Just returned from another trip to Sri Lanka – and although I only had a few photos of an outstanding sunset at Bentota beach and some amazing shadows transformed by a solar eclipse into trendy designer patterns, I also took the opportunity to belatedly upload a set from last September when Sanjiva organized a hike up from the southern lowlands to World’s End and Horton Plains.  Supposedly World’s End sports the most dramatic view (and lover’s leap) in Sri Lanka, and the surrounding Horton Plains contain a unique ecosystem.

We didn’t make it quite to the top, but did experience some steep climbing, amazing views and a Dr. Suess inspired landscape,

followed by a long winding return to civilization through an unbelievably steep tea plantation. 

The photos don’t do justice to the experience, but here they are anyway!

Photos from last week’s one-day stopover in Hong Kong on the way to Sri Lanka.  Spent most of the time trolling through the lively markets in Kowloon (flowers, birds, live fish, produce, you-name-it.)  Full flickr set here.

During another of my “day in Hong Kong” layovers I took a ferry to a local island that promised two quaint fishing villages – Sok Kwo Wan and Yung Shue Wan.

Not really as quaint as you might first imagine, in part due to the huge factory on one end of the island with smokestacks peeking over the hills from almost every vantage.  And the thick humid air and overcast didn’t help.

It was however interesting to me that with only a path between the villages, there’s no need and therefore no ability to have full size cars on the islands – just bikes, wheelbarrows and a few go-cart-pickups for moving construction materials.  The result of scaling a village to the human inhabitants instead of to their automobiles does make even a poorly planned, somewhat dilapidated community cute to some extent.

In the end the day proved enjoyable between the ferry ride along Hong Kong’s skyscraper-studded waterfront, walking the hilly footpath between the two villages, and enjoying a beachside seafood lunch.

Complete photoset here.

[Photoset here.]

Our adventure started as all adventures do in Sri Lanka, with a long drive on progressively smaller roads.  Until the roads give out completely. Sights spin by at a breakneck speed - elephants on a flatbed, chaotic towns and open-air markets, lazy cattle wandering free – too fast to comprehend let alone photograph well.  At a couple of points the ride was so steep and bumpy that the rear hatch of the van failed and a couple of packs tumbled into the road to the alarm quickly turning to amusement of all.

The end of the road in this case was the tiny village of Palabathgala, near Ratnapura, and the eleven of us, plus guide, were deposited at the bottom of a staircase into the rain forest, leading up up and up into a misty escarpment. Already the grey skies were dripping on us.

This is the long way up to Adams Peak and the temple of Sri Pada, a pilgrimage popular I suspect not only because it is said to have Buddha’s footprint, but because it’s just so dang hard to get to. Our path starts with unremitting steps up into the forest. Every hundred the count is etched into the concrete - 1000, 2300, 3900. The humidity is intense and I adopt an old man pace to keep from overheating. Step, breath, step, breath. It works pretty well and although I’m towards the back of the pack my heart rate stays low and my legs still feel strong. However my strategy for keeping dry fails. Not only am I drenched in my own sweat, buy when a drizzle starts I throw my windbreaker over my head and drape it over my pack, leaving my arms cool. But any moisture on the pack quickly transfers to the inside of my windbreaker, and mixing with my copious body moisture my windbreaker is quickly thoroughly soaked inside and out.

After an hour or two, we arrive at a small army base just as a monsoon downpour starts, and take brief refuge as it turns our stairway into a temporary torrential waterfall and then disappears just as quickly as it came.

Finally somewhere near step number 5000, the cement ends and the original rock steps begin. Still unremitting, but somehow the uneven steps are easier to navigate. Maybe it’s because you have more choices than a fixed stairway provides.  Or maybe it just occupies your mind more.

After hours of this we reach a rocky river, spanned by a spiderweb of white threads. It is apparently a custom for new visitors, to weave a thread into the web. All of us newbies partake in this custom (photo courtesy of Udeshika). This is a good spot for lunch and we break out out lunch packets - rice, curry, cal, sambol, all wrapped in plastic and then newspaper - a traditional lunch favorite here.

