offering to Buddha before the big driving test, it was pretty much the same as a Stateside DMV. You walk in, wait in line to get a number to wait in more lines. Once you reach the front of said line, a bored bureaucrat watching the clock and counting the minutes until his or her next break does a little something and sends you to the next line. Luckily for us, since we’re here in an official capacity, we have a little help with the process. Still, in the end, it comes down to paying your fee and sitting in a cubicle with a public servant who has perfected her disaffected sigh. She takes your fingerprint with a scanner and takes the most unflattering picture of you possible, using a webcam, and you’re done. Just like back home.

So, now I’m legal to drive…well, mostly. That is another small difference. Here, you don’t get your license on the spot. I would have had it Friday, but it’s another holiday around here, as usual, so perhaps Tuesday.

Being mostly legal, I thought I should finally try my hand at driving this weekend. I drove to Church this morning. This was my first time ever driving in a vehicle with right side steering and driving on the left side of the road. Did I mention the Terios is also a manual transmission? I only almost got run over by one bus (luckily, not a red bus), turned on the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal four or five times, burst into tears once, and made us five minutes late for Church. I’m going to go ahead and call that a success, mmmmmkay?

The Rest of the Road Trip

I’m sure you can barely remember my two most recent blog posts, since they weren’t that recent anymore. Sorry about that. We went on another trip (which I’m sure I’ll blog about at some point since it involved sea turtle hatchlings and was awesome). Anyway, to recap, we survived getting lost taking the scenic route and a trip to the elephant orphanage.

Rather than drag this trip out into thirty seven and a half more blog posts, I’m going to hit the highlights for you today. Someone also told me I’m not getting paid by the word, which probably means I should be a bit more brief. Then again, I’m not getting paid at all, so I guess it doesn’t really matter, unless any one of you Fellow Adventurers wants to send me a check. I promise not to spend it all on beer, but only because beer is cheap here.

Getting back to business, I’ll summarize some things. Our hotel in Kandy was awesome. It was back off the main road toward the mountain a bit and it was very much a part of the surroundings, almost like a hotel had grown out of the mountain.
We ventured out our first morning there to see Kandy’s main tourist attraction and the most important Buddhist holy site in all of Sri Lanka, The Temple of the Tooth. The temple holds the tooth of Buddha. The belief is that after the Buddha’s funeral pyre, some guy went and snatched a tooth, and, to make a long story short, during the 300’s AD, the tooth was brought to Sri Lanka for safekeeping. Interestingly, it was believed that whoever possessed the tooth was the rightful ruler of the country. True to belief, Kandy was the last home of the Sri Lankan kings. The temple itself was very interesting as well as super crowded. It happened to be a time when the reliquary holding the tooth was going to be displayed. Apparently they never display the actual tooth. Being there on a day you can see the reliquary and visiting the temple in general is supposed to give you good karma. After fighting the crowds in the main temple I was hoping that getting our karma recharged was worth the hassle. The monks also bathe the tooth once a week on Wednesday in some special water and then hand the water out to worshippers to take home because it is believed to have powerful curative properties. I wish I’d known that before our visit. I could not figure out why people were carrying what looked like dirty water home in bottles. Everyone in the temple also wanted to touch our kids, which The Little Explorers do not find endearing in the least.

There were some other interesting things about being around the Temple of the Tooth, like the crazy monkeys living in the area around the central pond. They have little fear of humans and beg for snacks and such. We even got to see a monkey fight. Big entertainment. Less entertaining and more frightening were the chicken ducks. These things were freaky. I swear, it was like a Frankenstein combination of a chicken and a duck. I’m not generally one to get freaked out about animals, but these things gave me the heeby jeebies. They were so frightening and weird I took some pictures to share with you. When I got home, I asked my brother-in-law, who is a bird watcher, about these freaks of nature. He told me they are Muscovy ducks, and are really neither ducks or chickens. Freaks of nature, indeed.


Tell me that's not horrifying.


Shudder. Freaky deaky.

After our time in Kandy, we headed to Nuwara Eliya, which is in the mountains of Sri Lanka and in the heart of tea country. For some reason we can’t figure out, it’s actually pronounced Nurellia, as if it’s all one word. Try to pronounce it as two words and native Sri Lankans will look at you like you have two heads and speak Pig Latin. Hey, I’m not the one who named it a name that is clearly two separate words. That’s all you, Sri Lankans. While there, we visited a tea plantation, which, in the interest of proving that the workers are no longer actually slaves, is now more politically correctly called a tea estate. I’m sure that doesn’t make much difference to the practically indentured servants who live and work there, but it might make us westerners feel a little less guilty about drinking tea, which I guess is the point. Human rights aside, it was actually very interesting. Did you know black tea and green tea are actually the same thing, only the black tea leaves are left to ferment for three days? You do now. Amelia Earhart was the most captivated with the process and was excited to get home and tell her Grandma, who likes to drink tea, all about the tea production process.

