Sri Lanka Trip

A more in depth description of my Aunt and Uncle's Sri Lanka trip, written by my Uncle Phil.

I am pasting a narrative that I hastily wrote for a friend who is doing a story on us in the hometown newspaper (Westerly Sun).  I have mixed feelings, justifyably, about receiving publicity in the face of enormous disaster.  Our little story is just so....little, but one, nevertheless, that yields enormous gratitude.

We have traveled to India during the past three winter vacations, first to Goa, then to Kerala, and last year to Tamil Nadu.  Our direction of travel has been in a southerly direction and the last southern destination is Sri Lanka, prompted by the encouragement of a friend who lived there for 16 years and told us about the beauty of the land and the people.  We planned a nine-day trip from December 22nd-January 1st starting with three days at Dickwella Beach Resort.  Dickwella is located just a little east of the southern tip of the Island, about an hour’s drive from Galle, which you have seen pictures of on the news.  The Resort is located on a peninsula with beach on both sides.  Owned and operated by an Italian family, there were many Italian, French and German tourists staying there.  Very few Americans (there or anywhere else on the island).

Originally, our plans were to stay four days at Dickwella and then travel north to the central part of the country to an area called the “cultural triangle” where ancient Buddhist capitals dating back as far as 2500 BCE are now archaeological sites and tourist destinations (Sri Lanka continues to be the spiritual center of Theraveda Buddhism…74% of the population is Buddhist).  We had hired a car with a driver/guide for the entire trip and he suggested that the ride north was too long for one day’s travel.  Aubrey suggested that we cut a day from our stay in either the north or south.  We decided to change our plans and leave a day early from Dickwella.  That decision (prompted mostly by Marsha to her credit) made all the difference in the world for us.

The morning of the 26th we woke early, packed our bags and went for a long walk on the near-deserted beach.  I had a swim about 7:30 and we returned to our ground-floor room about 25 steps off the beach.  We had breakfast, finished packing our bags and got on the road about 8:45.  We had to drive east along the coastal road for a while before turning north on the road leading to Nuwara Eliya, our destination for that day.   Crossing a bridge over a river we noticed large crowds lining both sides of the bridge pointing towards the water. We saw the tide rushing in with lots of debris in the water.  People were excited and agitated and there seemed to be a lot of commotion in the town with people running, shouting, waving their arms, peddling fast on the bicycles, and turning their cars around.  Our driver stopped and asked what was going on and we were told that the road ahead was washed out and we had to turn around, which we did immediately.

At that point we had no idea what was happening. Nobody did.  I assumed that the flooding was the result of the full moon.  We backtracked and took an alternate road north that took us along the southern edge of an elephant reserve where we spotted our first elephant of the trip.  When we stopped for lunch, Aubrey spoke to some people who told him that many people had drowned along the coast and that this was a much larger problem than we had thought.  But it wasn’t until we arrived at our hotel in the small mountain town of Nuwara Eliya that we realized what had happened.  In the hotel lobby everyone was watching BBC on the TV describe the 8.9 earthquake and the Tsunami that had swept across the Indian Ocean leaving death and destruction in its wake.  First reports said the 2300 people had died in Sri Lanka and one million were affected.  As of this writing the estimate is over 30,000 dead.

As we later found out, we had left Dickwella about 20 minutes before the first of three waves struck the coast.  Aubrey spoke to other drivers who had been in the area and made phone calls to discover that Dickwella had been badly damaged including the seaside rooms where we stayed that had been totally washed out.  As soon as we could get to an international phone, Marsha called her sister to let her know that we were safely out of harm’s way.  The next day in Kandy we found an Internet Café and sent emails to friends and family in the US and also in Israel. Everyday we watched the news and were overwhelmed by the hourly increase in estimated dead and the extent of the damage not only in Sri Lanka but throughout the Indian ocean area as far away as the northeast coast of Africa.