The Hatton train station did not put us in a good mood. A man followed us from the train station trying to convince us that we should take a cab to Dalhousie (the base to climb Sri Pada from). His quoted price would have cost our daily budget (which is $40). The bus, which we did take, cost us a dollar, for the both of us. Our cab friend just happened to work for the guest house that we were to stay at, but that didn't make it anymore likely that we would take his cab. The bus was fine by us.
We sat on the bus, which was leaving in half an hour, and were harassed a bit more by tuk-tuk and cab drivers, before we made it clear to everyone that we would, in fact, take the bus. The bus got crowded amazingly quickly just before leaving. The crowd that piled on were all, so far as we could tell, pilgrims on their way to climb the holy mountain. So perhaps because it was a bus carrying pilgrims and pilgrimages are supposed to be hard, it was the worst bus ride we've taken on Sri Lankan roads. Besides the return trip, of course. The road was a narrow ridge straddling one and apparently our dear bus driver had taken the 2 hour posted time as a challenge that he was certain he could beat. Or he was under the impression that he was driving a sports car and not a bus. The bus swerved this way and that on very curve or corner. The bus would take blind turns at high speeds, with only a honk to warn anything coming the other way on the very narrow road. A few times we even encountered something coming the other way and the buses breaks were tested mercilessly. So were our knees as they were slammed into the seat in front of us. We held on for dear life (and on every right turn I would be smacked by our bags, which were sitting beside me). Some of the other bus patrons seemed to also object to this ride and they showed their displeasure by puking out the windows. Fortunately not anywhere close to us. Still the bus continued to be popular and more people would hop on at every opportunity and by the time we arrived at Dalhousie the bus was even more full than when we had left Hatton. Sorry, pilgrims. We arrived at what was apparently the guesthouse stop, but it seemed a bit too cruel to elbow our way through all of the people in aisle with our heavy bags. The main stop was only 500 meters away anyway. It would be a lot easier to walk to our guesthouse from there than having to push our way at the present.
Well, it was easier for everyone who wasn't Sri Lankan. Unfortunately, as we were the only people who weren't Sri Lankan (or didn't look Sri Lankan) on the bus and the touts and tuk-tuks simply could not grasp that we liked to walk and we already had a room. We called the guesthouse to get proper directions as we were bombarded by queries about where we were going and how much we wanted to pay for a room. The guesthouse said that they would send a tuk-tuk. Nancy said that we didn't want a tuk-tuk, just to walk. Given that it was only a short distance, one would expect that this was understandable. We got proper directions and then headed in the proper direction. We continued to be showered in offers of tuk-tuks, rooms and taxis. In fact, it seemed like every single guesthouse worker and owner had a room just for us and we were constantly being greeted by the phrase "Sir/madam, you want room?" By about the 15th time we answered (or ignored in my case) that question we ran into the tuk-tuk that our guesthouse had sent. In retrospect I guess a tuk-tuk would have been a good way to ignore all that we were walking past, but by this point I was so fed up I refused to take it, even if it was free. I glued a maniacal grin on my face and walked on (and long after the fact, I do feel a little guilty about how grumpy I was at this point). Nancy followed in a similar, but more polite state. We were greeted at the guesthouse by the same man who had tried to pick us up in the tuk-tuk. He showed us to our "hut" as the Lonely Planet described it. It was definitely that. Though, we have certainly stayed in ricketier and more run down places in Laos or Malaysia. It was actually a pretty good deal, all in all, since the $20 we paid for it got us dinner that night as well as breakfast the following morning. Anyway, it was certainly not a luxurious bed that I flopped down, curled up and wished we were back in Ella, on.
Nancy got up after a while and left me to my sulking while she went and ordered us some lunch. I got up a bit later, much improved, and joined her. She had just booked us into a place for the following day at Kandy, unfortunately, we realized shortly after that it was not the place we had intended to be booked into. Jayasuria had mentioned a place called The Green Villa, owned by his cousin and we had intended to stay there, but we had temporarily lost the note that Jayasuria had given us and Nancy called a place called The Green Woods, because we had remember Green in the name and that was the only one in The Lonely Planet with green in it. Nancy called the Green Villa booked us there for the night after our stay at the Green Woods not long after we realized the mistake (Nancy didn't want to cancel at The Green Woods because they sounded nice too). Both places did turn out quite nice though.
The food at White House (our guesthouse in Dalhousie) was excellent. Apparently all prepared by an older Tamil woman, who we saw wandering from time to time. We spent a while after our lunch sitting in the restaurant area and absorbing the ambience. At least, what we could of it. There was a loud group of French people, around our age (4 couples I think) who also inhabited the restaurant. They spent most of their time smoking and listening to French music. They seemed to be having fun though they were kind of annoying. It was kind of satisfying that we passed most of them wheezing their way up the mountain later that night.
