Sri Lanka trip (pic + foreign policy wonkery warning)
Hi all,
So I wound up in Colombo, Sri Lanka during Secretary Kerry's visit there and I thought I'd show some of the pictures I took.
First, just to get the hate out of the way:
That was the beach. Sorry. Before you yell, it was 114 degrees, and the Sun this far south (6.9344° N) is like a blast furnace.
Colombo was getting ready for two big festivals, May Day (the government is at least nominally socialist) and Wesak, which is sort of the Buddha's birthday (or it combines celebrating his birth, enlightenment, and ascension all at once, or something like that). I was busy on May Day so I couldn't get to the rallies, but for Wesak Colombo was full of decorations like these:
Which are lit up at night (incidentally, the Cinnamon had the best Caesar Salad I've ever eaten):
For lovers of odd liquors, here is a glass of Old Ceylon arrack, basically a coconut whiskey that tastes like bitters:
And here's the colonial-era hotel I had it in (we were in the equivalent of the Howard Johnson down the road):
School was closed for the holidays, so this high school was empty:
And this nearby church was closed for the weekend out of respect for the Buddhist festival:
After all the stuff was set up, I had some time to walk around the old town. The area is divided into Fort (which was once a fort and is now just a pretty boring commercial downtown area) and Slave Island, which is where I ended up walking, around Lake Gangarama:
(That's a canal to the lake; it goes by Temple Trees, which is their Prime Minister's residence -- security being what it is, I couldn't get pictures of that so I just got the canal)
Anybody know what kind of bird that is?
The canal opens into the lake, with a Buddhist temple floating in the water.
A stork, maybe?
Here's a fixed temple (on pylons; not floating)
Beware the monkeys. This isn't a langurwallah; that's a trained macaque and his handler. The monkey does tricks for passers-by, but it was way too hot and he just kind of stared at everybody.
So, while most attention on South Asia is rightly pointed at Nepal, Kerry's visit to Sri Lanka is still important.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/02/us-srilanka-usa-kerry-idUSKBN0NN02V20150502
Sri Lanka was for decades run by one family, the Rajapaskas. They prosecuted a long and bloody war against the Tamil population in the northeast, a conflict which created the Tamil Tigers and, with it, modern international terrorism as we know it (the Tigers invented the suicide vest, for instance). The scion of that family was to everyone's surprise pretty soundly defeated in elections earlier this year by Sirisena (a long-standing opposition figure who most thought was being kept around like Caesar did to Cicero, as "proof" that they didn't literally kill every opponent), and apparently the US is pretty happy to finally have somebody we can work with in Colombo. Already the signs are hopeful: the constitution has been amended to weaken the Presidency (term limits were applied for the first time) and strengthen the Parliament and Judiciary, and Tamils have been included in the new government (Rajapaska won a military "victory" of sorts a few years ago by essentially killing everyone even slightly associated with LTTE, but obviously that only lasts a few years and the new government wants to forestall a return of the violence). The new PM (with the strengthened Constitutional powers) is Wickremesinghe, who is a long-term opposition figure like Sirisena but also kind of the Sri Lankan Joe Biden in terms of his verbal filter or lack thereof.
Kerry's words were very strong coming from a diplomat; he actually said "we're very glad you won" to Sirisena. He also (and this is a huge point) has pledged to help seize and recover assets stolen by the outgoing regime (several of the Rajapaskas have US citizenship -- can you imagine a foreign citizen being a country's defense minister? It happened). If we can actually recover the looted money that would do a lot for the US in Sri Lankans' eyes.
On a side note, Kerry fielded some questions about the nearby Maldive Islands, whose government is unfortunately looking more like the Rajapaska mold (they had a "reform" President a few years ago, who is now in jail on corruption charges that are widely considered trumped-up).
Anyways, just wanted to let y'all see a corner of the world I visited this week...
= new reply since forum marked as read
There was actually a rock out in the ocean between India and Sri Lanka that the two countries had been disputing for decades. As is the nature of things, these disputes got more and more heated, until a couple of years ago both of them launched Navy flotillas for "training operations" in the area just to kind of prove it was theirs. They got there and... the rock had been submerged by rising sea levels.
Global peace through climate change... 
