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sensitive to the smell of soap
Monday, July 7 2025
location: southeastmost cabin, The Other Corner, Habarana, Sri Lanka
There was another early-morning nature walk along the edge of the reservoir this morning, and I figured if I didn't go, who would? The answer to that question arrived a few minutes after I made it to the dining hall: Gretchen's father and Nan, one of the single ladies who looks to be in her 60s. Unfortunately, there was even less to see than we'd seen yesterday, though Jiva and one of the nature guides tried their damnedest to find us a crocodile. The farm dog was a little late in showing up, but when he did, he was as enthusiastic as ever. We ended our walk in The Other Corner's garden, where I saw my first sunbird, an iridescent blue bird that looks and acts like a hummingbird but doesn't hover as much and flaps its wings much more slowly. There was also a bright orange garden lizard that quickly changed his color to a drab grey-brown once we showed up.
After another reasonably good breakfast, we waited in the dining hall for Zach and his guys to get our luggage loaded and all that. Danielle, one of the nice Australians from Cambodia, was showing us an app on her phone that allowed her to quickly obtain and pay for eSims for her phone when traveling in various countries. It seemed like a great solution for our connectivity problems (we'd been depending on WiFi at the various lodges, but that didn't work when we were traveling in the bus). So I installed the app only to learn that my four year old phone doesn't know about the concept of eSims. Gretchen then installed it, but I think her Cricket phone plan somehow got in the way. This is the price of using a budget cellular provider! (Danielle uses an iPhone of course.)
The bus ride today was to the beach town of Trincomalee on the northeast shore of Sri Lanka. On the ride, I noticed I'd developed an aggravating little cough that kept producing tiny divots of phlegm. I wondered if perhaps it was caused by all the dust I'd inhaled yesterday in Kaudulla National Park, but that wouldn't produce such a persistent cough. I feared maybe I was coming down with a respiratory disease, perhaps because I'd inhaled some exotic viral particles exhaled by one of the tourists at Sigiriya.
We arrived at our destination, the Amanta Beach Resort, in the early afternoon, and were led into a semi-outdoor lobby area where Anne, a white woman (a rare sight in Sri Lanka) introduced us to the place where we'd be staying for the next several days. She was white because she was from France, though her husband was a Sri Lankan chef (with, it turned out, an obsession with Japan). She built the resort on an empty plot after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, when much of the Sri Lankan coast was still largely undeveloped (due to that war). I was wondering what had happened here during the tsunami of 2004, but when I brought it up with Anne, she pointed out that that was way back during the civil war when the beach was undeveloped and so nobody really knows.
After a brief visit to the beach (where I noticed a lot of microplastics mixed into the sand; supposedly cargo ships flagrantly dump their trash into the shipping lanes offshore), we went to lunch. Zach asked if anyone wanted various drinks, including beer, and I was the only one who ordered a beer. (But then it turned out the Zach's young social media director from India also ordered a beer.) Lunch was a multi-course meal served in the least-welcomed way: plated food was brought out to us individually, with no say-so on our part about what it was. You could tell the co-owner of the resort was a chef because of how gourmet the food was made to look, with decorative scrawls of sauce and unnecessarily enormous plates delivering not-especially-large servings. But it was a little light on ideas for what to feed a vegan, as two of the courses largely consisted of string hoppers, a specialty of Sri Lankan food I would've never eaten again had I not been hungry. Gretchen and I were so irritated by the experience that we tried to escape before what was sure to be a horrifying dessert course, but on the way out we were stopped by Zach, who insisted on having the dessert sent to our room.
Gretchen was the only one at that time who had her room key, mostly because she'd gone back to get something. It turned out that we'd been given the smallest room in the resort, and it was also windowless aside for its door. But that wasn't the main problem with it. The problem was that it had, like many things in Sri Lanka, a funny smell. In this case it smelled like a conventional scented soap had been used to clean it and then it wasn't mopped up. Some people actually might've liked that smell and thought that it made the room smell clean, but Gretchen and I are highly sensitive to such smells, since we do not use scented soaps and, to the extent we do use scented products, the smells are natural. Gretchen wasn't sure how she was going to be able to sleep in our room, and until she figured it out, she opted to open the door and run a ceiling fan. Meanwhile, Gretchen's parents had been assigned the most palatial room at Amanta, and, because it was assumed we would benefit from it, that was why we'd gotten such a tiny room. Gretchen's parents' room came with its own fenced yard and dipping pool, though the yard was weirdly-arranged and could've benefitted from some flagstone walkways so we wouldn't be tracking gravel everywhere.
I was still coughing up tiny divots of phlegm on a regular basis and concerned I might be getting sicker, so I decided not to go to the afternoon activity, which was at a local college to watch yet more locally-produced film. Instead I took advantage of Gretchen's parents' pool or hung out in the bed, though I didn't use the time in an especially productive manner. Gretchen had told the staff that our room smelled like soap and that they should come and wash it down with just water. But instead when they showed up, it was to deal with some sort of plumbing issue. Someone just downstream of Amanta on the sewer line had flushed the unflushable down a toilet, and it required some Amanta staffers to come into my little room and fuck around in the bathroom with a channel lock wrench, caulk, and probably tools I didn't see. When they, the bathroom smelled of brimstone. I ran across the chef guy out in the alley and he apologized for the chaos and told me about the sewer line problems.
I an effort to have slightly recreational afternoon, I'd taken one of blue pills in Gretchen's mixed container of pills, thinking it was a xanax. But I had no magnifying glass, and without it the markings on the pill were impossible to read (and then look up). But nothing ever happened from taking that pill, suggesting it was estradiol, an estrogen precursor.
When Gretchen got home this evening, she told me about the film thing she'd attended. She said the theatre had been packed with Sri Lankan students, who apparently have a decidedly non-American relationship with showering and deodorant, because, she said, the room stank of body odor. This might explain the icy-cold air conditioning used in the theatres at the upscale malls in Colombo; perhaps that is necessary to suppress the smell of the people.
The people who had attended the film event had also eaten dinner somewhere, so I had to subsist on snack food.
I'd managed to communicate to some of the cleaning ladies that our floor needed to be mopped with "just water," but their efforts didn't do much good, and Gretchen ended up having a miserable night due to the persistent smell of soap.
A darter swimming in Habarana Lake. Click to enlarge.
A darter above the water at Habarana Lake. Click to enlarge.
A stork-billed kingfiser above Habarana Lake. Click to enlarge.
A black-hooded oriole with two white-bellied drongos above Habarana Lake. Click to enlarge.
A mystery bird with a fruit in Habarana. Click to enlarge.
A sunbird in the garden at at The Other Corner. Click to enlarge.
A male garden lizard in orange mode, shortly before he returned to a more usual drab grey-brown appearance. In the garden at at The Other Corner. Click to enlarge.
Female Indan black robin at The Other Corner. Click to enlarge.
Male Indan black robin at The Other Corner. These two were a pair. Click to enlarge.
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