The chatter of the restaurant went on well after the excellent dinner of (but of course) rice and curry that was provided. We went to our room, that turned out to have pretty paper thin walls around 7:30 and attempted to get some sleep. We planned to get up at 1:30 Am to start climbing the mountain. With the wildly varying time frames we were given, 1 and a half hours to 6 hours, we thought that perhaps 4 hours would be a good happy medium. We had just about fallen to sleep, probably about 8:30, when, in the room next to us, someone went on Skype. As I said, the walls were paper thin. In any event, if we had known Spanish we could have eavesdropped on the whole hour long conversation. We did not go to sleep until after our neighbour had shut up.
Altogether, we were running on very little sleep when we got up at 1:30 to climb up the mountain. Its not like we had really expected to sleep that much anyway. We dragged ourselves out of bed and packed our water and some warmer clothes (and valuables, including our computer, since we were not very convinced that the tiny pad lock on our door would offer much protection from a thief in the night), took out our flashlight and stepped outside.
Nancy was not feeling well at the outset, in fact she was feeling lousy. We had planned poorly around certain biological functions and it probably would have been better to wait. But Nancy did not want to stay in Dalhousie any longer than absolutely necessary so she decided that she could tough it out. I shared her opinion of Dalhousie, but I spent the first half of our climb rather worried about her. She was certain she would be fine though, even if she was a little discomforted.
Dalhousie at night was eerily silent, though there were a few empty shops open with their lights on, hoping to sell to early and ill prepared pilgrims. We made our way to the entrance and were barked at by a pack of dogs which we had to scare away from the entrance. There were others on their way up, but there were also some on their way back down already. The descenders seemed to be largely (actually only) Tamil. This seemed a little interesting but we have yet to find out why so many Tamils would make the ascent and not be there for the dawn. They mostly seemed exhausted, though some of the younger (boys mostly) folk were rather chatty.
We took a turn and found ourselves in a more well lit area with a couple of Buddhist monks waiting for us. They gave us a prayer protection thing that was tied around our wrists and we gave them a small donation in return. And we carried on up the steps. Sri Pada has an immense amount of steps, we were quoted various numbers from 5 to 22000. I'm not sure that anyone has actually counted though. Anyway there are a lot of them. All the way up these steps, about every 20, are big fluorescent lights on high light posts. They make pools of light all the way up the mountain.
We were often passed by eager foreigners only to pass them panting later on. One thing that our weary brains noticed as we walked was the amount of garbage that was strewn about beside, and sometimes on, the steps. Plastic wrappers and cups, styrofoam and other detritus were our constant companions all the way up. Apparently people found it quite easy to ignore the many readily available garbage cans all the way up (which were largely empty), as well as the signs that said "please keep this sacred place clean".
After about 30 minutes of climbing we were both drenched in sweat and a little concerned about how much water it was that we would need. We appeared to be rapidly running out. After an hour, Nancy was less sure about her ability to make it the whole way to the top. She was also muttering darkly about the lack of any bathrooms in evidence. There were also some thoughts about how it was obviously men who designed the whole thing. She had to stop often to rest and just as we were thinking that maybe we should give it a miss and return at a latter date, a bathroom appeared. It was even free, which kind of surprised us, since there were so many shops and businesses along the stairway. After her trip to the bathroom Nancy began to feel better. After another hour of climbing, she was even certain that we would make it to the top.
Before we got there though, we passed several more businesses and shops selling, among other things, tea, snacks, water, massages and religion. These last were the most irritating since they were mostly just blaring recordings of chants, prayers, mantras and hymns at an unreasonably high decibel level. From all four of the major religions that have reason to believe that the peak was sacred and, no doubt, all of their spawned spin offs. Buddhism, in it myriad forms, was the most represented, of course. And while I generally like the sound of monks chanting or mantraing, it losses a lot of its appeal when its blasted at you pretty much every 10 minutes. Mass media and such seemed to us at the time to be the worst (or at least most irritating) thing to happen to religion. More of this was in evidence on the way down.
Another irritating factor was some of those on their way down. Most were too tired to really take notice, but the young men amongst them would yell "encouragement", that is to say mock. We were not very amused by these young hooligans, who seemed to have missed entirely the point of their pilgrimage. I found myself muttering darkly about how I couldn't wait until they turned the mountain into a space elevator.
Of course, as I've just reread The Fountains of Paradise, I know that they can't since the mountain in the book, Sri Kanda, was a good 3 KM higher than Sri Pada. So I'm glad we we're climbing that. Though in the story Morgan takes a gondola to the top in less than an hour, I'm sure we couldn't have afforded that. Especially since the climb was free.
After about 2 more hours of walking though, we were going along at a good clip, getting used to the stress on our legs and all the other irritants. Every now and then we would catch a glimpse of the summit lights and they looked very far away. Sometimes we momentarily would mistake the summit for a couple of stars. And Nancy was never fooled when I suggested that it looked close, like we were almost there. But suddenly we really were almost there.