In Nuwara Eliya, every road seemed to lead us by the same really beautiful park. Each time we passed it, The Little Explorers would exclaim, “A not-broken playground! Can we go play at it Mama? Daddy, look! Can we please go to the not-broken playground?!” I guess that gives you an idea of what the playground was like, and what most of the playgrounds we find here in Sri Lanka are like in comparison. Finally, on our way out of town, we obliged the kids and stopped at the park. We immediately understood why this playground wasn’t broken. There was an admission charge to go into the park and garden. We once again confused the heck out of some Sri Lankans by asking for the resident admission fee, got that straightened out, and headed inside. We strolled leisurely through the park on the way to the playground. Upon reaching the playground, all three Little Explorers took off running gleefully and began playing on all the equipment, most of which was, indeed, not broken. Of course, all that fun came to a screeching halt when Gertrude Bell announced, “I have to poop, NOW.” (You didn’t think we could go an entire blog post without talking about poop, did you?!) The International Man of Intrigue agreed to take Gertrude Bell on a quest for a restroom, since we figured there was a high likelihood of there being a potty in a place that had an entrance fee. About two seconds after they turned to walk away, Arthur Dent walked headlong into the side of a metal slide, fell, and started screaming. I sprinted the five feet to him and just as I was scooping him up, heard Amelia Earhart let out a shriek of terror. I whipped around just in time to see her trying to scramble out of some sort of drainage ditch. I screamed and tried to run over with a still hysterical Arthur Dent in my arms. Luckily, since The International Man of Intrigue had only gotten two steps in the search for the restrooms, he was by Amelia Earhart’s side before I could take more than a half step. This is how we roll, Fellow Adventurers. If one thing crazy happens, several more must happen in quick succession. It’s just our life. Lucky for me, The International Man of Intrigue is trained in acting quickly in emergencies and wasted no time in assessing the damage to Amelia Earhart. Our big fears were broken bones and snake bites, so when she came up a bit dirty and scraped up, missing her glasses, we took a deep breath of relief. Not so, Amelia Earhart, who kept screaming hysterically, especially once she realized her glasses were gone. The International Man of Intrigue bravely went over the side of the foot bridge (really just a dug-in plank) in the search for the glasses. He came up with them, and while they weren’t completely smashed, it was painfully obvious Amelia Earhart had stepped on them in her scramble for safety.

Can you blame us at this point for cutting our losses and deciding to head home? We did stop back at the hotel we had already checked out of and begged use of their facilities one last time. Once we had Amelia Earhart cleaned up and Gertrude Bell feeling relieved, we hit the road for Colombo.

I’m going to admit, I wasn’t sure of the drive home at first. We were on a one lane road in the mountains. I mean one lane, not as in one lane in either direction, but one lane. I got my passenger brake foot ready and warmed up my vocal chords for lots of screams of, “Red bus!” Fortunately, while there were a couple of moments I slammed on my imaginary brake, for the most part, it was a very scenic drive, complete with waterfalls and only a few moments of panic. Of course, the closer we got to Colombo, the crazier the traffic became. Apparently we didn’t get the memo that it was “No Brake Light Friday”. It definitely kept us on our toes, and probably explains the first ever car accident we’ve seen in our time here. We were coming up on a small village when traffic inexplicably stopped. In Sri Lanka, this, of course, means that everyone jockeyed for position and drove on the shoulder until cars were jammed in three wide on our side of the road (with a few cars actually being partially or mostly on the wrong side of the road). We were wedged in behind a van that claimed to be a Nissan Homy. We laughed at the name until a group of about 9 guys piled out of the car, all in matching black slacks and each wearing a different color of pastel button down shirt. Then we absolutely roared with laughter. A Homy van full of homies?! You have got to be kidding me! As they came back to the car, they made motions indicating that there was an accident ahead. We figured that meant we’d be sitting for hours. Nope. Cars started to go around the accident and eventually we were close enough to see a bunch of men prying the door open and pulling some guy out of a van. By the time we got up to the scene, there was no scene. Someone else pulled the car off the road and that was that. No police, no ambulance, nothing. Weird, right?

Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful trip home, except for that time we passed a mobile fish cupcake truck three wide on a two lane bridge. Gotta keep it interesting, after all.

Our first Road Trip

We just got back from our first Sri Lankan road trip, or as we call it in the Intrigue family, ADVENTURE! As anyone who has ever attempted a road trip with three small children knows, this was no small undertaking. Add on the fact that we are currently leasing a Daihatsu Terios and packing the car becomes an adventure in itself. A Terios may sound like a breakfast cereal, but it is a small SUV that seats five. On a regular day, Amelia Earhart’s booster doesn’t fit in the back and she has to settle for a lap belt-don’t judge unless you’ve lived in Sri Lanka, Judgy McJudgerton. I mean it. For one thing, I don’t think we’ve ever gotten out of third gear, for another, there are no carseat laws here, or even helmet laws that seem to be enforced, as evidenced by seeing a parent and three kids riding a motorcycle, a common sight around here. Also, don’t think it doesn’t bother me, but cars here are ungodly expensive, even used, and we just don’t have several TENS of thousands of dollars in cash waiting to be thrown away on a not so gently used 1982 minivan. So, you can sympathize or you can judge, but if you’re judging, kindly keep it to yourself.

