The Tea Route Cycling Tour – Part 2 (Sri Lanka)

The inaugural Tea Route Cycling Tour, crossing Southern India and circumnavigating Sri Lanka has finished. A few days ago we arrived on the outskirts of the Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, and began to celebrate our adventure.

Henry and Tour Leader Ezhil at the finish line

To many of us, because the island is situated so close to India, the expectation was that we will be visiting a ‘Little India’. And though in certain aspects, that may be the case, the island is certainly not India.

Sri Lanka (previously known as Ceylon) was once visited by one of the most famous of all travellers, Marco Polo, who called it the finest island of its size. I have no idea how many islands Signore Polo visited and whether it was pure serendipity that brought him here, but he was obviously impressed. As were we.

Each day brought us a different taste of the island, and by this I don’t mean food, though there is plenty of that to sample as well. Every day we witnessed the lushness, the natural richness, the fauna and flora that was all around us. Every day, each and every one us had the opportunity for a random encounter with a local who would bring a smile to our faces.

For myself, it was an encounter with an older monk who was walking ahead of me during a rest day, holding a magnificent umbrella made, I believe he said, of palm leaves. I was admiring it from behind for a few minutes when he suddenly stopped, turned around, and started a conversation that went on for a while and included a discussion of the current state of the world.

Another day I was sitting on a bench waiting for a corn on the cob that I ordered from a vendor that I had spied as I cycled by. The corn wasn’t quite ready when a big, new 4×4 stopped to buy some corn. The person who ordered the corn from the vendor came over to me and said the Bishop of Mannar, a city to which I was heading, was inside the car and wanted to talk to me. I walked over and there in the front seat, wearing all the religious paraphernalia, was the bishop. He wanted to know what I and the other foreign cyclists that he had seen while driving were doing, where we came from, and so on. We had a lovely chat and he invited me to visit him at home. Before leaving he asked me if I was a Christian. I smiled and said, no, I am Jewish. He smiled back and said, well, then we are brothers. I smiled back and agreed.

Cricket with the locals

One day I had yet another brief encounter that brought a big smile to my face. I was cycling up a small hill and passed an older man, maybe as old as me or older still, on his single speed, rattling bicycle. Not long afterwards, he passed by, showing me exactly what he was made of. At the top of the hill he turned off the road, stopped, looked at me and smiled. I smiled back with a big grin. For a few seconds, we were brothers, doing the same thing. I write this simply to point out that every one of us had these kinds of serendipitous encounters, meetings that made us smile, laugh, and be happy about what we are doing on Serendib Island.

You will have noticed that I have used the word serendipity several times. That is because it comes from Serendib, the name Arab traders used for the island. Later, when the English arrived, they couldn’t believe their luck, thus the word serendipity. I could go on and on about how many ways Serendib or Sri Lanka, which apparently means resplendent island, surprised, pleased and otherwise welcomed us.

I will only point one more example. All of us had serendipitous encounters that made us smile but I think most of us were smiling each day for a different reason. Every day as I left the hotel for another day on two wheels, it wasn’t long before there would be a child, a teenager and elderly man or a woman, people in general, greeting me, smiling and waving at me. When I waved back, when I responded in any way, there was even a warmer reaction.

I have yet to visit a country where such brief interactions, particularly with children, brought so much joy to them and to me. If you ask me what the highlight of cycling in Sri Lanka was, I will quickly respond that it was the hundreds of children, women and men smiling at me as we exchanged brief acknowledgments of each other.

What a way to spend three weeks. I think I have developed many, many, more laugh lines.

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