Quest for the Ratty Hat pt. II

That evening/ morning was miserable. I spent hours being sent from one counter, desk, and office to another to try to change my flight, contact the embassy, etc., but nothing went right: the internet was down, and everyone sent me to someone else to talk to, just to have that person send me back. One man finally explained that what I had to do was go to the Indian High Consulate in Colombo and get a special stamp in my paasport that would allow me to get back into the country. I went through security so many times that night (some of the offices were outside the secure area, some were inside) that they got to know me and would just wave me through. I started to think about Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

Later that morning I finally got back to Columbo and the airline office where I was able to bump my flight back about five days. The Indian High Consulate wasn't open for another hour, so I gave up and caught a train back to Kandy. There, I spent some time making lost and found posters with pictures and a description of my hat. I included a Sri Lankan translation explaining the reward, as well as the phone number of my friend Roshini in Columbo. I then had 100 copies made. Why so many? I could have lost the bloody thing anywhere between Ella, Kandy, and the top of Adam's Peak. Still, I thought I'd at least try. I pasted a few up in Kandy, then got on the train to Delhousie/ Adam's Peak. And I got off the train at the next stop, running out with a pre-glued piece of paper to slap up in a visible spot, before running back and jumping on the train. I did this, oh, about two dozen times, maybe, frantically running past people, pasting a poster and running back. (Did I mention I had only about 8 hours sleep for the three nights previous? That might explain a few things.)  I'm pretty sure everyone thought I was crazy, (I did.) but they were also very helpful. People on the train started asking for posters and one guy even offered to put it up on a local TV channel.

The next day I started climbing the mountain, again, leaving posters at tea stands along the way. I made it about half way, when a hotel said, yes, they had a cap. (They don't really use the word "hat" - everything is a "cap".) That brief hope was quickly extinguished when they brought out an ugly, cheap, red thing. And then, looking at the poster, they noticed that I had left a number out of the Roshini's phone number. All those posters I had put up? Maybe 50? Yep, they were all wrong.  (My email address was right, but few people actually use email there.)

F*ck.

So, resigned and partially defeated, I headed back down. I spent the evening down in town, fixing the remaining posters. After about three hours sleep, I got up, and started climbing back up the damn mountain - again. After fixing all the posters I had left before, I came back down, and was asleep by 2:00AM.

The next day while waiting for the train to Ella, I bought a hat. It was kind of like the red one I was shown the previous day - beige, and with a brim that was stiff from the plastic insert. It was pretty crappy. In Ella I checked back into the hotel I stayed at before, but I weren't  able to find it. The thing that amazed me, though, was how kind everyone was. Instead of looking at me as the semi-obsessed, crazy gringo that I was, they took the cause on almost as if it were there own. The hotel called others. A rickshaw driver took me to a nearby rural village, explaining that "It's not a hat a Sri Lankan person would keep or wear - maybe a Tamil." and asked the farmers there if they had seen it. Back in town someone told me to ask Telakasheeny (Tela, for short) - a local homeless guy who wore a similar hat. (Hmmmmm....) When I found Tela, and asked him to keep an eye out for it, he looked at me with the utmost sincerity, and said "I will do my very best, sir." as though I had just asked him to storm a machine gun nest.

The best though, was that night before I went to bed. A young guy in his late teens who worked at the hotel came to me and in broken english tried to explain he had looked all over the hotel without any luck. I thanked him for trying, and he said, as the tears started to well up in his eyes: "I'm sorry... it's just... you come all the way from America... and now... this happen... your grandma's cap... I just... in here (pointing to his heart) I feel so..." shaking and dropping his head, wiping away the tears. Great - now, I'm getting all weepy- eyed. "Oh, hey...no... it's OK." I tell him. He looks up at me and points to my chest: "Are you sure you OK... in here?" (Oh god, the kids killing me here.) "Yeah, yes, of course. It's OK." I reply, and give him a smile. He smiles back and I give him as manly a one-armed man hug as I can before saying goodnight.

The next morning I saw Tela. Still no hat, but I gave him my old sleeping bag in grattitude, and because I really didn't have much use or room for it anymore. The rest of the day was spent traveling back to Kandy, repeating the running around like a headless chicken routine to fix phone numbers on the posters along the way. I met a train conductor from before who was very Buddhist about the whole thing, explaining that loss is a natural part of life. He later explained that he had lost his wife and daughter in the tsunami that ravaged the coast in 2004. He was on a train at the time, so wasn't at home when it happened. Talk about putting things into perspective.

In Kandy that night I bought another hat, better than the previous one, though still pretty cheap and crappy. The next day I was able to get my passport stamped by the Indian High Consulate saying that I was going to be allowed back to India becasue of  "Humanitarian Consideration". And that same night, after having put a "lost" ad in two of the Sri Lankan newspapers, one in English and the other Singalese, I realized that I had lost the hat I had just bought. The situation was going from sad to pathetic. Somehow, over nearly 10 years, and maybe tens of thousands of miles, I had managed keep a hold of one hat. Now, I was unable to keep from loosing one after 24 hrs.

Maybe the Indian High Commision was trying to tell me something.

Quest for the Ratty Hat pt. I

So, after my jungle adventures I did a few normal tourist activities, like visit the Pinnewalla Elephant orphanage, one of Sri Lanka's top attractions. There's fun stuff like watching the baby elephants drink two quarts of milk in about two seconds, and not-so-fun stuff like seeing the elephant whose foot was blown off by a land mine. Definitely a downer, that. I also bought an elephant leather satchel there to replace my worn-out backpack, "The Albatross." (I talked the guy down to $25 for a used one, as opposed to $65 for a new one. Aren't I clever?) (PS - just kidding about the elephant leather part.)

