How to start about my most favourite country On the road?

 

Amazing people, perfect food, interesting religion and beautiful landscape. That can be my observation from the country of the tea and elephants. Actually I saw few elephants and a lot of tea plantation, but there is one thing I didn’t expect: beautiful trees. The most beautiful trees I’ve ever seen in my life. Something like this:

 

Red dusty road, huge green trees, one big dry water canal, few cows and their personal fly catchers plamenak. That’s my image of the African bush. First time when I arrived to the Gewalseeay, small village in the north-west of the Sri Lanka, picture of the African bush became reality. Almost every second day I went with Heenkenda on the motorbike through this scenery to teach kids in the near village.

 

“The life sucks”

For me as a kid born in the central Europe is Sri Lanka kind of paradise. Paradise from the point of view of the kindness, hospitality and smile of the local people. Example: on the street, or in the train you meet a person. She or he smiles at you and with really bad English start conversation. After two minutes you have invitation for the lunch or dinner to their house. You came into really simple “building” where are sometimes also chairs. Because of you as a guest plus foreigner they prepared the best for you. And as the desert they picked up fresh fruit from their garden (like papaya, mango, banana). That people are mostly poor from our western point of view. Sometimes farmers have to take a loan to start planting the rice. After three months of the planting they harvest. In that moment they realize that they even don’t have money to pay back. What is the point? They are still smilling, making jokes and trying to enjoy their life. I have never heard them to say “The life sucks”.

Everything is not positive, same as in the life. Civil ear and conflict which finished seven years ago between Sinhalese and Tamils is still in the air. There are a lot of unsolved problems.

In the capital Colombo you can find a lot of air pollution caused by increasing number of the cars. Also there is no common strategy how to deal with the rubbish on the island. Because of this plastics and other inorganic stuff is burned as same as in the rest of South Asia region.

Mainly in Colombo you can see such a big differences between really rich and really poor people. I start to understand, that these are global and same problems for all of this region…

 

Next time I start to write about my Indian project: “Through India by the train”.