Then hours more of stairs, as we climb right up into the clouds. The temperature drops to a pleasantly chilly range, but the humidity remains so high everything remains soaked. At last we reach a few nondescript buildings, vendor shacks deserted now on the off season, and dry out a little.

We engage the sole visible resident for some hot water and relish in a hot beverage as only the perpetually wet and cold can.

We’ve been climbing stairs straight for about 5 hours now, and I am rather surprised that this village represents not the end, but the official start of the Adams Peak Climb! Three more hours to go and it’s already after 4PM when we leave. I stride out, glad to have saved my strength for this part. But it’s not long before I’m taking a short rest after every 20th step, then every 5th, and then at times after each one. After approx 20,000 steps (a nearly 2000m climb), I’m in summiting mode - don’t think about the rest of the trail, think about the next step.

This section again has concrete steps, and even rails begin to appear, as the stair grade gradually increases from 40 degrees up to 70. The wind is whipping the clouds against the mountain, and although the wind is fairly dry, as we ascend the wind strengthens and blasts us with more and more rain. The vegetation has changed from jungle to cloud forest, eerie twisted shapes draped with moss in the blowing mist. Sometimes Adams Peak is above the cloud layer and while my hopes were never strong that we might emerge into sunshine, it became clear that the summit was being blasted by 40-50 mph winds. We climbed, clinging to the rail, as the stairs wound between granite outcroppings and sheer cliffs whose true extent remained hidden in the mist.

At last a structure emerged from the mist at the top of the near- vertical ascent and as the wind tried one last time to part us, or at least any gear not tied firmly down, from the mountain, we entered an alleyway between two buildings. A man emerged from a tiny cell and showed us to a small cold monastic cell where we could spend the night. A change of dry clothes raised everyone’s spirits and shortly we all moved up into the caretaker’s cell to squeeze onto his bunkbeds, drink another round of hot tea, and chatter away with him animatedly in Singhalese. I just sipped happily as the singsong swirled around the warm cell and mixed with my exhausted daze.

Now we’ve had our dinner packets - despite being tasty my post-extreme appetite is small and I can’t do much more than sample. With another round of animated chatter we laid mats in our cell and have lined up like sleepy sardines to await the morning.

[Morning]

Well, that night felt like Survivor – with each person having a share of the floor approximately two feet by five, cramping legs, whistling wind and rain, chilly enough to cause shivering, bumping into each other as you turn, occasional snores, and someone scraping through the door to use the bathroom every 45 minutes or so.  I listened to music on my iPhone almost all night, but dozed off a few times for a total of maybe two hours of sleep.  The whole experience felt like something from a 19th century Himalayan explorer’s tale.

The traditional climax of a Sri Pada trip – viewing the sunrise – fell victim to the continued mist and increasing rain.  But after some bread and jam for breakfast we visited the temple.  My preparation for the elements – a complete poncho over clothes and pack – disintegrated in seconds in the howling wind – but I dutifully rang the bell once representing my first visit, and fled.

Guess what came next?  Yes!  More stairs!  We took a different (shorter) route down, leading us down the other side of the mountain.  After coming off of the peak and emerging from the cloud, the steps moderated into a broad trail, and we followed a narrow valley filled with manicured hedgerows of tea.  Dozens of waterfalls sprang from the escarpment, and the rain started to ease at times to provide us broader views.  At last we returned to motorized civilization at the village of Nallathanniya, had another hot syrupy tea.

And as all Sri Lankan adventures ended, so did this.  Hours of the most jolting, harrowing driving on narrow, steep, windy roads, leading us inexorably back to Colombo, a shower, dinner, and late that night to the airport, and eventually home.

I’m just back from Sri Lanka, where I shared it’s first week as a unified country in decades.  I saw late night street parties, and Sri Lankan flags stuck on anything that stayed put, or that moves for that matter.  I heard the honks of roving truckloads of flag-waving, drum-beating, celebrators, watched but didn’t understand the President’s speech, and enjoyed the impromptu victory holiday.

