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The Jungle Diaries

The Jungle Diaries

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Off-grid in Sri Lanka. Deep in the jungle north of Sri Lanka's last kindgom, blooms a plantation once abandoned in war...Copyright 2023 The Ceylon Press Biografías y Memorias Ciencias Sociales Escritos y Comentarios sobre Viajes
Episodios
  • What Sets You Free

    What Sets You Free
    Nov 6 2025
    The 2nd of May 2025. Yesterday, of course, was the 1st of May, the day when people celebrate the start of spring. Or at least they used to until most of them moved into town and cities and forget the countryside. In Oxford, of course, they do it in a particularly old-fashioned and bafflingly erudite way. They sing Latin hymns and dance fifteenth century dance numbers beneath Magdalen Tower, built in the year Henry VIII came to the throne. Although the king was to mature into the terrifying opposite of a spring chicken, the festival to celebrate this part of the calendar continued through all his troubled marriages, and the centuries of war, wealth, regret and change that were to follow. Yesterday was no different. Watched by hundreds of townsfolk, the festival was carried out, the tower bells rung and the students flung themselves drunkenly into the freezing river. Spring was welcomed in. Writing about this kind of May in June, Philip Larkin said: The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too,Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles threshIn fullgrown thickness every May.Last year is dead, they seem to say,Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. But by the first of May of course, spring has long since sprung - and things are already afresh - so it really ought to be summer that is welcomed in. Maybe it's a hinge thing, a bit of both. But whatever it really it, it is a matter of great and monstrous marvel that a festival about growth, freedom and life should have been highjacked by the arms industry, generals, and war mongering political leaders as the best time to show off their arms – their tanks, rockets and other expensive military equipment. An optimist might say this is getting a bit better. In the old days, not so long since passed, the star of the international stage was the Kremlin. It was noted for its interminable drive-pasts of tanks and guns and fly-pasts of military jets. Most countries have a moment for similar shows of force – though none so cold blooded. Here in Sri Lanka Independence Day – the 4th of February – is the day designated for its show of force. Special wooden stalls are built facing the sea all down Galle Face Green with white clothed chairs set out for the dignitaries. And then under shade with the hot sun all around them, they all sit down, and watch Sri Lanka's military walk past. Flags are hosted - here and at Sri Lankan embassies abroad, priests of all sorts murmur their blessings, and the navy offer a 21-gun salute. They are part of a quite formidable military, over 150,000 personnel – half what it was the height of civil war and reducing still. And a third larger than the British Amry – or just 10% of the size of the Indian army. Not that Sri Lanka has any external enemies bent on invading its shores. It takes a while for politicians to learn how to wind down over extended armies, so they don't become the people in charge like they did in Turkey, or like they still are in Egypt. But compared to most of its near neighbours – in the Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the army here in Sri Lanka plays a remarkably back seat role in politics and has avoided making any significant direct interventions to influence or redirect elections. But nowadays May has to share its moment of symbolism with all sorts of other things. The month is much borrowed by counties and organisations to commemorate martyrs, medical cures, national heroes, flowers, truculent dictators, pizzas – even military spouses, smiles and the statehood of Minnesota. But really, and most of all though May is the moment to forsake madness and put aside its main promoter - the bleak winter, darkness, circumscribed dreams, cold and thick pyjamas. Nothing that was too hard, too impossible too ungraspable is any longer out of reach. With spring under your belt, you can go about your life with some degree of optimistic serenity, certain that for some months to come, the sun will shine, even if only metaphorically. And with that simple, critical readjustment, you feel free. Perhaps the most telling of all May day celebrations was that one back on 4th May 1961 when Bayard Rustin led the first freedom ride to challenge the racist segregation in practice on the buses of the American South. I hang on to this thought of freedom, even though such memories of winter austerity are rather wasted here in tropical Sri Lanka where the weather is either dry or wet, hot or warm. May on this island is traditionally wet, and on the cool side of warmer. Every tree and spice bush, rambling jungle creeper and fallen seed puts aside the dozy dry drought and gets growing again. You can smell it as much as see it. Having only just woken, I ...
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    10 m
  • The Art of Hermiting

