UNA WATUNA BEACH VACATION
I have dreamed for over a year of coming to Nooit Gedacht Heritage Hotel and just sitting for a month, a good occupation for an 86 year old. But when I found out that Thalatha and Winsor would take a little vacation and come south with me I was delighted. We had a great time in Kandy, staying at the Sarvodaya Guest House. And here I invited them to stay with me at Nooit Gedacht. But they were not on vacation to sit. When we first arrived here we had a good meal at Nooit Gedacht and then walked down to the beach at Una Watuna.
The beach was part of the reason that I wanted to spend a month here. When I first visited here with a student group in 1986 (rooms at the Una Watuna Beach Resort were $4 a night) and the crescent beach was wide white sand and free of people. There were a few hotels and restaurants above the beach where you could get a good cheap meal, the Happy Banana was one such place. You could sit at outdoor tables separated from the beach by a wall and watch the waves breaking on the beach. It was idyllic. At the end of each Sri Lanka/India college trip we would come down to Una Watuna to relax before flying home and did this at the end of ten trips over 20 years. This is what I wanted to come back to.
The last visit in 2004 in early December was as pleasant as any of the others. We spent three days swimming and lazing around and then flew home on Air Lankan Airlines. Three weeks later on the day after Christmas, a devastating tsunami brought a wave of water 20 feet high that destroyed much of Una Watuna and killed thousands of people in Una Watuna and Galle, just down the road. It was a Sunday morning and the tourists were asleep in their hotel rooms or perhaps lounging on the beach while the people living in Una Watuna saw the sea drain dry and sensing something terribly wrong headed for higher ground. So many of them escaped and many tourists, people just like us three weeks before, drowned.
At Warren Wilson College we raised $15,000 for tsunami relief and brought it here with a Warren Wilson church group in 2006. Due to funding by a Clinton/Bush led effort the hotels had been rebuilt. Una Watuna was idyllic again.
This was what I dreamed of coming back to. So the first thing we did after eating was to walk down to see the beach and get our bearings. But everything had changed. My sleepy idyllic beach town had become the equivalent of Gatlinburg at the entrance to the Smoky Mountain National Park near Asheville.
In the 90 degree heat and 90 degree humidity the narrow street to the beach was now filled in both directions with every kind of whizzing vehicle, making walking difficult and the street was lined with every kind of tourist shop offering clothing and souvenirs or something to eat.
And when we got to the beach the beach, almost down to the water line, was cluttered with lounge chairs under umbrellas with overweight Northern Europeans, who were were escaping cold, dark short days for sunshine and 12 hour days, roasting themselves as they tried to get a tan. I was embarrassed. This is what I had lured Thalatha and Winsor to. There were no Sri Lankans. In fact before the tourist deluge that started in the 90’s and didn’t really get going until the Sri Lankan civil war was over in 2009 with random bombs exploding in unexpected places, Sri Lanka wasn’t much of a tourist destination. Villagers living along the water even used the seaside as outdoor toilets where it was easy to clean yourself. No one went swimming, no one dreamed to going to the beach for a vacation, the beach was just an ordinary beach. And to this day Sri Lankans don’t go to the beach. The idea of going to the beach has come from Sri Lankans who have lived abroad where the beach is a craze and is being introduced to those who haven’t traveled.
When you think about it. Lying half naked in the sun when the temperature is year around 90 degrees and the humidity 90 percent, particularly if you have white skin prone to sunburn and cancer seems nuts. Even at Nooit Gedacht most of the people are stretched out by the pool, cooking away. This isn’t a form of recreation that appeals much to Sri Lankans. Any self respecting Sri Lankan woman, including Thalatha, won’t go out into the sun without opening an umbrella over themselves.
What stuck me forcefully when we were making our way through streams of tourists to the beach was that this was exactly the wrong place to which to have brought Winsor and Thalatha. Our first brief excursion through Una Watuna to the beach was going to be the last. And Winsor and Thalatha were not going to spend their days in swimsuits (I doubt if they had ever worn a swimsuit) by the pool at Nooit Gedacht. So what were we going to do for the two days were were here? This worried me greatly, but it shouldn’t have. They already had other things that they wanted to do, to visit Matara down the coast and to visit Galle nearby and so that is what we have done the two days that they are here and had a great time doing it.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 