The origins of the conflict always seemed pretty abstract to a newcomer, and it is somewhat baffling that progress has incurred such a heavy cost on the economy and liberty of the people.

As far as I can make out the origins of the conflict lie as they often do in colonialism, which employed a divide-and-conquer strategy between the Singhalese majority and the Tamil minority.  The Tamils are known as an industrious people and amassed a disproportionate amount of wealth and power under colonial rule.

After independence 50 years ago, the fledgling democracy was poor at protecting the minority Tamils from the vengeful rule of a suppressed majority – for instance Singhalese was declared the only official language which emotionally, educationally, and legally disenfranchised other language minorities.  One thing led to the next, and with poor decisions and corrupt manipulation on both sides, plus some probable interference from Tamils in South India, a brutal civil war broke out.

Several tired decades later, it is very hard to see objectively why the fighting had continued.  I suppose that a conflict this long generates its own momentum, deepens grudges, and incubates a set of entrenched interests.  In the few years I’ve been visiting I’ve often thought that there hasn’t been objective reasons left to warrant the continuing damage the conflict inflicts.  Like the conflict wouldn’t be very severe if it were starting fresh today.  Furthermore and most depressing, the fighting had concentrated power (namely LTTE leader Prabhakaran) in such a way that no compromise was possible.

Under those circumstances, I sympathize with the Sri Lankan preference for a decisive victory (despite the horrors that accompany it) rather than endure decades more of guerilla war, assassinations, and suicide bombers.  The victory earlier this month capturing the final LTTE territory, and the killing of Prabhakaran and other leadership figures, allows the country to move into a new phase.

I consider the military victory only one step in resolving the larger political conflict, but all the Sri Lankans I spoke with placed much more importance on it than that – for example:

• The feeling that Jaffna and the beautiful east coast will shortly be accessible to travel.  Many are looking forward to their first visit in years (and for the younger set, the first visit ever.)
• The feeling that many Tamils were forced into supporting the LTTE (financially, as human shields, and even as child soldiers), and now that the LTTE is gone these Tamils cannot be pressured in the same way.  There seems little desire to continue to label them “terrorists” and the term “ex-terrorist” and “ex-combatant” seems to signal a desire for reconciliation rather than ongoing revenge.
• The agricultural riches of the north will again soon allow Sri Lanka to feed itself and result in lower food prices.  The internal trade will also help bind the populace together.
• Confidence in the hard work ethic and capabilities of the Tamils to rebuild quickly and effectively join the political discourse.
• There’s hope that nobody would want to be the last suicide bomber to die for a losing or unjust cause.
• The end of the war will immediately start bringing in more tourist dollars, badly needed now as hotels, resorts, and restaurants already were suffering under the war before the economic collapse.

By the end of my visit I felt more confident that Sri Lanka can take this hard-won victory and build upon it a more peaceful, stable, and prosperous society.  The Sri Lankan people, of any background, certainly deserve that.  And they deserve our support in that process.  Godspeed!

If you happen to find yourself travelling half way around the world, and have a few extra hours to burn in the middle, what could be nicer than Hong Kong?  The landscape is conveniently compressed into a vertical form that makes it photogenic and easy to get around.

I landed at around 7AM from SFO and the express train deposited me in central Hong Kong shortly after 8. While my mission was to find something local to eat, I decided first to visit the small market area and see if it was buzzing early.  It was, with seafood, butcher, grocers, eateries, and more packed into alleyways covering a few blocks of the neighborhood.  I wandered around admiring some of the exotic offerings, but the stifling heat and humidity combined with the steep streets to put me into an overheated state pretty quickly.  I made my way back down towards downtown and lost my bearings for a remarkably long time in a maze of air-conditioned upscale shopping malls.  By the time I found myself I was cooled off and decided a ferry ride was more sensible in the heat.

