Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/26434
• ••• •• • •• But after a couple of days, we started to feel ridiculous about how much stuff we had brought to this land where people seem to live quite happi ly on very little. To become the instant talk of the town in a small fishing vil lage because you have a five-foot, high-tech spear gun is a somewhat foolish and embarrassing predicament-especially when you consider that the locals can dive deeper and longer with bootleg, 1970S tourist leftovers. The local fishermen, however, responded to our enthusiasm for the sea by taking us with them on their pontoon outrigger boats to where the fish really were. After settling into the relaxed landscape near the ocean, we final ly scored some memorable surf. Glassy, early morning sessions became our breakfast. But the sea all too quickly resumed its capricious ways, and during the next flat spell we were drawn back to the interior of the country, back to the romantic trains. Climbing Sri Padma, one of the island's oldest and most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites, we were joined by throngs of elderly peo ple equipped with flip-flops and wills of steel. They passed by offering tooth less smiles of encouragement, the breath of their monotonous chants infec tious and motivating. We reached the summit of the mountain in the cold and windy darkness just before sunrise, exhausted by two days of climbing in a religious procession that had thickened with an indescribable fervor. We hud dled with the pilgrims for warmth, hoping to experience a glimmer of spiritual illumination. The mountain cast a perfect triangular shadow on the land below us as the sun rose. We spent long, late afternoons on rickety Chinese bicycles, riding past families of monkeys sitting in silent tribunal, grooming the day away. We drank hot chai, brewed from river water, with bowlegged fisherman who spoke fearfully of four-foot crocodiles that venture out of the estuary into the sea at dusk in search of high-tide delicacies. The fishermen make a point to be nowhere near the beach after dark because the wild elephants who come to bathe in the ocean take great offense to spectators, local or otherwise. These creatures are engaged in a territorial struggle with expanding human popula tions that are directly threatening their existence. Their future is doubtful. How much longer do they really have in Sri Lanka? We were grabbed off of the streets into night-long circumcision par ties where all that separates you from a semiconscious, nine-year-old boy is blaring Hindi music and a bloody sheet. Hot wind wound through the spaces between our thoughts as we walked back to our tent from the point break. We walked through the lingering vision of an offshore kaleidoscope sunset, the sounds of fishermen in the distance-fifty or more-pulling a drift-net over a mile long, singing bittersweet songs. Sitting by the campfire, images of the day's last wave would replay itself in my mind as the sun's waning light undu lated on the ripples of this sacred and magical vision, a creation of spherical water in a cylindrical, momentary rush. 46