    The Art of Hermiting
    May 9 2025
    “It's love,” my music teacher assured us, “that makes the world go round.” He was trying to enforce some degree of harmony in the class at the time, burdened by having to learn yet another Mikado song. He might have cheered us all up had he shared W. S. Gilbert’s other great insight: “Man is nature's sole mistake”.But this he failed to do and so, aged 12, I was left wondering just how on earth the world would motor itself forward, and go round and round, given the unhelpful existence of such hermits as myself. Of course, hermits often love, but given their predictably sequestered impact, the effect is like being licked by a gerbil. Not enough to really help the world go round and round. And round.Quite how I got away with it, being brought up in a country then so explosively fecund that the Prime Minister’s younger son set about furtively and forcibly sterilizing any male within sight, was itself a miracle. Of course, he failed. Utterly. In the ten years from my arriving in India and then leaving it, the population jumped 100 million. And not just there. Everywhere. More and more people, making the world go round, with love. The battalions of shrinks who spent so much effect making me into the balanced, burnished, and pleasing figure that I am today, never really explained what happened when or why to make me so. But hermiting, to coin verb, is a very pleasing occupation. And I am certainly getting better at it.It was a challenge to do well in India, at boarding school, university or in any of the vortex-inducing publishing houses that greedily besotted me during an early career enthusiasm. But here, in the jungles of central Sri Lanka, it works much better.The path of a hermit is rarely straightforward, especially if you are the sort that prefers looking upon caves, lighthouses, and abandoned windswept islands, rather than living in them. Why, after all, should hermitting be shorn of books, champagne, a good chef, or opera? Not everyone is St Paul, content with dates and bread, or likes dining off leather shoes, like the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova.Clearly there are degrees in hermiting, as in any condition or occupation - though my friends still chuckle and snigger at my career choice to run a hotel. That, they claim, is merely a perverse attempt to have ones cake and eat it. For, of course, you can’t hermit 24/7 in a hotel. In a hotel hermitting is intermittent. Like the building of Rome, it cannot be achieved in a full day. There are guests to greet, help, welcome and part with. Suppliers of everything from diesel to devilled cashews to meet. An unending parade of plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, Wi-Fi repairers, gar deliverers dancing up the estate road in duets with government agents, tuk tuks, lost policemen, cinnamon peelers, monkeys and falling mangos.But all of this misses that one essential point: hotels nurture hermiting. Ravi Shankar, Coco Chanel, Clinty Eastwood all lived in hotels. And look at what they achieved. “When you get into a hotel room,” noted Diane von Furstenberg, “you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.” Amongst well-informed hermits, arguments rage gently over what type of hotel offers the best hermiting. And at first glance you would seemed utterly spoiled for choice here in Sri Lanka. It lists over 10,000 places as providing accommodation. However, closer inspection shows that just a quarter of these places are classified as hotels And of those just 8% (200) are rated as 5-star. For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of these 200 hotels are small private operations - authentically boutique in a world that has heartlessly commoditized the word. Thankfully, the hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world – Taj, Sheraton, Marriot, Starwood, Meridian, etc. – have yet to put in much of an appearance here. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality. My Colombo hermitage of choice is the Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, a much overlooked habitat of calm sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road. Alternatively, Tintagel offers unquestionable peace, a far cry from its 1956 tabloid moment when the radical Prime Minster S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, seated on its veranda, was shot dead by a Buddhist priest whose business affairs had gone awry - the first leader of the modern state to be murdered – but not the last. For those who prefer Colombo hermitting in massive edifices, there is Cinnamon Grand; the Hilton, one of the first globally branded ...
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    11 m
  • A Little Bit of Expert