I travelled the short hop across the harbor to Kowloon and investigated another air-conditioned attraction – the Hong Kong Museum of Art.  Three progressively more exciting exhibits – pottery antiquities, showing the gradual refinement from Neolithic pots to Ming dynasty vases.  Amazing to see a pitcher thousands of years old with a form that modern Italian designers would envy, and how the conventions, techniques, and designs subsequently developed in many cases only detract.

Next was an exhibit of painted scrolls, which although ancient capture an expressionism and spontaneity that the European tradition took centuries to reach.  And the juxtaposition of text and image seemed quite trendy!

The final exhibition was contemporary paintings – all of similar aesthetic to the ancient scrolls, but with modern subjects, colors, and compositions.  Although some came across as fairly flat and cartoony, there were quite a number of amazing pieces from both the point of graphical composition and expressionistic brush artistry.  Well worth the visit!

I hopped a ferry back across to downtown and made my way up the series of outdoor escalators that helps bride the downtown to the trendy SoHo neighborhood.  Searching among the dozens of trendy looking eateries featuring cuisines from all over the world, I finally found a simple Chinese eatery, packed with locals, and with very little Arabic lettering in evidence.

I was placed across a tiny table from a man just finishing his meal, and ordered a few items from the minimal English menu they provided – steamed pork buns, squid and garlic, steamed spareribs with black bean sauce.  Solid but simple choices.

Then back to the train, quickly to the airport by about 3PM to await my final flight leg to Sri Lanka.  A report of my adventures there coming soon!

Full Flickr set here.

It’s always interesting to see how much travel one does during the year.  At one point it used to be a source of pride, but now it’s becoming a source of carbon and of family disruption.  Either way, without good data you can’t judge yourself against your goals – I predict lifestyle data collection will be a major theme of the coming year.  Dopplr is a site that helps record your travel and look for opportunities to link up with your travelling friends.

This year, they’ve introduced a personalized annual report.  Mine is here.  A total of 61,252 kilometers last year, emitting around 7700 kg of carbon.  Most enlightening to me is the total of over two months - 73 days - away from home during the year.  And I felt was lighter on travel than in the past!

And I’m not off to a good start for 2009 – away 13 days so far and it’s only the 20th…

[Update 22 Jan: If you think this kind of data analysis is obsessive take a look at how beautiful obsession can be with the Felton Annual Report 2008.]

Some of our Sri Lankan visitors wanted to see a bit more of the Silicon Valley than the inside of our conference rooms where we’ve been working all week.  Follows is a little driving tour I took them on to see some of the local sights, both large and small.

1. WSO2 Mountain View office:  Aspiring to someday be part of Silicon Valley lore, a fitting place to start when looking in the rear view mirror of history. http://wso2.com
2. Fairchild Semiconductor: After the invention of the IC at Shockley Laboratories, mass defections spurred the development of the integrated circuit by the eventual founders of Intel Corporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor
3. The GooglePlex: Formerly the site of Silicon Graphics campus, Google is the current symbol of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial success.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Campus
4. The Computer History Museum:  Ironically located in the former Silicon Graphics Executive Offices building, vacated not long after occupation - a poster child for the valley’s perpetual boom-bust cycle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum
5. Apple Computer:  Famous for bringing computer technology to the general public through a continuing emphasis on usability.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_computer
6. Stanford University: the intellectual force that anchored Silicon Valley here rather than elsewhere.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford
7. Stanford Linear Accelerator: Not really central to Silicon Valley history, but it is big and impressive and highlights Stanford’s role in attracting scientific talent to the area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAC
8. Sand Hill Road: the center of VC in the valley.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road
9. Hewlett-Packard Garage: considered the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" - the prototype of the garage entrepreneurial culture.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_garage

The tour ends conveniently near to the best Ginger Gelato in the Whole Universe.

See the photos here.