The stairs became narrower and it was single file, one side up, the other side down. And it was also a traffic jam. We found ourselves behind a group of true pilgrims who were slowly making their way to the top. I say they were true pilgrims because they were all quite a bit older than us and they were also chanting. What it sounded like was "Why? Why? Why?" followed by "Die! Die! Die". We rather hoped they were speaking Sinhala and not English. As we heard mention of the Buddha from time to time we assumed that this was the case. Since they were moving so slow we dashed past the chanters when there was a lull in the down traffic. And then we were at the summit. It had taken us just under 4 hours.
On the summit we found more garbage, teaming masses of people huddled around each other, largely sleeping, a few dour faced monks and, of course, tons of tourists with cameras waiting to catch the first rays of the sun in their lenses. There was a long line up to see the foot print of the Buddha/Shiva/Adam/St. Thomas (not Aquinas, but the one who was Jesus' brother, either figuratively or literally depending on who you ask), which was in a small hut. This we skipped. We did not actually go into any of the structures and we also skipped the ringing of the bell. The bell was constantly being wrung by the pilgrims (one ring per ascent, so if you've ascended 13 times, you ring 13 times). That had a big line of course. The largest line was to the bathroom though. We sat where no one seemed to be sitting, put something a bit warmer on our rapidly cooling bodies and ate some ginger cookies that we had brought. We had sat near what appeared to be a drainage pipe and some sand bags but as we ate we noticed a foul smell coming from that direction. Perhaps they were actually garbage bags and not sand bags. Anyway when we saw the large rat scurrying among them we stood up and leaned against the railing to look out over the lightening world. A blue band had appeared in the distance and we knew that dawn was approaching. But we did not want to stay on the summit any longer. We had had our fill of it and did not need any more.
We started descending, but stopped in a dark patch between two lamps and looked up transfixed by the star field above us, that was ever so slightly starting to fade. We continued down a bit further and then stopped to watch the sun rising from behind another mountain and into a cloud bank. We had missed, but didn't really care so much, the sun rising and appearing to bow to the mountain, as its shadow stretched to the horizon. But we were also away from the buzzing crowds that were on the top. We were in silence where we watched and not stunned by hundreds of flash bulbs going off in an attempt to capture the magical moment. We had our own moments, alone on a few steps, where time seemed to stop as we watched the pillars of light shining up from behind the cloud bank, crowning it in an orange gold, tiger striped with shadow. Shining there as though the gates of paradise were standing open for a few brief moments, so all could look upon a world floating on light. In those moments we were struck by the beauty and power of the natural wonder we were witnessing. We were both reminded of the haunting opening lines of Ursula K LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, which celebrates the power of the world's cycles:
Only in silence the word,
Only in darkness light
Only in dying life,
Bright the hawk's flight,
On the empty sky.
The sky seemed so full and so empty with what we saw before us.
It ended though and after a while of watching the dawn and mist rolling in through the a pass between Sri Pada and yet another mountain, we had to move on in order to be ahead of the traffic coming down. But we found ourselves elated all the long way down. Even though we hadn't really seen what we had come to see, we had seen something wonderful.
Only few things marred our descent after that and they did not take (much) away from our elation. One was, now that the lights were no longer needed, the loud speakers that were on the light poles began blaring. Blaring what I can only assume was the national religious radio. This started not long after we began walking again and it was still blaring when reached Dalhousie. It was our constant companion all the way down, with advertisements and religious chants and possibly the news. As it was all in Sinhala we really had no idea.
Also, now that the sun had rose, most of the shops that had been closed on our ascent were now open. We ignored calls of massage, tea and blessings. One man even offered us good luck as we hurried by. There were also a few beggars, must of which had a disability of some sort. Largely they were missing legs, or unable to walk in some way. In a way we were pretty impressed with their feat of getting so far up the mountain on crutches. We were feeling pretty charitable and we did have a bit of extra money, so we gave what we could.
An impressive feat was also the people carrying up the loads of food, propane, drinks and other things to all the shops. We still didn't buy anything from the shops, but we were impressed. Despite the constant blaring and touting, we were in a pretty good mood when we returned to the White House. Not even clear evidence of rodent activity in our room (we shouldn't have left the banana there anyway) dampened our spirits. We had the best showers we are ever likely to have and the complimentary breakfast was pretty good too. But we still did not want to stay another night, so we packed our things and caught the next bus to Hatton.
It was as bad a bus ride as the one there, but with our spirits buoyed by our climb we did not mind so much. Nor did we mind the long wait for the train to Kandy. And we quite enjoyed the train ride itself. We quite liked the Green Woods Guesthouse where we finally caught up on our sleep too. Its too bad that Kandy itself was not so enjoyable.
