In and around Galle, Sri Lanka, March 2018

An ExPat friend's birthday party on Galle's Beach or 'Dewata' beach, a relative haven from tourism in comparison to surrounding areas. Unawatuna, Hikkadua and Arugam bay are Sri Lanka’s premier beach destinations. I never visited the latter but the former two were like Goa x Costa del Sol combined in levels of tourist activity.

Sri Lanka is one of the worlds biggest exporters of commercial yellow fin tuna, these are actually skipjack and used in most local breakfast dishes and curries but beautiful quality, although to some when not very, very fresh an acquired taste. The world is on the brink of having a marine collapse and now, more than ever we should be conscious of what we eat, everyone is hyped about not eating meat but not enough about sea food. The sea is a wild and finite resource that I I hope we can save before it collapses completely.

String hoppers are one of the more popular breakfast carbs that I have came across in Sri Lanka, basically over cooked vermicelli noodles made of different rice, another one is white bread (I saw a man half my size eat a whole loaf in 10 minutes) usually served with a beautiful daal and a fairly plain fish (tuna) curry with it. Not Sri Lankan cooking at its best but the real deal.

A meticulous five man cast net operation in the main Ceylon Fisheries Harbor in Galle. Pushing the tightly packed long liner boats apart before dropping it deep into the harbour to collect these largish sardine type fish that are numerous under the boats of an extremely busy fishing port, they went straight into tanks so as to use them later as live bait towards baiting the thousands of hooks that any one of these boats have numerous kilometer long strings of.

It occurred to me a while back that the whole ‘dolphin friendly tuna’ was and is a complete sales play, praying on our love of sea mammals and general misunderstanding of the sea and fishing. Dolphins will never take a baited hook of any sort as they are too intelligent and can see and sense the line, hook and all-round unnatural appearance of the prey in this form. Any ocean fisherman of even very limited experience will know this. There are extremely rare cases of technical sport fisherman catching them while using a live bait with the latest technology in Japanese Fluorocarbon (which is a type of line that refracts light in a similar way to water thus making it more difficult to see) this new strain of Fluorocarbon is hundreds of dollars for very short distances so no commercial long line operation would ever consider using it in place of cheaper nylon line. Amazing what people get away with in advertising, praying on people’s plain ignorance and good will. The same can be said about so many products that we buy day to day, I think possibly the most questionable is probably the ‘organic’ label which is shamefully and terribly abused in many cases (not all of course!). Just to add to this, currently there is almost no such thing as truly sustainable fisheries or even farming practices both in the sea and on land, from meat through everything to agriculture... But that’s all up for informed debate...

Betel nut (or pan when mixed with tobacco) is one of the worlds biggest drug problems, after nicotine and alcohol. Anyone who’s been anywhere in Asia will probably have seen thousands of people with purple grins, spitting into the street. This is a huge Sri Lanka package (meant to make at least 4 parcels) - the nut is in the top left, the dark stuff to the right is leaf tobacco but crucially on the bottom left is the lime or in many cases a strong alkaline that acts as a catalyst for the nut. It’s actually quite a serious stimulant. They have banned the use of tobacco in ‘pan’ in India now but it’s still widely used.

During the first part of March a Buddhist vs Muslim feud in the hills around Kandy broke out and they banned the whole country’s use of any major social media servers with the idea being to stop the use of social media to plan mass rioting / demonstrations and the spreading of ‘fake news’ that could agitate the the situation further. With the use of a VPN application I was able to continue communication with family and friends.

Army presence stepped up a huge notch after the initial trouble in Kandi. These guys and hundreds of others from the SL army were just a showing of force by being in any place there is any Islamic / Buddhist population. There doesn’t appear to be any further. I’m not a huge fan of military as a whole but if their presence alone stops violence between religions then I fully support it. These guys were absolutely charming and happy to update me on the situation.

Little Sademi probably has the sweetest smile in the whole country and always has a drawing or picture for me when I visit her and her amazing family.

A lovely Sri Lankan family who fed me and spent time with me with absolutely no expectations or preconceptions of my potential western wealth. I met them through an interesting character called Mahinder who I will write about later because it’s a good story with hopefully a happy ending (he’s the one with the monks) they were always calling me to make sure I went to see them and spend time with them, probably just a presence of a totally different culture for them that rationalises them entertaining me so frequently. They had very little money and worked very hard to provide but they would always feed me when I spent time with them, hungry or not! And the crab in one picture here was a real expense that they wanted to share with me before I left. Wonderful in so many ways.

I was drinking Arrack with some of the local guys on the beach after a few of the the fishermen had just got back from over a month’s fishing trip. A celebration of sorts. A brilliant joke from one of the lads about this chap -‘why has this guy got only one tooth left?’ Me - Why? ‘Because he’s a f**cking rickshaw driver!! 👊🏼👊🏼👊🏼

This was the view of Galle fort, a Unesco world heritage site, as we sailed out of Galle towards the Maldives...