A few final thoughts on the big drive around Sri Lanka. The country isn’t really all that big (about 300kms across) but it does take significant time to get from place to place due to sharing the limited road network with 20 million other cars, stray dogs, bicyclists, trucks, buses, tuk tuks, farm machinery, and walkers as well as dealing with repeated winding switchback roads up and down mountains.
My driver, who goes by the name Francis, may have been past retirement age and with only one good eye, but he seemed to handle the drive well with his 35 years of tour driving experience. Francis was very nice and polite. He was definitely Old School, addressing me as ‘Sir’ and always discretely disappearing from the dinner table when my meals were served to go eat with the other drivers/servants in the back room. I thought about inviting him to join me, but his English was terrible and conversations were very difficult. In addition, I’m pretty sure he was paying far less than the tourist prices I was repeated stuck with paying.
Francis told me that he actually retired from driving several years ago after his wife died. He decided to come back to work after finding it too boring and unsociable to hang out by himself at home. He drove a Nissan station wagon that reminded me of one of my old cars in the U.S. It had over 330,000 kms on it and he treated it like delicate china. He liked the doors closed very gently and drove painfully slowly over any bumps he came across – which drove me a bit crazy, especially after having just barreled around the Australian Outback on 4wd tracks in my Rav4 last month. The safari tour in the Land Rover was completely at the opposite end of the spectrum, which made it extra fun.
The crazy chaotic Sri Lankan driving was actually handled very well by Francis. Honking horns are used constantly to alert other cars of your passing or other people walking along the road. I filmed several videos with my iPhone I will upload when I get the chance. I was amazed to see no accidents for most of the journey, but then found a big rolled truck on a switchback mountain road and another more minor front-end crash the following day. Stray dogs were running around everywhere, but they always seemed to know how to get out of the way of cars at the last minute. I only saw one dog dead in the road from being hit on our entire journey. Francis actually told me that most of the dogs were owned by people, but they certainly seemed to run around like they were stray and many did not look particularly well.
Much of the trip was in silence, unfortunately, because it was just too hard to communicate in English. He could recite interesting facts about Sri Lanka and the sites we visited fairly well, but if I ever said anything I would have to repeat myself over and over – phrasing things in different ways – before he finally could understand what I was saying. 90% of the time he would completely misinterpret what I said and start talking about a different unrelated topic. It was just too frustrating to try and keep a conversation going.
Being a devout Buddhist, my driver would conduct a brief prayer on his steering wheel every morning before we headed off. He would also discreetly prop his hands up in a prayer gesture and bow his head every time we passed a statue of Buddha.
