drug mix-up on the road to Kandy Wednesday, July 9 2025
location: the smallest room at Amanta Beach Resort, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
I got up early and went out to plink away at my computer outside the door to our room, where there was a semi-outdoor lounge area (and occasional mosquitoes; there had be something for the massive swarms of dragonflies to eat). I still had that same cough I'd had two days ago, though it didn't seem to be getting any worse.
When Gretchen got up, we packed up our stuff because soon we'd be back in the bus.
At breakfast, Gretchen started acting increasingly lethargic and indifferent, indicating she must've accidentally taken one of the pills that facilitates sleep (either xanax or ambien). At some point she became aware of this and decided she must've accidentally taken a xanax instead of an estradiol. But this didn't seem to bother her much. Nothing was bothering her because she was on xanax. At some point I looked around and realized everyone had finished and left breakfast except for us. But she was in no hurry to go anywhere. When we finally got up and started making our way across the compound towards the lobby, she got distracted by the kittens who hang out at the bottom of the stairs up to the dining area. She sat down and started petting one, and, in annoyance at her priorities, I hurried back to the room to make sure our luggage had made it to the bus. I then went back to find her and by then she'd made it to the lobby area and was walking very slowly and looking unmistakeably under the effects of something. I don't know if the staff were worried about her or what, but at least she wasn't puking.
Eventually we'd said goodbye to the fine folks at Amanta and were loaded onto the bus, where Gretchen explained her pill mix-up to her parents so they wouldn't be concerned. She then settled into listening to podcasts on her phone, though she kept misplacing things like that phone and her headphones, though they were in her hand or otherwise right there near her.
Today's bus ride was to Kandy, a highland city in central Sri Lanka (and the basis for countless dad jokes). Getting there would take most of the day, and there would be two big stops along the way to fulfill itinerary items. At our first stop just so people could use a clean bathroom (tour staff generally go into the bathrooms before we do to make sure they're copacetic), Gretchen was still blissed out from the xanax. She declared that she was having a wonderful bus ride and that this was the way to do it.
As we got closer to Kandy, the terrain became more mountainous. Somewhere along the way, we went down a very narrow road (where the bus guys had to get out of our bus to negotiate a very tight squeeze past a school bus) and ended up at a factory in the city of Matale featuring a big billboard about plant-based foods. Evidently we'd arrived at some sort of factory that makes processed vegan foods. We were led into the factory and then to a catwalk up above floor, where the head honcho lectured us about the products they make, what they make them from, and who they supply them to. I couldn't really hear him above the roar of fans and other equipment, but I made out that jackfruit was an important raw material and that the products were sold unbranded to other companies who apply their branding. While this was going on, I looked around at the largely-un-airconditioned factory (which had a somewhat-off-putting gamey smell) and the several walled-off fishbowl offices and meeting rooms full of laptops and whiteboards and a smattering of people wearing white-collar outfits.
After that, we were given a tour of some of the farm around the factory, which included greenhouses and fields of various familiar crops (though no rice). On the edge of one such field, we spooked a huge monitor lizard, who charged off into the bushes with phenomenal speed. I asked a question about some wooden poles that looked like they had been installed in the ground to hold up other plants but had also started sprouting, but there was too much of a language barrier for me to get a satisfactory answer.
A couple of the factory staffers went into a greenhouse and came out with some scotch bonnet peppers, which are known for being extremely hot in the peppery sense. I took one, which had been given to me as a sort of novelty. But I began tearing at the tip with my fingernail, producing a small piece that I put in my mouth and chewed up without difficulty. The staffer was astounded to see a gringo eating a scotch bonnet without discomfort, but I knew something he apparently didn't: even the hottest of peppers are actually surprisingly mild near their tips. The real heat is concentrated closer to the pepper's center.
I still had that pepper when we finally made it to our buffet lunch, which was held there on the grounds of the factory in a semi-outside area, with eating places scattered at various nearby semi-outdoor pavilions. The food was the usual mix of curries, though this time the rice was actually basmati, which hadn't been the case earlier in our Sri Lankan adventure. There was also an east Asian dish and a oyster mushroom dish, so the food was a cut above what we'd been eating for days. I used my scotch bonnet to spice it up a bit, as the food had had its spiciness profile toned down for whitey.
Getting back on the road required even more finesse than had been required earlier as again we had to squeak past schoolbuses (this time two of them full of children in their school uniforms).
Even closer to Kandy, we stopped at a mountainside Buddhist temple that existed, in part, in various caves. Some of us (including me) were wearing shorts, and, since bare knees are considered offensive to religious Buddhists, we were made to cover up using white skirts that had been handed out with out with out other schwag back in Colombo. Then we could climb the steps and check out the caves. They were similar to other Buddhists temples we'd seen in Colombo (there was, for example, a huge reclining sculpture of the Buddha), though they were in caves, so some of the structure had an organic quality to it, yet it had been plastered over and painted with murals and designs anyway.