We had a great time exploring Singapore over the last few days.  Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Arriving at the hotel well after midnight and reuniting with our German friends as we were checking in.
• The Shangri-La hotel breakfast buffet.  Each morning we power up for the day with a buffet the includes a build-your-own noodle soup section, Indian fare, dim sum, Japanese and Korean fare, fruits and pastries in abundance in addition to the full western buffet.  Three plates each usually fattens us up enough to skip lunch, not to mention discourage an early dinner, but not enough to taste everything that looks delicious.
• Double-decker hop-on-hop-off bus tour of central Singapore, introducing us to the city, a mix of colonial buildings, traditional two-story storefronts with upper-story shutters in a rainbow of colors, and glass and steel skyscrapers.  Laced through with impeccably maintained greenery.  I didn’t expect Singapore to feel so spacious and gracious.  It doesn’t have that intensely urban feel like Hong Kong or New York.
• Wandering through Little India, a maze of shops and eateries heady with burning incense.
• Dinner at the home of a colleague of our friends, getting a picture of home life and how east meets west.
• Trawling the many malls on Orchard Road.  A little of that goes a long way for me, unless followed by…
• A daily afternoon dip in the pool, before, during or after the brief but sometimes heavy daily rainstorm.  An hour with a good book under a beach umbrella, listening to children in the pool or the patter of rain just beyond the shelter.
• The Night Safari - a cross between a zoo and a wild animal park, but in a dark and rain-glistening tropical jungle lit by a full moon and artistically placed lighting not much brighter than the moon itself.  Never though have I seen such an active and alert a collection of animals - Malaysian tigers, jackals, tapirs, capybaras, elephants, barbarosas (a lumpy wild pig with upturned tusks sticking right through the roof of it’s snout), giant anteaters, sloth bears, bat-eared foxes, giraffes, hippos, water buffalo, antelope…
• A boat loop on the Singapore river, starting at Boat Quay, a quaint strip of eateries tucked up next to the polished spires of the financial district.
• Chinatown - a section of quaint and colorful storefronts and street vendors - though very few hawking cheap Chinese merchandise.  For some reason Indian trinkets dominate.  The Hindu temple is festooned with a layer cake of blue characters and a menagerie of animals, and the courtyard walls are topped with images of lounging sacred white cows.
• Meeting with our friends in the vaulted lobby for Christmas eve present sharing, at the foot of a 30 foot tree, as a live choir performs intricately harmonized Christmas songs nearby.
• A new iPod touch ;-).
• Indochine, a trendy southeast Asian eatery housed in a wing of the Singapore Asian Civilization Museum on the waterfront looking towards Boat Quay and the financial district, provided the perfect Christmas Eve dinner venue.  My top choices - a beef and prawn salad, steamed cod in lemon sauce, green mussels in coconut curry, lemongrass creme brule, mango and sticky rice.  Wow!
• The Singapore Art Museum, housed in a colonial former school, boasts an interesting collection of Asian contemporary art, some of which seems rather primitive to me, others quite sophisticated.
• Perfectly manicured botanical gardens brimming with more kinds of palm tree than you had ever imagined existed.  The fantastic orchid garden.  My favorite specimen is the spindly and bizarrely twisting brownish-purple "Margaret Thatcher".
• Club Chinois on Orchard Road for Christmas dinner - upscale, trendy, light oriental.  Featured scallops on a slab of silken tofu, fois gras on crispy duck skin, chicken drumstick on a Chinese sweet radish salsa, minced 5-spice chicken on a disk of silken tofu, cod braised in a clay pot with baby bok choy, and cubes of tenderloin stir-fired with ginger and green onion in a crispy noodle basket.  Chased down with apple pie, chocolate lava, peanut-encrusted rice balls filled with bean paste with a honey-ginseng tea, and a warm creamy almond "soup" in a new coconut shell.  One of the best dinners ever!
• Strolling through Christmas street party on Orchard Drive, with elaborate lights and decorations, bizarre floats (my favorite - the jumbo sliced pannatone loaf with fern-like shoots springing from its top and dotted with bread loaves in case you didn’t get the "Jesus is the bread of life" theme), a concert.  But mostly filled with shutterbugs milling around.  At any one time, 1/3 were taking photos, 1/3 were posing for photos, and 1/3 were waiting to take a photo or pose in one.  I’m not exaggerating!
• Taking a cable car to Mount Haber (only a 100 meters high or so), and back down to Sentosa Island, which is gradually turning from a beach resort and golf course into an island-sized theme park.  We caught a computer-rendered 3D chair-hurtling "log ride" down a mountain.  Then strolled through Undersea World which held a number of interesting specimens such as the tiny red hearted but otherwise translucent sea angels, giant Japanese Spider crabs, and a long underwater tunnel where we could watch scuba divers feeding the manta rays and hordes of other fish.  Even a dugong.
• The Pink Dolphin show in the lagoon - standard fare with tricks and petting from volunteers.  With quite a jostling crowd and corny tourist patter, it was remarkable only in that we actually saw the pink dolphins.
• Dinner at The Banana Leaf Apolo in Little India, where dinner is served on a banana leaf mat that acts both as a placemat and plate.  Gen was the only one who ate the whole meal of samosas, Tandoori chicken, chicken tikka masala, paneer in a creamy tumeric sauce, and a paneer/potato kofta in saag.  Chased down with mugs of limeade.

