Text & Photos:(c) Copyright, Russell Johnson

"It is India without the hassle."
Arthur C. Clarke

I could see what he meant about his adopted country. The people are fine featured, well educated, and it doesn't take five of them to complete a simple task. You see poverty but it doesn't grate at your conscience in scenes of maimed beggars. And once out of the capital city of Colombo, the world dissolves into a lush green dream. Banana and pineapple, teak forests, queues of brightly colored umbrellas bobbing through rice fields. Elephants blocking traffic.

Sri Lanka has some of the best protected wildlife preserves in the world. The first recorded one dates back to the 3rd Century B.C.

I stopped at an elephant orphanage and watched a herd bathing in a river. It was led by a curmudgeonly bull who snorted elephant ephitets when I violated his space. I raised my camera to take a picture and heard hissing behind me. I swung around to make eye contact with an enormous reptile. This was not the gecko on the shower stall. The monitor lizard looked to be about five feet from his first lethal incisor to the last bony plate on his tail and walked with the gait of a constipated pit bull. It "monitored" me, (rolling its eyes like Groucho Marx) dismissed me as a wimp and not worth the trouble, and swaggered away.

I drove on and beautiful young women beckoned me.

They sold me cashews, oily and sensuous. I whiffed sandlewood and vanilla and spices. I brushed by Kandy and the Temple of the Tooth (the Lord Buddha's) and where I lodged at the musty but marvelous old Hotel Suisse. It had grand hallways and huge rooms with shutters that swung open and a circular bar tended by a gap-toothed man with greasy black hair slicked back over his ears.

Kandy, situated beside a lake in the hills just below the center of Sri Lanka, is the country's cultural center.

Temple of the Tooth
The Temple of the Tooth is said to house a relic from the mouth of the Lord Buddha, himself, which was said to have been taken from the flames of his funeral pyre and smuggled to Ceylon in the hair of a princess. The Tooth was pirated to India by an invading army but brought back. Then Catholic zealots stole something they thought was the tooth and destroyed it when the Portuguese captured Kandy. But the Sinhalese claimed it was a false tooth and that the original still rests inside the Temple of the Tooth. The temple was constructed during the time of the Kandyan kings in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Festival Time
Sri Lanka's grandest celebration, the Kandy Esala Perahera, takes place each year in the month of Esala (July or August). It is a ten day fest which ends on the night of the full moon with a procession of drummers, dancers and elephants led by the Maligawa Tusker, a giant dressed to the nines carrying a canopy which shelters a duplicate of the reliquary of Buddha's sacred tooth.

I went to Sri Lanka's "cultural triangle", the ancient cities of Anuradhapura, Mahintale and Polonnaruwa, and walked in the rain amongst acres of some of the most inspiring Buddhist heritage sites I have ever seen.

Now I know why my Sri Lankan friends -- who have lived the fois gras of New York and San Francisco and Singapore -- all say they want to go back to their villages to retire.

But Colombo, Sri Lanka's capitol city, does not evoke such images. The Singapore Girl who sat next to me on the plane rolled her eyes (like Groucho the lizard) when I asked her about it. It is noisy, petrol-stinky. Driving requires a sort of entrepreneurship endemic to South Asia. My driver leapfrogged smoke-spewing busses, nosing back to the proper lane barely in time to avoid trucks that came roaring from the other direction blasting warnings from their airhorns. We slalomed around circuses, leftovers from the Brits who claimed this as one of their outposts (along with the Dutch and the Portuguese). We drove past police checkpoints, reminders of a civil war that despite cease-fires and periodic bursts of optimism still nags and kills. "Our little problem," as Sri Lankans call it, has had little direct effect on travelers aside from scaring them away. We dodged past statues depicting, in the European tradition, Great Leaders gesturing their right hands into the air like opera singers belting arias. One G.L. had enormous ears.

Arthur C. Clarke lives in a neighborhood called Cinnamon Gardens where, as in many matured cities, fashionable homes have been converted to embassies, advertising agencies and schools. Leslie's House, named for Clarke's late longtime companion, is located next to a girl's school. It looks as if it has been a work in progress for the thirty some years Clarke has lived here. Modern appendages clash with colonial charms. A garden in back has served as his salon for the world of good men and great who have come to call. Friends such as the late Issac Asimov who wrote him a limerick:

"Old Arthur C. Clarke of Sri Lanka

Now sits in the sun sipping Sanka

And taking his ease

Excepting when he's

Receiving pleased notes from his banker"

Clarke says he is especially fond of the time he spent with American newscaster Walter Cronkhite and the good old "man-on-the-moon-days" when together they shed tears on first touchdown.

"I hope you are not intimidated." said Clarke as I entered his office. He was referring to the yipping chihuahua that charged toward me.
Pepsi skidded to a halt about three feet away.

 Clarke introduced me to the tiny beast he originally named Pepe. His Sri Lankan friends couldn't pronounce it, however...always adding an S. So the name of the cola stuck. Clarke got up from his chair and called Pepsi. The dog hesitated a moment and came to me instead. I have a extreme negative predisposition to two animals on this earth: monkeys and chihuahuas. When I was a child, my best friend owned a shrewish little mutt that made shreds of several of my pantlegs so I expected the worst. Pepsi, however, was more like housecat. He nuzzled my hand when I leaned over to pet him.

 We walked into the garden and talked...