After we were done looking around inside the temple, a monk appeared and led us into an actual building, the kind with windows that looked like it might've been built to European standards. In a large breezy parlor, the monk gave us lecture on the specialty of this particular temple, which was the creation and preservation of the Pali Canon, holy texts written on palm leaves. The monk then showed us the process of writing on palm leaves. First a stylus is used to scratch the letters into the leaves and then a black pigment is wiped into the leaf and the surplus is wiped away. (I read elsewhere that the character systems used by both the Sinhalese and the Tamil are devoid of straight lines specifically to avoid cutting parallel to the veins in palm leaves, which would weaken the documents.)
At the end of the lecture, a couple fresh-faced teenage monks appeared and proceeded to crank out little plam leaf fragments that they inscribed with the first precept of Budhhism, which in English is "I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life," though they wrote it in Pali, the ancient liturgical language of Sri Lankan Buddhism. This precept is, or course, particularly simpatico with vegan adventurers, but the irony is that almost no Sri Lankan Buddhists are vegan or even vegetarian. (Zach told us that when he tells a Sri Lankan he is "vegetarian," they assume he must be Hindu.) It seems Sri Lankan Buddhists have something in their culture that allows them to ignore (or severely narrow the scope of) what would seem like the most important precept. In any case, we each got little palm leaf fragments inscribed in curlicue script, and these were the first souvenirs we'd received on this trip that we actually wanted. (Amusingly, though, when Gretchen and I compared ours to each other, they looked totally different, and we couldn't figure out why until Carly showed us that one of us was holding ours upside-down.)
We also participated in the string ceremony where we each got a length of string tied around our wrist by the monk, after which we were expected to mutter words of worship, something Gretchen and I grudgingly participated in.
As we got closer to Kandy, the traffic got to be more and more of a snarl, and it took something like an hour to drive the last twenty miles. I was watching our progress on the Google Maps on my phone, and for awhile it seemed like we would travel half the distance to our destination in a certain amount of time and then travel half of the half remaining in the same amount of time, endlessly, meaning it would take an infinite amount of time to get to downtown Kandy. But obviously that wasn't the case, because inevitably we rolled into the entrance of the hotel where we would be spending the next three nights, the Hotel Suisse, another massive sprawling hotel dating to the colonial period. We were told it was run by the same company who run the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, which made me a little nervous, because by then we knew that there had been a problem with the main kitchen at Galle Face. (Not only did it sicken nearly all the people in our group, but it had had the same effect on a big wedding party that had been there at the same time, and those people were mostly native Sri Lankans.)
Once we were checked in, Gretchen was particularly excited about the Hotel Suisse pool, which she soon found was refreshingly cool, though for some reason there was the strong smell of vomit wafting across it. She'd gone ahead of me while I'd been back in our room and soon sent me a direct message to have me come down with my camera. It turned out that right next to the pool (though even closer to the shore of Kandy Lake) were three trees that were full of either birds, bats, or both. The huge number of beings in those trees was producing an enormous amount of guano, which was the source of that vomit smell. In the United States, that smell (and health concerns) would've caused those trees to have been hacked down years ago, displacing all the wildlife in them. But Sri Lankan has a refreshingly live-and-let-live attitude towards nature, and so the hotel coexists with the critters. I snapped a bunch of pictures, particularly of the bats (they were those enormous flying foxes of course), but they're dark and they're framed by the bright sky, so it's hard to get a good photo.
We had dinner in a massive colonial-style dining hall, where we were served family-style. Some of the food was pretty good, and there was also beer.
Loading up the bus to leave Amanta Beach Resort. From left: Gretchen's father, Zach, Danielle the Australian from Cambodia, our bus driver, and Jiva. Click to enlarge.
Me at the first rest stop. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen still on xanax at the first rest stop. Click to enlarge.
Distant mountains on the road to Kandy. Click to enlarge.
Inside the plant-based food factory, where we'd been told not to take pictures. Click to enlarge.
In the gardens at the factory, I found little mimosa plants whose leaves collapse when bothered.
Schoolgirls near the plant-based food factory. Click to enlarge.
A reclining Buddha at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
A cave ceiling at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
Wall sculptures at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
A sculpture featuring Buddhist devils at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
Graffiti in an alcove that only I looked around in at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
The monk lecturing about palm leaf documents. Note the gentleman in the back wearing a modesty skirt. He's an Irish neurosurgeon. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen (in a modesty skirt) with her mother at the cave temple. Click to enlarge.
Young monks cranking out string for the stupid string ritual. Click to enlarge.
A cormorant and a bat at Hotel Suisse. Click to enlarge.