Just posted a few photos from last weekend’s trip to Tuscon for the Tuscon Gem and Mineral Show, a city-wide collection of gem, mineral, and fossil collectors and wholesalers from around the world.

Most of the shots are from a hike through Saguaro National Park, and a tour through the practically abandoned Biosphere 2.  Many curious stories behind that expensive experiment!  (I didn’t say failed experiment!  You can’t make me say failed experiment!)

The desert around Tuscon is a pretty lush ecosystem, with jumbles of desert flora everywhere - my photos attempt to make some visual sense of the landscape.  The colors, even in this season in-between hot and wet.

Enjoy.

I did get to see the cultural show after all - quite entertaining with young women whose improbably double-jointed hands flitted around their flowered headpieces like exotic insects, and bow-stanced young men jerking around like marionettes to the drums, then flying into acrobatic twirling that would shame a dervish.  Besides humor and grace, the show also had suspense, as the young men jumped around with elaborate demon masks on, flinging their copious tangles of wooly hair within centimeters of their flailing torches.  I expected the whole costume to erupt in flames any minute!

Today I visited a spice garden near the hotel, associating spices to the plants that provide them.  Who knew pepper was a creeper instead of a tree?  And that cardamom blooms from the bottom of the plant?  The Sri Lankans have an extensive herbal medicine practice, which makes me wonder whether the recipe (prescription?) of spices found in a good curry is intended to have similar curative properties. I picked up a few overpriced items in gratitude for an interesting tour.

Next I headed down to the old Dutch fort at Galle, supposedly a charming old town but in fact I found it a bit ramshackle and ordinary compared to the charming specimens littering Europe.  I suppose part of the appeal is it’s air of being forgotten by the stream of history.  My romantic visions of old colonial splendor shrank as my sense grew of the desparate attempts to simulate something familiar in an impossibly remote and "primitive" place.

I again struggled to make some decent photos, with minimal success, mostly in close-ups, but did enjoy circumnavigating the ramparts.  Each nook was filled with shy, straight-laced looking young Indian (Sri Lankan?) couples surruptitiously necking under the privacy of a colorful umbrella.  The machinery of war turned to the purpose of love…

When sweat began to flow, I stopped by the venerable New Oriental Hotel for a lime and soda (the traditional drink of gastronomically-wary visitors here - the lime is fresh squeezed and refreshing, the fizzy soda is guaranteed to come from a bottle, and the sugar syrup on the side requires boiling to make.)

A few hours was sufficient to circumnavigate the whole promontory, and a bit outside it, and to investigate a few high-class shops tucked in among the dilapadated colonials.  Wanting to ensure my arrival back in Colombo before dark cut the afternoon a bit short - and the drive back was as exciting few hours as usual - passing three fairly dramatic accident scenes en route.

