Back in Colombo

It's Saturday morning. Slept like a baby - almost 12 hours at a stretch.

We've spent a day on the road covering over 500 km, broken rest, to attend a wedding. We were there for merely two hours. This didn't make sense. Wasted so much time, just to show our faces at a function.

Probably that's why Ranga wanted to buy a new country and build roads that are straight and smooth. I don't think that thought had anything to do with the kind of smoke he was inhaling.

We, the Islanders of Paradise, are a strange bunch of people. Optimistic, to the max.

Most of us, especially the gals, enjoyed the view - all the way, leaving aside the bumpy roads (that are "proposed highways" as Boycy puts it), the horrible drivers, the lack of common facilities and the chaos along the way.

They just said they enjoyed the trip.

In an ideal world, you'd hit the highway, cover the distance in two hours, have a longer presence at the wedding and would have been back for supper. Thank god, we appreciate the natural beauty in our country, I wouldn't have been able to put up with whining and grumbling otherwise.

"If you build it, they will come..." said Kevin Costner's character in a movie that was all about building a baseball field in the middle of nowhere.

I hope our (political) leaders believe in that. We must build the roads, that's the only way to develop this country. Once the roads are in place, everything else will come. The tourists, the industries, the businesses, the money. To the village. Once there is money, people will stop fighting, they will stop stealing. They will forget who's a Tamil and who's a Sinhalese.

I hope those "proposed highways" would materialize soon. (As in "highways" not as two-laned nightmares). I wouldn't mind driving 500 km a day then.


This is a pix of the Welimada Town Council 15 miles Limit signage. Put up by the British hundreds of years ago, it still stands in its original place. What does it say - the road has not changed even an inch since then!