I then went to Anaradhapura, an archaeological site with plenty of ruins and large dagobas. (Also known as stupas or pagodas - they're those big, domed temples.) I also visited Dambulla, where a bunch of large Buddha statues lay around in caves looking wise and peaceful. Buddhism seemed pretty boring compared to other religions until I saw some of the paintings there depicting his life. It could have been Homer's Odyssey, starring  Mr. Siddhartha Gautama. (I'd learn later that there are lots of different types of Buddhism. The Nepalese ones get pretty wild by incorporating some of the Hindu stuff - multi-armed, tusked, monster-gods and such.) From there I also visited Sigiriya - my favorite. It was a impenetrable fortress created high on top of a steep rock mesa, also famous for its vibrant frescoes of some rather busty, actually really busty, women. Do a Google search and you'll see what I mean.

Another attraction everyone kept telling me about was the climb to the top of Adam's Peak. It's where two rather significant things are supposed to have taken place. For the Christians, it's where Adam descended to earth from heaven, and for Buddhists it is where Buddha ascended into Heaven. The guide books mention a visible footprint on the highest rock, though they don't specify who left it. After Israel and the dawning realization that pretty much everywhere in India was a Hindu pilgrimage site, I was burned-out on such places and intentionally avoiding it. Then I heard it was also the highest point of Sri Lanka, and also an unusual climb that most people do at night in order to watch the sun rise, so I changed my mind. (Later research confirmed my suspicion that it is not the tallest peak. But you can't climb that one because it's topped with a government radio tower.)

The morning before I decided to climb it, I got on the train in the small tourist town of Ella. Since I had most of the day to kill, I decided I wanted to take the train the entire way to Kandy to enjoy the scenery. And it is a beautiful ride, on a classic 1940's style train (Not retro - just never updated.) through the mountains, past waterfalls, over old iron rail trestles, and around tea plantations, with the rows of bright green tea bushes lined up in some cool geometric designs. The only bad part was at the end when I missed my stop. (I almost made it, but someone was blocking the doorway - jumping from a moving train is quite possible in this part of the world, and seen as an "At your own risk." endeavor.)

I had to take the bus back to Kandy, where I took another train returning from the direction I had just come. After that, another bus took me into the mountains. Finally, after all that travel, I left my satchel, now filled with all the stuff I wasn't going to take on the climb, at a hostel. It was already almost 8:00PM. To get to the top you climb 5,000 steps - it took me about 3 1/2 hours. The hike is a little surreal - The entire way there are lights and speakers playing traditional music and you can stop almost anywhere to buy goodies or tea. And not only is there a temple at the top, there's a teahouse with a TV right below it. (Makes our mountains back home seem positively primitive by comparison.)  I even had a climbing partner about half of the way - a little dog who, I think, would have gone the entire way had he not fallen asleep when I took a break. (I couldn't bring myself to wake him - why have an animal do something so silly only a human would choose to do it for a reason other than there might be food at the top?)

The guys with the TV teahouse let me sleep on their floor. In the morning they even came over and put a cap on my head to keep me warm (It was surprisingly chilly.) and it was shortly after that that I realized something horrible had happened. I had lost my hat. It was the hat that my recently deceased grandmother had given me nearly ten years ago. The one that had "Made in New Zealand" on the tag - the very first foreign country I had ever visited. It was the hat I had with me my very first day of archaeology survey and every field day since, hiking over thousands of miles throughout the west. It had been to over 40 countries, on my very first train ride, inside the Great pyramid at Giza... the list goes on. And now, it was gone. I had lost Grandma's hat.

At first I was in denial. I had probably left it in my leather satchel below. So, after watching the sunrise, (Yeah, yeah, it was a nice sunrise -whatever. You can't even see the bloody Adam/ Buddha "footprint" - it's covered by the temple.) I practically ran back down the mountain. It wasn't in my bag. I quickly made up a lost and found poster that I posted on the trail, and then grabbed the first bus to the train station. I kept telling myself I didn't really care; it was just an old hat, after all - pretty beat up, the edges were a little frayed. The sweatband had come apart a long time ago. It was sweat-stained and even smelled a little funny. Either way, I didn’t have time to go looking for it - I was supposed to fly back to India the next day and still wanted to see the Colonial Portuguese port city of Galle. I made it there that night just in time to watch Sri Lanka loose the World Cup to India. (Soccer is a HUGE deal here -  I wasn't the only one to go to bed upset that night.)

The next day before leaving for the airport I saw a small tin globe with the following cities on it for the USA: NY; DC; Atlanta; Dallas; LA; San Francisco; and Billings. That's it. Not Chicago or Seattle. Not even Salt Lake City or Denver, but Billings, MT. A town I know well, as it is about 2 hrs from where I grew up. It has a population of about 100,000 people. Go Billings, I guess, for somehow making an impression in Asia.

That night at the airport I said farewell to the hat and went to get on the plane. With flashbacks of the Denver incident, I quickly realized there was something wrong. There was a lot of discussion behind the counter about my passport - a lot more than there should have been. I was hoping it was just because of me now having two bags, but I knew what was happening because I had been warned by another traveler in Sri Lanka. They weren't going to let me go back for two months because of a recent law designed to, somehow, keep terrorists with a tourist visa out of India.

It looked like I was now going to have plenty of time to go find my hat.