Bits of destruction from the Tsunami are evident along parts of the coast here, but the main infrastructure is back in place (all new bridges and a widened, smoothly paved road.)  Surprisingly, to my eye it is often difficult to tell a building partially destroyed by the wave from the ones that are simply dilapidated.  And as usual, nature seems to protect her own - the palms lining the beaches don’t seem to have taken much of a beating, and every scar has healed over in tropical green.

Expanded photoset here.

The sun is deepening into an orange ball, dim enough to briefly eyeball directly, and dropping more quickly than I ever recall seeing before towards the Indian Ocean.  Paradoxically, as the light dims and the air becomes heavily incensed with a burn-pile of palm leaves somewhere, my mind is clearing and brightening a bit, pulling out of the warm floating semi-coma it’s been in all day, allowing me to think through some of the events and insights of the week.

Those events and insights are both personal and professional, a fortuitous combination that too-rarely accompanies a business trip.  I’ve been in Sri Lanka for five days now, arriving after a 48 hour (minus the time change) trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles to Taipei to Kuala Lumpur, backtracking briefly eastward to Singapore, and finally Colombo.  All that air conditioning left my sinuses a bit clogged and it took a few days for that to clear out too, but by yesterday I was feeling fully time-shifted and physically fit, yet mentally reeling from the firehose of information that accompanies my first trip to the home office as an employee.

I lodged initially at the Havelock Place Bungalow, a small (6-room?) inn mixing old-colonial charm (four-poster beds with mosquito nets) with contemporary styling (the office is approached by a bridge over the swimming pool), and avoids thoroughly the feeling of being the millionth customer in a multinational hotel chain clone.  Co-founder Paul Fremantle had arrived earlier in the day from the UK, and he, Sanjiva, and Asankha, one of the local project leads, joined me at the hotel for a quiet meal.

The next two days were productively spent at the office. Dims arrived from Boston late Monday and James from Bangkok on Tuesday night, uniting the company in one place for the first time since I joined.  On Tuesday after a tasty Sri Lankan buffet lunch we came back to the office and it seemed eerily quiet – only a couple of people working in the normally crowded and bustling office.  And the stragglers were acting quite surreptitious.  Sanjiva came back from a short errand and somebody asked him to look something over in the secondary office down the hall where half the employees work.  He did and was shown into a streamered conference room with cake and 40 candles for his birthday!  Since the average employee age is well under 30, many joked about the number of candles (which, as I’ve got a couple of years on him made me feel my age in a new and uncomfortable way), sang a rousing but poly-chromatic Happy Birthday, and called for a speech to which Sanjiva smilingly threatened “what goes around comes around!” and directly cut the first slice of cake.  The affection and respect that he’s given by all as a CEO, a mentor, a role model, and friend is palpable. The community he’s created is one of the most valuable assets of the company, as well as simply being quite moving on a personal level.

On Wednesday afternoon about 15 of us piled onto a tour bus, which seems drastically outscale on the Sri Lankan roads, and drove south for a couple of hours to the Bentota Taj Exotica hotel and resort, sprawling terraces of rooms built above and around a rocky outcrop on a wide miles-long honey-colored beach lined with coconut palms and pandamas.

Between Wednesday night and Friday afternoon we planned out the 2007 product and release lineup and estimated resource constraints, with breaks to nibble on a constant oversupply of tasty snacks and meals, served al fresco poolside, in lounges with panoramic views and live entertainment, on torchlit patios with a surf-crashing soundtrack.  An arranged local cultural dance performance fell square on the WSDL conference calls and as we’re rushing to end that prolonged madness I felt, not compelled, but not eager either, to heed the Outlook calendar-chimes of duty.

