Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

For his pains, Leonard Woolf got very little for the novel. His friend Lytton Strachey said, "I was disappointed to see that it was about nothing but blacks—whom really I don't much care for." And although it was dedicated to her, Woolf's wife Virginia was indifferent to its merits.

As a despised and overworked expatriate employed by the Singapore government as a university lecturer in the 1960s, I found Woolf's five-volume autobiography in the college's library and read it all. The second volume, Growing, about his years as a despised and overworked colonial officer, gave me heart and helped me to become patient and sympa thetic. In that book he describes the necessity of being efficient—replying to letters on the day they are received, keeping accurate notes, learning to be methodical, developing an interest in the culture. Taking his advice, I followed his example and became productive and a little happier as an alien in Singapore.

"Where staying?" the scooter rickshaw driver asked me.

I had no idea. It was now late afternoon, and the light would soon be gone.

"Any hotels here?"

"Hotel there," he said and pointed up the road, east along the coast, the way I'd come.

That was how I found the small one-story hotel, salt-crusted, flecked with mildew, and sitting behind a sand dune, the pounding surf and a wild beach on the other side. A German tour group, just arrived, had already marked their territory, hogging the lounge chairs by draping towels on them—though all the chairs were unoccupied except for the towels. These Germans were perhaps the first tourists I'd seen on my trip—the first large group, anyway—and were on an Ayurvedic retreat. They were apparently unfazed by the news of land mines or talk of strife.

I stayed here a few days, made another trip into Hambantota, and continued my story "The Elephant God," writing one day about the main character:

She had come to understand what the solitary long-distance traveler eventually knows after months on the road—that, in the course of time, a trip stops being an interlude of distractions and detours, pursuing sights, looking for pleasures, and becomes a series of disconnections, giving up comfort, abandoning or being abandoned by friends, passing the time in obscure places, inured to the concept of delay, since the trip itself was a succession of delays.

Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giving away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. It was not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights.

"Nice and quiet," the hotel manager said, passing me one day. "You can relax here."

But I had not come all this way to relax. I told him I would be leaving the next day.

"Avurudu," he said and smiled. "Impossible. No buses."

"I'll find a car"

"No cars. Nothing. Everyone home with family. Not auspicious to travel."

He showed me a prominent item in that day's newspaper. Favorable Avurudu times were listed, including this one: "The auspicious time to leave home for work falls at 6:35 A.M. on Thursday, April 20...Wear gold colored clothing and set off facing the North, after consuming a meal of moru and rice."

That was three days away. The whole country was shut down until then. Nothing was running, no buses, no trains.

"Where you are going, sir?" the manager asked as I checked out the next morning.

When I said Colombo, he laughed, meaning "impossible."

I walked to the road and hitchhiked. An overcrowded van took me almost to Matara. I had to crouch in an uncomfortable position, with passengers' elbows in my kidneys. Finally, after more than four hours, I could stand it no longer. I got out, hitchhiking again, and after half an hour a man in a small car picked me up. Near Galle, at a bend in the road, I saw a large painted banner: Warm Welcome for US-Sri Lanka Friendship, and a great crowd of excited people awaiting their American visitors, on whom they would lavish Avurudu hospitality, garlands of flowers and baskets of fruit.

I saw no sign of the Americans nearby, but farther down the road I heard the unmistakable yak-yak-yak of a helicopter settling to earth, somewhere out of sight in the jungle. Later I found out that the helicopter contained three U.S. senators and their wives, who had come to visit a tsunami refugee camp. A junket: politicians picking up a family vacation, being personally thanked and rewarded for their country's generosity. There was no better example of official travel and unofficial travel: the swoop and buzz of the senatorial chopper overhead as I stood on the narrow road, bumming a ride.

THE SLOW TRAIN TO KANDY