January 12, 2005

The long road home

After the apocalypse

A journey to find loved ones in the devastation of southern Sri Lanka defies description - the jaw drops; the eyes glaze; the soul weeps. And the politicians fiddle as the people wail.

By Eric Ellis
 

ADRIAN Collins can't believe his eyes. Flying into a devastated Sri Lanka from London, he knows his beachfront villa, 200m away on the track ahead, has been trashed by the Boxing Day tsunami. But what his mercifully alive local house staff hadn’t told the British investment banker was that the wave has changed the island’s map. What on Christmas Day was a long, sandy spit dotted with villas was a day later a 100m-wide channel connecting the Indian Ocean to the now-much-larger lagoon behind. Collins gazes helplessly to his shattered house from what is now the mainland, then shares a reflective bottle of the local Three Coins beer. “I’d always promised my wife a tropical island hideaway,” he says. “Now we’ve got one. Cheers.”

I’d met Collins minutes earlier as we sat stunned at the damage to Beruwela, a fishing village a few kilometres up the Galle Road. The scale of the disaster is still breathtaking, beyond imagination, but everyone who has been down Galle Road says it gets worse from here. Families sit desolated on concrete slabs that were their living rooms, some of the million now homeless. Beyond criminal is the scale of government corruption and bureaucracy stopping the foreign aid from getting where it’s most needed. It’s an indictment of a nation that Lankans and foreigners with local smarts plead that assistance be direct instead of sent through official channels. It will take a generation, a new clean government, peace and billions of dollars – that Sri Lanka, one of the world’s poorest countries doesn’t have – to rebuild this broken island.

The 300km single-lane Galle Road hugs the coast from the capital, Colombo, to Sri Lanka’s third city, Galle, in the south and east beyond. Still surfaced as its British builders laid it down a century ago, the potholed track is normally a vibrant journey through Sri Lanka’s spicy soul. Up to half the island’s economy is generated along here, from banks, casinos, malls and one of the country’s only McDonald’s at its Colombo end, through tourist resorts on some of the world’s best beaches and textile factories stitching Victoria’s Secret lingerie to charming fishing villages. But now, the roadside and surrounds up to 3km inland are strewn with bodies, the detritus from thousands of razed houses and fishing boats that nature flung from breakwaters like rubber ducks in a bath. About 30,000 people died along Galle Road, double in Sri Lanka if you count the Tamil Tiger unverified estimates as the road wends north into rebel-held country.

I’m on my own mission down Galle Road, which I’ve travelled 30 or 40 times before. Like Collins, my English wife Sara and I are two of many foreigners with a small piece of Sri Lankan paradise. Our property at Mawella, a fishing hamlet 120km east of Galle, sits on a headland 25m above normal sea level, 20m above the tsunami. But it was the least of concerns as I drove, like so many others, down the road in a 4WD laden with food, clothes and medical supplies into the main impact zone, trying to reach our neighbours who lived in a two-roomed fishing shack 5m from the water’s edge. Sunil is one of 200 fishermen among the 1000 people at Mawella. His jaunty outrigger and nets are our landmark to clamber up the track behind his house to our plot, first stopping for his wife’s sweet tea and joshing with their three kids and their jolly 80-year-old grandma, who we just call Umma, Sinhala for mother. Last time we were there, I snapped a few family portraits which Sara turned into table photos with Ikea frames. That was before December 26. Now we have no idea what has happened to them. I have the portraits with me, ready for any outcome.

COLOMBO. Well up the west coast, the capital is largely unaffected. The Verandah breakfast at the 150-year-old Galle Face Hotel was briefly disturbed, and the hotel’s seafront chequerboard used for sundowners was flooded. Sri Lankans have responded magnificently, acting faster, more effectively and without the ethnic enmities of their bumbling politicians. Colombo is functioning normally though the airport can’t cope with the planeloads of aid arriving. The streets, normally patrolled by suicide bomb-wary troops, are festooned with white ribbons. It looks inappropriately festive but white is the colour of mourning for Sri Lanka’s 55% Buddhist majority, a gesture embraced by the minority Tamil and Muslim communities. After fighting the most bitter of civil wars since the 1970s, the communities are warily coming together in this unprecedented crisis. December 26 was a poya (holy day). Tissa, my Sinhalese driver, suggests maybe that the Lord Buddha was angry that day. Like many ordinary Lankans, he’d never heard the word tsunami before December 26. Then he thinks about it a bit. “Tsunami has no party, no country, no religion, no colour, Sir,” he says. “Buddha and Allah and Jesus and Shiva are all angry, Sir.”