Anyway, we piled everything in the car, tightly packing so much stuff around the Little Adventurers that they wouldn’t be able to move, much less poke each other, for at least the first 20 minutes. The International Man of Intrigue dumped a log book, the Lonely Planet guide, a handful of maps, and his old (non-talking, non-direction giving) Garmin in my lap and proclaimed me Chief Navigator. I wondered if this was the best idea, considering I had just tried to get in the wrong side of the vehicle. Darn right side steering wheel and left side driving!

It seemed like we had barely watched the gates shut behind us and turned off of our street when we were lost taking a detour. We were driving through parts of Colombo I’m not sure any westerners had ever ventured near. I’m pretty sure as people saw us they were thinking, “White people?!? There goes the neighborhood!” The problem with being lost taking a detour through Colombo was that driving here is less than boring. While there is a method to the madness, at first glance, it can seem like there are no driving laws at all. Two lanes painted on the road can mean three driving lanes. Drivers will drive on the wrong side of the street if it will get them around a car that is driving slower than they are, then come to a dead stop in front of that car to make a right turn. The powers that be will change the direction of a one way street, or make a two way into a one way seemingly on a whim. In short, it’s crazy.

The major problem with being lost taking a detour before we even got out of Colombo was that traffic got crazy. The International Man of Intrigue had a death grip on the steering wheel and I was wearing out my imaginary passenger break. I kept screaming things like, “BUS!” and “There’s a guy walking with his scissors point up!” Cars zipped around us with abandon. Motorcyclists in their standard black windbreakers we dubbed Lankans Only Jackets wove in and out of traffic. We tried to figure out where we were in a town where maps are sketchy and roads change names whenever they feel like it. We dodged busses. Busses in Sri Lanka are terrifying. Did anyone have the game Simpsons Road Rage for Playstation 2? Those busses were modeled after Sri Lankan ones, I’m sure. If you didn’t have the game, let’s just say all busses are homicidal and driven by a not entirely sober person. Red busses are the worst. Soon any form of danger had me screaming “RED BUS!” The absolute worst moment came when we found ourselves with a bus on either side of us and they were both jockeying for the position where our car happened to be located. I’m pretty sure the laws of physics state that one bus can’t occupy the space occupied by a Terios, let alone TWO FREAKING BUSSES! One bus was two inches from our right bumper and closing in. The other was two inches from our left and closing in. The International Man of Intrigue swore. I swore. I screamed. He honked. The Little Adventurers kept poking each other in the back seat, oblivious. By some miracle I in no small part contribute to the two St. Benedict Medals in the car and our guardian angels, the busses returned to their own lanes and we came out alive. I was shaking and almost started crying when it happened: an improper emotional response. Apparently I was so completely stressed that some wire crossed in my brain and instead of crying, I started laughing hysterically. I laughed and laughed. The International Man of Intrigue looked worried but he was too busy driving to do anything about it. This was around the point we figured out where we were, but things were still crazy. I screamed “That van is going to t-bone us!” as a van decided his red light was optional. The International Man of Intrigue asked, “Tebow?” as he obligingly slammed on the horn and accelerator simultaneously. I thanked him and said if we got out alive, we should all consider Tebowing for a while.

Now that we were found, we high-tailed it out of the city at a brisk 40 km per hour. That translates to about 25 miles per hour for you non-metric speaking people. Luckily, our destination was a mere 60 km away. For some reason, the laws of motion do not apply to Sri Lankan “highways”, so that meant we were about a half a day’s drive away. This gave us plenty of time to take stock of our driving injuries thus far. Turns out the International Man of Intrigue had developed a blister from gripping the wheel too hard and my leg muscles were twitching from trying to shove my feet through the floorboard. Other than that, we were fine, so we enjoyed looking around at the surroundings. A KIK Cola billboard proclaimed, “Lankan to the Last Drop” and I proclaimed, “So is her headband and matching plastic earrings.” We saw a business that advertised itself to be “Volunteer Caterers.” What the heck does that mean? They cater for free? They only cater for volunteers? They are from Tennessee? We also got to stop to take the Little Explorers potty on a fairly regular basis. Lucky for us, you can’t just pop in somewhere and use their facilities. For one thing, there’s a good chance they don’t HAVE facilities, or the ones they have aren’t “western style”. For another, they just don’t let you do that here. Luckily, we have the coolest travel potty ever made. If you have small children, you need it. Look here. As we drove, we also realized that each town seemed to specialize in selling something: ceramic tiles in one, clay pots in another, inflatable kids’ toys in another, and one seeming to specialize in Lankans Only Jackets. So that’s where they come from…

Finally, after hours of driving, we turned off of the main road toward the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. That’s when I saw the most shocking thing I’d seen all day. Two women in saris were walking along the roadside. They held leashes in their hands. The leashes were attached to PORCUPINES. I SWEAR TO YOU, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. These women were walking porcupines on a leash. Large porcupines. I still can’t get over it. And with that, I’m going to end this chapter of our trip. Stay tuned for the continuing adventures of the Intrigue family as we do exciting things like eat lunch and visit orphaned elephants.