    A Little Bit of Expert
    May 2 2025
    A Little Bit of Expert, 14th February 2024There is the BBC of course. CNN. Reuters. The New York Times. All News, if you will. And then there is real news. Recently, I have taken to walking the dogs up Singing Civet Hill, down the Coconut Gove, through the jungle path and out onto the newly planted Chocolate Walk that links back to the Spice Garden and the estate entrance.As subjects go, dog walking routes are way up there - with global warming, or the Oscars, choices of totemic influence, able to steer the whole day this way or that. And where the day goes, the week, the year, the millennia follows.Bertie is still gated so cries in the office or has a private garden-only walk with Ranjan. I take the other four into great, occasionally tamed, wilderness. There are wild boar prints to smell, the track of a mouse deer, porcupine a plenty, wild dogs, and of course, monkeys. For Archie, Bianca, Coco and Nestor, the stroll is akin to entering naked into a cream cake shop and letting rip. A golden sun filters through jungle trees. Dry leaves shift underfoot. A vast blue sky implies itself from above. Apart from the excited sniffs and scratches of the dogs in their virtual cream cake shop, it is silent. Meditation silent. Soul silent. The sort of silence impossible to image within a yard of asphalt.Even so, there are traces of human activities. In this case, young Mr Goonetilleke’s attempt to keep wild animals off his plants. Thin strips of steel wire had been stretched on boundaries and anchored to electrical forces so strong as to give me a nasty jolt when I walked in to one. It certainly deterred me. But not the animals, who hopped across, or simply waited for a coconut leaf to fall on the wire and short it.Occasionally Mr Goonetilleke attempted to revise his technical masterpiece, but in the end, he refocused his ubiquitous expertise into solving other problems, leaving him, and us, a little wiser than before about the uses of electricity. Experts, like love bombs, are everywhere on this island. It is one of its principal human features; one of Sri Lanka’s many little bits of lovely. Not for these shores, the remote and gifted expert, given to Deus ex Machina pronouncements, rare as Burmese rubies, on what should be done in this instance, or that case.No. In Sri Lanka, the expert is there right next to you, just like Mr Goonetilleke, ready to intervene. On the train, in the street, at the doctor’s waiting room, his expertise in whatever the matter in hand, worn since birth, and so much a part of his physiology that you might as well try to sever an arm or ear, as to sever this part too.The journey to this remarkable state of national know-how has been long and meandering, journeying past centuries of want, and decades of central bureaucratic incompetence, enlivened with parrots like flashes of glittering arrogance. From banking, electricity, and tea, to fish, drugs, cement, and chickens, state owned industries remain wedded to The Frank Sinatra Dictum:– “I've lived a life that's full / I've travelled each and every highway / And more, much more / I did it, I did it my way.” Whisper if you will that they are largely technically insolvent or as dated as dinosaur in a poodle parlour – it is to no avail. Their expert song sounds on. And on. The elites rule. Their way, or no way.Sometimes – not often – it all breaks down. The Civil War, JVP Uprisings, Hartal, Aragalaya. People get fed up with experts. And all hell breaks loose. But Sri Lankan society is nothing if not civil, and in between these moments of madness a kind of gorgeous mannered existence runs along paddy tracks from village to village. The Emperor has no clothes? Of course he hasn’t. He’s so naked you can count the mosquito bites on his buttocks. But such a lovely hat. And the scarf he is imaging he is wearing. That too is beautiful, offsetting the make-believe sarong, just so.As the experts busy themselves choosing their special clothes for the day and getting ready to advise those few people they have time to see, the rest of society just get on with it. Everyone is an expert in almost everything. They have to be, or life would simply stop in its tracks like a perfumer with a pegged nose. Expertise is not something you can outsource. To make the right choice you have to know so much as to leave you cleaving to the wings of a rocket as it does it 360 orbit of any problem or issue.“Generator blown,” observed Kasum, the chef. “I’ll fix it.” I begged him not to. But he did it anyway. And it sort of worked.Its mildly terrifying, marginally irritating and wholly discombobulating when suddenly you need to be the expert. And nowhere is this more true than in matters of health.Soft westerner as I am, I’m accustomed to seeing a general practitioner for anything from a head bump to a throat sniffle. With celestial expertise, the GP will point me the right way – this specialist or that; this test or that;...
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    14 m
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