MORUTUWA, 20km south of Colombo. This is where travellers normally kick back on the haul south, leaving the capital’s chaos behind. Sri Lanka’s gorgeous white beaches are first glimpsed here, glinting between a 5km row of jauntily painted beachside shanties next to the railway line. It’s easy to view the serene sea today because the shanties are no longer there, bulldozed into piles of rubble either side of the road like a perverse, mangled snowdrift.

KALUTARA-BERUWELA, 55km south of Colombo. Remarkably the pastel-hued St Francis Xavier Cathedral is intact, as are many places of worship that punctuate this road; mosques, Hindu temples, Buddhist dagobas, Christian churches. It’s like the wave genuflected and surged around them. Or it may just be their clergy built them with better quality concrete from their congregations’ donations than the faithful spent on themselves. Everywhere people are drinking coconut milk, wary of the groundwater. Refugees billet in churches and schools, or under UNHCR tents or those sent from individuals. WITH LOVE FROM LIVERPOOL, says a sign on one. “Our houses are all finished,” says a terrified Tamil woman, Maryam, camped in a Catholic classroom. Another local man, Nilanta, says hundreds died here. I hand $US100 worth of 1000-rupee ($12) notes around the camp and Tissa hands his precious Bristol cigarettes but it all seems pathetic. Another man wailing “my house, my house” drags me over to see it. But there’s nothing that resembles a house.

BENTOTA-KOSGODA, 70km south of Colombo. Wendy Curtis is not going to let any old tsunami wreck her holiday. The 54-year-old Briton from Sheffield is lying on a sunbed reading Paul Scott’s 1977 Booker Prize-winning novel Staying On as Collins and I walk through the grounds of the Bentota Beach Hotel. Devastation surrounds us; a fishing boat is beached near the pool, 100m from the ocean, outrigger pontoons are strewn on what was the hotel lawn but is now best described as a sandbar. Mahout Jayantha scrubs down the hotel’s pet baby elephant, Kapoori, who had escaped her chains and the tsunami with Jayantha in pursuit to high ground, sensing the waves’ arrival. Save for three other couples, Wendy has the five-star hotel to herself, and is counting her blessings her Boxing Day dive was rescheduled two hours later to 10.30am. “Why would you go home?” asks Wendy, “These people need jobs and I’ve been helping where I can. I’m British!” Tourist guide Indica de Silva was taking Germans on a tour of his Buddhist temple. He ushered them to safety, returning when the waters receded to his vanished house, missing wife and two dead daughters. A regional potentate, Gamini Zoysa, hands out goodwill to refugees at the temple but not much else. Some 150 people died here. An acolyte of the erratic president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, whose family has ruled for much of Sri Lanka’s 57 years as an independent nation, Gamini smiles a lot and the homeless fall at his feet. “It’s very bad,” he says, stating the obvious while adjusting one of several gold rings that cluster his fingers. Tissa clicks his disapproval. “Our politicians are very rich, Sir.” It seems that during this crisis they are getting even richer. The rupee has soared, the stockmarket buoyant, the anecdotes of official pilfering sickening.

AMBALANGODA-HIKKADUWA, 30km north of Galle. Passing a courthouse that’s now a refugee camp and a bank that’s now a morgue, we stop at a friend’s villa. Damaged beyond recognition, it’s hard to find but when I finally spot it, Ranjan the housekeeper bursts into an embrace of tears as we come through the gate. He explains how his wife with their year-old baby herded their Swedish guests onto the roof of the two storey-house as three waves crashed in. “We are happy because we have our lives,” Ranjan says. Two commuter buses were swept off the road here into a lagoon that locals fish in. Sri Lanka doesn’t have the expertise or resources to retrieve the 100-odd dead; there are more urgent priorities just 10km away at Hikkaduwa. Here the odour of death wafts over Galle Road. This is where the waves swept the Colombo-Galle Express off the track. Ten days on, military salvage crews are still pulling bodies from the wreckage, strewn with sand, handbags, schoolbooks, clothes and rats. Wailing Sri Lankans, mostly Galle Muslims, file past tables laden with credit and business cards, bankbooks, wedding albums and identity cards soldiers took from bodies to identify the 1000-odd victims. A puppy suns contentedly on the slab of what was a primary school, adopted by Sri Lankan air force salvagers. Patting him, Squadron Leader Sudil Peiris says the dog somehow survived the waves. “We have given him a new name – Tsunami!”

GALLE. Sri Lanka turns east here at the 400-year-old fort built by Portuguese expeditioners and later fortified by Dutch and British colonisers. The waves hit the fort’s 25m high ramparts, swirled around either side to meet in a murderous spout over Galle’s famous cricket ground, and the adjacent bus station and market. Last March, I’d watched Australia smack Sri Lanka here and Shane Warne take his 500th Test wicket. Last week, it was a putrid open-air morgue for 3000 people, including some of the visiting team from England’s Harrow School. At the nearby police station, cops have laid out the personal papers of perhaps 1000 victims, for relatives to claim. The face masks on passers-by betray the government’s fiction that all corpses have been collected. I watch as one is exhumed from the rubble of a collapsed gemstore. The lilting sounds of nalawa, a ceremonial trumpet played at funerals, waft across the city. The unscathed fort was besieged by terrified Galleites on Boxing Day. As rumours swept the town of more waves, they gathered at the fort’s highest point, the $600-a-night Aman Hotel, whose staff doled out rice and dahl to thousands.

