The Long Drive North

The drive from Colombo to Dambulla was long and bumpy. 4 ½ hours spent in a private car, jerking down a crowded 2 lane road that wound down hills and around curves through progressively thicker greenery, until the landscape grew wild and untamed. We booked our ride through a tour service provider who scouted us out at the airport and pegged us as an easy mark. Not that we got ripped off, but we did pay a premium for a private car, and while the vehicle was comfortable and air conditioned, Becky and I still shared an uncomfortable moment of realization once we got in the car and realized that our driver had suffused the entire vehicle with his rather pungent body odor. The kind of remarkable BO Jerry Seinfeld once characterized as a formidable entity with a life cycle of its own. Our driver was a nice guy, and he navigated the snarl of traffic on the roads with practiced dexterity, but still, that ride took a lot out of us. The inevitable constant starting and stopping to move around 3-wheelers and trucks did not make for smooth sailing. It didn’t help that the driver had selected a satellite radio station for our listening pleasure that pumped out nonstop soft rock songs, a litany of unforgettable, sickeningly sweet ballads that called to mind the sweaty teenage insecurities of my misspent youth. Richard Marx and Brian Adams. We took it in stride, and found the humor in it. Upon our second listen of “Everything I Do (I do it for you)”, I remarked to Becky that this was the first song I ever slow danced to, in 8^th grade, with a real live flesh and blood girl, with my arms extended out and elbows locked to ensure that our bodies didn’t really touch and our eyes never really met. Becky too, affirmed that she “was way into it” back in the day. Ahhh, we were such children of the early 90’s. In all our innocence we really dug Kevin Costner as a heroic but conflicted Robin Hood, romping around Sherwood Forest with Morgan Freeman as his random black friend, with Christian Slater as his long lost brother from another mother, as they plotted against Alan Rickman as Nottingham’s vile and sleazy sheriff. In our adolescent brains, that somehow seemed like a good movie, and the Brian Adams power ballad at the end wrapped it all up in a nice tidy bow. Ah, the joys of being young and impressionable.

We drove onward into the jungle. Becky slept first, then woke and I started drifting off. I slept fitfully, and was startled awake when our driver slammed on the brakes to avoid crashing into a semi-truck. I opened my groggy eyes to see the car a few inches away from the back of a mack truck. There was a gorgeous magenta sky on our left, as rain drummed down on the windshield and the sun started setting over the mountains to the west. The stunning colors of the picturesque sunset were offset by the fact that the driver had changed radio stations, and was in the process of subjecting us to an interminable playlist of the Backstreet Boys greatest hits. “cause I waaaaaant it thaaaaaat way.” Lordy. Deeper and deeper into the jungle, as darkness set in, listening to a boy band croon some of the worst hits of the last twenty years, and trying to wrap our head around the changing landscape and the shifting light. We arrived at the Heritance Kandalama after about 5 hours, checked in, and started getting acquainted with one of the coolest hotels either of us have ever seen…