Sun and Scuba in Sri Lanka

After the chaos of Vietnam, and Cambodia and Thailand before that, I was ready to take a little time and relax. Luckily for me, I had my next destination in store: Sri Lanka. After a brief layover in Bangkok out of Hanoi, which found me stuffing my face with Thai food one last time until I had a stomach ache (totally worth it), I flew into Colombo on the west coast of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka, even after having been places like the DRC, put me on edge a little bit. Up until recently, the country was in the grip of a 26-year civil war between the national government and the Tamil rebel group, who wanted to divide the country along tenuous ethnic lines. It was a messy conflict, and rather than ending peacefully, it ended with blood when the government finally defeated the Tamil Tigers (the insurgent armed group) in 2009. Like all conflicts that end with violence, the defeated party was not necessarily cowed, and tensions have run high ever since, although outright conflict has been very rare. Even though the country has seen extraordinary economic growth since the peace accords, antiquated trade laws and unnecessary protectionism (no doubt remnant from the civil war) are still stifling a lot of progress.

Nevertheless, Sri Lanka has a lot of natural beauty to offer. If I was staying for two weeks, I would have made an effort to get into the central district, where rainforests and elephants abound, but as it was I only had a week to spend, and I knew exactly how I wanted to spend it: scuba diving.

I wanted to get a diving (PADI) certificate before I got to the Philippines and Australia, because I knew I would want to do some diving there. Sri Lanka is famous for great scuba diving, since it has two separate monsoon seasons which guarantee good diving on either the east or the west coasts. For me, in September, the diving was to be found on the east coast. Unfortunately, that involved an excruciatingly slow train ride (13 hours to go 250ish kilometers). Fortunately, September is not a huge tourist season, and it felt like at times that I had the entire east coast to myself.

I shared my beach view with the cows, but you can't beat the location

Trincomalee, the town from which I dove, is right on the beach, and I was able to find a room right on the beach for practically nothing, right down the beach from the resort (which had rooms for significantly more than “practically nothing”, which I didn’t want to pay) where I was going to take my lessons and get my PADI certificate. As it turned out, I was the only client for the course that week, so I basically got private lessons from John, a British dive instructor who had been in Trincomalee for a couple years.

My days in Sri Lanka, though few, were really amazing. I would wake up every morning and walk right out of my room into the clean ocean to take my bath, have breakfast, head down to the resort for morning lessons and afternoon dives, then back to the room to rest and read and relax. Truly inspiring, but it did mean that I didn’t get much time to see the rest of Sri Lanka or spend much time with Sri Lankan people. I guess I’ll just have to leave that on the list for the future. I passed my PADI with flying colors (John thought I was a PADI spy since I picked up on it so fast), and all too soon I found myself on a bus (WAY faster than the train) back to Colombo to fly to Singapore. Stay tuned for that update!

-Clay