GALLE FORT. Bottle-blonde Gloria is giving people the shits. It’s hard to dislike someone who’s just lost a dream beachhouse and we’ve cut her a week’s worth of slack but she doesn’t seem to get that there are one million people homeless like her but, unlike her, haven’t found alternative lodgings in a sumptuous lodge at $US200 a night. That’s about what half of Sri Lanka’s 20 million people earn in a year. Gloria claims to be a star of the stage – or rather was circa 1970 – and 35 years on she still does a diverting turn at drama. “I don’t think I can go on,” she wails repeatedly. “Rebuild, darling, we’re just going to rebuild,” sighs her long-­suffering partner. The other guests suffer her tantrums in silence, hoping her contractors, and her therapist, will soon arrive.

UNAWATUNA-TALPE, 10km east of Galle. The Ibiza East crowd usually gather here under blue Indian Ocean moons to drop mushrooms and ecstasy, have sex, read Alex Garland, dance, chill and slug lime arracks. Not any more. Facing south-east, every shack and flophouse on this gorgeous half-moon bay is demolished. Milton’s, a landmark hotel and restaurant loved by Sri Lankans as Melburnians do the Portsea pub, is shattered. At Talpe, If Villa, owned by an Australian pilot, David Gerard, is no more. Last year, a group of us stayed here for the Galle Test. We’d come home after a serious day’s boozing and barracking to a beach cricket Test with local fisherkids – they restored Lankan honour – fabulous curries cooked by Lionel and spotless rooms tended by the gentle Vijay. It’s unrecognisable and takes an hour to find. The property has been looted, like so many along the road. Bare-chested Lionel explains how he and Vijay ran inland to escape as the waves demolished the villa. Lionel survived. Vijay did not.

WELIGAMA-MIRISSA-MATARA-DIKWELA, 100km east of Galle. The traffic thins as we wend our way into Sri Lanka’s deep south. This is JVP country, heartland of the hardline Marxists who killed President Kumaratunga’s husband for daring to talk to the Tamils about peace but who now find themselves in government as her coalition partner. They control the Lands Ministry and have knee-jerk decreed that no dwelling should be closer than 300m to the beach, exacerbating the homeless issue. An early-warning system and designated escape routes would be a better idea. At Weligama, we pass Taprobane, the villa-on-an-island where American author Paul Bowles wrote the most nihilistic of his novels. After the tsunami American guests were “complaining about the screams from down there keeping their children awake” gesturing to the nearby devastated town where hundreds were killed. At Mirissa, fishermen take to the sea to catch fish to send to Colombo’s politicians, challenging them to eat. Rumours sweep the coast that fish have feasted on corpses and are spreading disease, affecting fishermen’s livelihoods. While there’s no evidence that it’s true, the president has yet to eat her meal. She was in London shopping over Christmas.

MAWELLA. I finally reach the road to Mawella hamlet. Its taken two days to make a normal five-hour journey. The internal roads are flooded or impassable with debris so I walk 2km inland across fields once thick with jungle. The beach is 10m higher than I remember it. I run to Sunil’s house, remarkably still standing, one of few that are here. But like the British banker Collins earlier, I can’t cross because the tsunami has cut several deep channels to new lagoons. I walk an hour the other way and someone yells out “Mr Eric!” Its Sujit, a cheerful fisherman we’d befriended. But there’s no cheer today; Sujit tells me he was the sole survivor of his seven-member family. I finally reach a devastated Mawella. It normally bustles with fisher folk but today I count only a dozen people, sitting stunned in the ruins of their houses. Mawella has been hit harder than most communities. Our headland faces east; the water hit it, welled up and then funnelled down the gully the village straddles. One woman tells me 30 locals died here while praying at a temple. Sunil and family are nowhere to be found but another neighbour, Violet, tells me they are all alive, staying at a brother’s house well inland. She takes me there and as we drive through the gate “Umma” and her grandkids rush to meet us. “Everything is destroyed, everything is gone, you have to help us” she wails, explaining that Sunil carried her and his kids halfway up our headland to escape the waters. She breaks down deep in my arms as I hand her Sara’s photos, the food, clothing, the medicines. “You are like a god,” she says. Not true, I tell her. We are their neighbours and like millions of neighbours around the world, we are here to help.