A living hell disguised as a tropical paradise

I am very happy to introduce you to my second guest blogger. Over to you Céline...

I don’t like the heat. In that case, why go to Sri Lanka, you might ask? Well, if Beth had been living at the bottom of a volcano, I probably would have gone to the bottom of a volcano. There’s only so much time you can spend without some of your closest and dearest, and I wanted to have a better idea of what she’d experienced for a whole year.

So Sri Lanka is hot, and I’m not very good at being stoic and putting up with even minor discomfort, so my travel companions heard all about my grotesquely swollen body, had to listen to my horrified commentary of every bead of sweat running down my back and to my complaining about having to constantly spray myself with chemicals to keep the sun and mosquitoes from killing me. They all seemed to love the heat and relished the thought of winter sunshine and I honestly don’t think they really understood quite how much I had to put up with.

However, the horrific weather wouldn’t have been enough to go as far as calling Sri Lanka a “living hell” if it hadn’t been for my experience on one particularly terrifying night. You see, I’ve had this recurring nightmare for as long as I can remember, where I’m being chased by the sea, and I’m running for my life, and it creeps closer and closer… and I wake up just before I’m swallowed by the waves. I was of course aware that Sri Lanka had experienced this nightmare eight years earlier, when 35,000 people lost their lives on Boxing Day. So when we put our luggage down in Mirissa, in a lovely guesthouse surrounded by coconut trees 10 yards from the turquoise sea, I tried to push all thoughts of natural disasters from my mind. We spent the day in and out of the sea, playing frisbee and getting burnt shoulders before having dinner on the beach with the gently lapping waves washing up around our table.

That night, I woke up in a panic. I could hear the waves pounding against the shores, in a way that was melodious and hypnotic from within a hammock during the day, but which sounded full of menace and way too much power in the middle of the sweaty night. Added to that our ceiling fan, which was running at full speed and sounded very much like an emergency helicopter, and the fact that I was half-asleep and completely confused as to where I was, and there you have it: my very own personal, nearly 40 year-old nightmare coming true. I had a few minutes of utter terror, before I realised that I was not going to have to run and probably die a painful and lonely death, but those minutes felt like a couple of lifetimes.

I obviously told my travel companions about my traumatic night over breakfast, and hence my “living hell disguised as a tropical paradise” short description of Sri Lanka was born. We cheerfully used it whenever we had the most wonderful food, which was pretty much every meal, whenever we gazed at the lush and stunning landscapes, and whenever Sri Lankans greeted us like old friends. This is a country that has recently gone through many traumas and tragedies, and I’m sure it has been hell on earth for a lot of its inhabitants, but it was also welcoming, gorgeous and fascinating, and I feel privileged to have spent some time there, during the coolest month of the year.