I'm too excited to focus on the paper that I'm writing about defining water governance right now, so I'm writing an email to you. What am I so excited about, you might ask? I'm going kayak surfing tomorrow at a place on the southern coast called mirissa. The surf forecast can be found here. If you're not sure what I mean by surf kayaking, here's a video of people doing what I'll be doing for the next week. I got on a waveski in the pool last weekend and successfully rolled it, which should mean I'm good to go. That was last saturday. Since then, my life has been pretty interesting too, so enough about next week.
Last saturday I went to the pool at the Overseas School of Colombo to paddle a waveski for the first time. They are much more difficult to paddle than kayaks, but they have substantially better performance on waves. I taught the daughter of the guy who let me try his waveski to roll, and now I'm a friend of the family. They took me out for coffee and cake afterwards, and invited me on their surf safari next week. Just before kayaking I went to an 1.5 hour yoga class with my aunt and uncle which was painful because I'm not flexible enough, but felt great afterwards. My uncle's reward to himself for making it through a yoga class is a huge brunch on the beach, so we went to the old Galle Face hotel and had an enourmous brunch. Just after my kayaking session, my uncle and I went to find tennis courts to play, but they were all wet (only clay courts around here), so we opted for saturday pickup ultimate frisbee instead.
On sunday morning I met up with a group from the UK who would travel with my aunt on a dragonfly tour of sri lanka for the next two weeks. They consisted of 4 people from the UK, two of which were a very proper british couple, and two of which live in a wing of a castle on the Island of Man, where Andy (the husband) works as a gardener. His hobby is herpetology, which made the trip much more exciting. After standing around for a couple of hours and identifying all the dragonflies we could see around here, we jumped in a car and headed for Sinharaja where we would find rainforest and a beautiful place to stay for the next two nights. On our way, we stopped off at several of the "good dragonfly spots" to see if we could see any rare dragonfly species. One of our stops was much more eventful than the rest. We spotted not only a new species of dragonfly (one that hasn't been officially described yet) that was just discovered, as well as a hump nosed pit viper that I spotted about 2 feet from one of the tourists feet. We also saw a keelback, a non-venemous sri lankan water snake.
At this point I should mention more about Andy the herpetologist. He is, despite being on a 2 week dragonfly tour, not at all interested in dragonflies. If you point to a dragonfly and ask him about it, he'll mumble something like "oh, that's one of those purple skimmer things" and wander off to turn some rocks over. You can tell where he's been because all of the rocks are turned upside down. When I spotted the first snake of the trip he was so excited that he offered to buy me "several beers", a very significant gesture from someone who I am told doesn't like people as much as he likes reptiles.
We made it to Martin's (our sleeping accomodation) in Sinahraja after it had gotten dark, so everyone but Andy stayed in our common area chatting, writing, and eating snacks. We decided that if we opened a couple of beers it would probably bring Andy running from wherever he was, but when we had finished a beer apiece with no signs of our herpetologist, we decided to go looking for him. We weren't able to find him, but he returned on his own an hour later, covered in leeches (more about leeches later) and bearing on his camera several out of focus pictures he'd taken of a common Krate. For those of you who don't know your south asian snakes, the Krate is one of the most dangerous. There is no antivenom for this snake's bite, and they can be rather aggressive. Andy told us that he'd found this one slithering across one of his boots, grabbed a nearby stick, pinned it down, gotten out his camera, and tried to take pictures while holding stick, camera, and flashlight at the same time. He then drank several beers and picked leeches off his legs grinning the entire time.
There are lots of leeches here. Especially in the rainforest. Before coming here, I did not understand what leeches are. Here, leeches are anywhere from 1/4 inch to 2 inches long, have sticky points at both ends, and are narrow and round. They (for the most part) aren't those big black swimming things you see in the movie "African Queen" which is the only time that I had encountered leeches before. I got a few leech bites, and discovered that they bleed a lot. The leeches inject an anticoagulant when they bite you, so your blood doesn't clot well. They are really gross, but they don't carry any diseases like ticks or mosquitoes, so I think they're about as good as bloodsuckers get.
The next day we decided on an ambitious 2 km hike out to a research station by where we were staying. I only say ambitious because if you haven't been around dragonfly or bird people before, you don't know that they are perhaps the slowest moving group of humans on the planet. It took us 4.5 hours to make it to our 2km mark, at which point it was 12:30 pm, and I was really hungry and calculating that at this pace, we might not make it back for dinner. However, our hike included some cool things like: really pretty birds which one of our guides could identify at a glance or by hearing their call ("hmm, that sounds like a brown crested cuckol"), a few more snakes including a green pit viper, another keelback, and a vine snake that we caught and played with for a bit, and some very cool looking dragonflies. We managed to see a few rare endemic species, one of which was only discovered in the last couple years when people started looking for dragonflies above 10m. These dragonflies live 15-20m up in the rainforest and almost never come down to ground level.
We made it back in less time than it took us to get out there, and I decided to go for a swim in the stream below our lodge before dinner with my aunt. As I waded into the water, I felt a few small nips at my legs, and then felt a much stronger nip at one of my toes. I dashed out of the water, but saw my aunt laughing at me. She told me that there are fish in the river that like to nibble on any dead skin you have on your feet, and that some spas charge a large sum of money to sit in a pool with these fish. When I put my feet back in the water, a swarm of tiny fish instantly appeared and began nibbling on me feet. After a few seconds, some 3-4 inch long catfish also appeared and began to nibble as well, with a much greater effect. After getting used to it, the treatment felt very good and I walked away with much cleaner leech bites and feet.
The next day I had to return to Colombo to continue my work at IWMI, so I took a bus back. The majority of people here speak little to no english, so finding my way around usually involves me speaking some broken sinhalese and looking for someone who speaks english. At one place where I had to switch busses, a nice man directed me to a bus to Pelawatte (the place where my office is) and then asked me if "you want enjoy Sri Lankan girls?" At first I thought that he asked if I enjoy Sri Lanka, to which I replied that I do enjoy Sri Lanka, but when he asked again, I got his meaning. I replied "no, no thank you" to which he said, "you are a good man!". I'm still not sure about this encounter...
Anyway, the bus system here, though confusing, works quite well and is incredibly cheap. It cost me about $1.20 for a 2 hour busride a quarter of the way across the country. I now feel much more free to travel wherever I want. For the last three days I've been in the office working on my water governance project. I'm now collaborating on a project about defining water governance in addition to my water governance index project. It's interesting stuff, kind of like a Topicality debate happening in real life.
That's all for now, I'll send another email when I return from my surfing safari. As always, if you have time, send me an update about your lives. I'm the youngest person that I know here which is quite a change from being a post-bac bum at Whitman.
Cheers,
Luke
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