(blog post pre-coffee. excuse typos and complete randomness)
Sri Lanka has two main populations - the sinhalese, who are generally buddhist, and the tamils, who are generally hindu (there's also a small muslim population and an even smaller christian population). The sinhalese are the island's original inhabitants and the tamils walked over from Tamil Nadu (India) about 2000 years ago. There's also the burghers - europeans who arrived after the 16th century - and indian tamils who arrived in the 19th century to work on the tea plantations. The tamils (the sri lankan ones, not the indian ones) are the majority in the north and eastern parts of the country and the sinhalese are the majority in the central, south, and west of the country. The 30 year civil war was over the control of the northern part of the island, which is where we worked and where we want to go. We have had to get a pass to go north, and yesterday afternoon we received it. When we worked here in 2005 we had to get passes from both sides; now that the war is over, we only need one pass.
Our plan for the month, has been to spend half the time in the south (on vacation) and the other half in the north (visiting friends and seeing the town we used to work in). Gene also has to work half the time and we had doubted that he'd be able to do that in the north - last time we were there, we had 4 hours of power a day and satellite phones that could surf the web at the raging speed of 4800 bit/s. So we'd planned a week in the south, a week in the north, another week in the south and our last week in the north.
We've spent our first week here in Colombo, the capital, and Unawatuna, a beach town. We have friends in Colombo - in 2008, Gene worked on the Sichuan earthquake with a woman who now heads the office in Colombo and so we've been staying with her and her partner in a large very relaxing house in a neighborhood with relaxing rooftop bars and good coffee shops. We've used our time here to get the pass for the north and to allow gene to work. We also went to the beach for a few days; we'd planned to head to Tangalla - a beach town with a good reputation that we hadn't been to before. To get to Tangalla, you take the train to Matara and ride a tuk-tuk (motorized rickshaw) for the last 15 km, but when we bought a train ticket we discovered that the train wasn't going to Matara that day - the furthest we could get was Galle, the old Dutch fort town. Two km outside of Galle is a beach town and so we decided to at least stop there for lunch on our way to Tangalla. The guidebook pointed to "the best place in Unawatuna for lunch" so we went, and discovered that our lunch place was the hotel we had stayed in on our way out of the country in 2005 - we'd taken a few days of vacation at the end and spent it on the beach. So we decided to stay there. It rained a bit so I took a Sri Lankan cooking class and realized that my kitchen is clearly missing a coconut shredder.
We returned to Colombo and got our passes. All online information seemed to indicate that there was no way that we'd get one -we could apply, but even if we were tamil, chances were slim. But our friend who applied for them for us had said that there would be no problem, and there wasn't a problem except that they're only valid for two weeks.
But the north has changed. We get phone calls from our friends on their cell phones. There's electricity up there. We've got a 3G modem with us and so we'll go up and see if gene can actually work from there. We'd planned to spend Christmas up there - maybe we'll see if we can get another pass.