Late Friday afternoon the bus returned and all but I piled on for the return trip to Colombo, and for Dims, Paul, and James, far beyond Colombo.  I stayed on for the weekend to relax and explore more of the southern coast of this island gem.  After a swim in the palm-shaded pool and a bit of time with a book, I returned to my room and essentially crashed - sleeping deeply for an hour and waking up dazed and empty.  A couple of trips through the buffet (hate to see how much I’ll gain on this trip) was insufficient to overcome my stupor, and I realized I’ve been processing far too much information about the world and my place in it physically, mentally, culturally, artistically, temporally over the last week to quickly snap out of.

Part of this overload is a deeper level of culture shock than I’ve ever expected, driven by a new-found awareness of the depths of my Western (partially in the European sense, but dominantly in the American sense) roots, the possibly irreconcilable difference between pioneer self-reliance and the colonially service-oriented culture here - where there are servants (hate the word even) to free one from the simplest of tasks.  For instance, why would one walk a few blocks when a 50 cent tuk tuk ride is at hand? Why would one drive on these crazy roads when one gets a driver along with the car for not dramatically more than a rental car elsewhere?  Paradoxically, I’m aware of how much I rely on Deanna to pull me out of solitary-reliance mode.

The difference in space itself here is also palpable to me.  I feel increasingly that I’m shuffling or more accurately being shuffled from luxurious cocoon to luxurious cocoon, transiting safely and again luxuriously through a crowded, ungroomed, lively, jumbled, confusing corridor.  Contrast that to the Western spaciousness where much of the wilderness beauty lies between the so-called civilized parts.  Just as with Stegner, landscape is ingrained in my soul.  I even realized recently that artistic endeavors lie in my future, they are undoubtedly landscapes in the broadest sense.  Here, I don’t feel the landscape yet and am wondering if I ever really can - is there really a landscape in the sense I’m accustomed to?  I’ve been unable to even make photographs other than a desultory snapshot or two.  The difference in the feeling of "rightness" between being in the High Sierra wilderness surrounded by not a single creature comforts, and being in this place, surrounded by them, shocks me.

Saturday thus turned from a planned day of exploration to a day of recuperation.  A long stint by and in the pool after breakfast, followed by a long walk to the farthest end of the beach, the remaining bulk of a Wallace Stegner essay collection, the development of an uneven yet luxurious sunburn and stinging foot-soles from the sandy hike and broiling rocks around the beach-end tidepools, practicing occasional but varied styles of hawker defense, the lazy contemplation of middle-aged potato-shaped cellulite-bulging Russians with horrifyingly scanty swimming attire, and thankfully of a few nubile ones that can actually pull it off, and another dip in the pool restored me to my rightful mind and put me in the mood to write/think and prepare for more active pursuit tomorrow.  I’ve arranged for (with the intermediary assistance of the concierge of course) a car and driver for the day and plan to visit Galle, probably the Brief Gardens, and anywhere else the winds of interest take me before returning to the Havelock Bungalow for another work-focused week.

Clearly this is turning into an unforgettable trip.  I’d apologize for the long post but most of you will certainly have abandoned the narrative already and thus miss the apology ;-).

By now the orange sun is long replaced by a thin crescent of moon in deep black, fading and darkening again as the heavy tropical atmosphere thickens imperceptibly into full cloud cover.  I’ve relocated from my nook overlooking the beach to a poolside lounger, from which I can smell the tandoori charcoal and the imminent buffet in the warm air.  Soon it’s pull will be irresistible.

My 2006 travel exceeded the prior year by quite a bit, logging over 70,000 air miles (not even counting indirect flights.)  I’m not sure whether 2007 will be better or worse - replacing lots of little trips to Seattle with a few long ones to Sri Lanka…

The weather improved for the post-Christmas pre-New Year’s interlude, and we managed to get outside a few times.  Pictures here.

Been in Sunriver all week with brothers, parents, nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law, spouse, daughters, aupair.  It’s been snowing a little pretty much every day, so we’ve stayed in with lots of games.  I did find a few geocaches though before the snow set in, and sneaked out a few times into the icy air for a few photos.  See them here.