Yala West (Sri Lanka)

...eastwards along the beach from Yala Safari Lodge. The breakers of the Indian Ocean pounded the sand to our right, then scoured back out again with a raucous undertow. Even at the best of times this is not a beach for bathing and there was no one else out in the mid-morning heat. The sand scorched our bare feet. Sunlight seethed on the surface of the ocean; somewhere out there, a thousand miles or so beyond the horizon, lay the Sumatran coast.
...the people I met at Yala will have been among the victims, even if I cannot put a name to them, whereas there is no way of knowing who may or may not have been lost in the more populous places. Perhaps that’s why it is Yala that has brought home to me the reality of the disaster.

Like everyone else I have seen the heart-wrenching newsreel footage of Galle and other coastal places, with the wreckage and the rubble and the frantic efforts ... more

My wife and I walked eastwards along the beach from Yala Safari Lodge. The breakers of the Indian Ocean pounded the sand to our right, then scoured back out again with a raucous undertow. Even at the best of times this is not a beach for bathing and there was no one else out in the mid-morning heat. The sand scorched our bare feet. Sunlight seethed on the surface of the ocean; somewhere out there, a thousand miles or so beyond the horizon, lay the Sumatran coast.

Most of our fellow-tourists were out on safari in the National Park, or at least in the fifty-odd square miles of it (out of four hundred) that were accessible, bucketing around in the backs of four wheel drive vehicles in the hope of sighting some of the rarer wild animals. A few others would be relaxing round the open-air bar or in the pool.

The Safari Lodge itself was a simple structure, all single storey and of light construction. The sleeping accommodation was designed to face the sea, with wooden-framed French windows opening onto the beach. The bar and restaurant behind were roofed over, but surrounded by open verandas rather than walls, to allow guests to drink and dine with some hope of a cool breeze from the sea to blow away the steamy heat.

We ambled on along the shore, leaving the Safari Lodge behind. There are no other tourist hotels or guesthouses for miles along this stretch of coast – we had left all that behind as we approached the nature reserve the evening before. Behind the beach here is mainly scrubby jungle, occasionally separated from the shore by sultry lagoons which harbour flamboyant tropical birds – pelicans and painted storks – on the surface and crocodiles beneath. The land is flat, punctuated only by the occasional rocky outcrop.

Less than a mile along the beach we reached a headland, with a little bay recessed into the shore beyond. Here we were surprised to find a fishing village - surprised because there had been no sign of a road forking off to reach it on the approach to the Safari Lodge. We peered around the rocks and bushes at the edge of the beach, uncertain whether to go further.

There was little sign of activity, but the village was evidently populated – garments hung out to dry beside the palm-thatched shacks. Narrow wooden boats like elongated canoes, brightly painted in turquoise, ochre and green, with lashed poles as outriggers, were pulled up on the sand. There was no jetty or harbour. The design of the boats looked as if it had been unchanged for hundreds of years; they bore no sign of engines.

The huts of the village were dotted among the dunes, without roads or even tracks between them. We saw no cars or other vehicles. There was a larger, maybe communal, building at the far end of the bay with a corrugated iron roof, but no poles carried electric wires even to this relatively sophisticated structure. Despite the sea-breeze, the odour of fish from the boats, and other odours, reached us. Human detritus among the bushes at the edge of the beach betrayed the lack of inbuilt sanitation.

Although we saw no one, we heard the murmuring of voices from among the dwellings, and decided against going on into the village. It was not its primitiveness that deterred us, but its timeless isolation, its sense of being insulated from the modern world, from which we would have felt like unwelcome emissaries, intruders.

Instead, we turned back along the beach along the sea edge and made our way back to the Safari Lodge for a drink before lunch. In the bar we chatted to the barman and befriended the hotel cat, a self-confident and well-fed marmalade tom that my wife insisted on calling Chivers. The bar was also home to a semi-wild polecat that scrambled in and out of the rafters to chase lizards.

Later that day, and again the next morning, we went out with a guide – whose name I regret I can no longer remember – in a Land Rover into the nature reserve and duly spotted our share of wildlife: elephants including a magnificent old tusker, sloth bears, monitor lizards, wild boar and jackals. We heard them too, at night-time, calling eerily in the otherwise silent darkness.

By the following afternoon we were gone, away along the coast to Galle.

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That was March 1st 2004. Had it been December 26th, of course, we would have been among the first people in Sri Lanka to see the strange wave rushing remorselessly in from the south-east, and would probably have still been standing there on the beach mesmerised, puzzling over its nature, when it engulfed us.

Even if we’d turned and run, there is nowhere much to run to along the flat coast around Yala. The Safari Lodge, so I understand from reports, has been erased from the landscape, with just “two parapet walls” remaining. I wonder idly which walls these can have been, since I cannot place them in my memory – as if it matters. One assumes the swimming pool also remains, if only as an incongruously tiled hole in the ground, like an archeological excavation.

From a web report I read that all the tourists staying at the hotel at the time were killed together with nearly all the staff, presumably including the friendly barman. Only one assistant chef survived by climbing a tree beside the restaurant and clinging to its branches. Fortunately for him, its roots withstood the onrush. Most of the safari vehicles trekking the reserve, together with their drivers, guides and passengers were also swept away by the water, which surged as much as two miles inland before its power was spent.

Not one of the reports mentions the fishing village. I cannot imagine it exists any longer. Probably the little bay, viewed from our vantage point of that morning, would now appear as if it had never been touched by human habitation.

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Contemplating the cataclysm that has just struck the whole region, I don’t know why my mind keeps wandering back to Yala.

Because it happens to be one of the few places affected that I know, or at least knew, personally? Yes, of course, but I also know/knew Galle, where many more lives must been lost and the devastation must have been much greater. Other places where we stopped along the coast between the two – Habantota, Dondra or Matara – will also have been worse hit than Yala, because they were so much more developed and more heavily populated, meaning there was more to be destroyed and more people to be killed.

Fewer than 250 people died at Yala, out of more than 30,000 in the entire semi-circular sweep of Sri Lanka’s southern and eastern coastline. Against that, though, from a personal viewpoint, I can be fairly sure that some of the people I met at Yala will have been among the victims, even if I cannot put a name to them, whereas there is no way of knowing who may or may not have been lost in the more populous places. Perhaps that’s why it is Yala that has brought home to me the reality of the disaster.

Like everyone else I have seen the heart-wrenching newsreel footage of Galle and other coastal places, with the wreckage and the rubble and the frantic efforts of the survivors to bury their dead and to salvage whatever can be salvaged of their lives. I have seen the newsreels, but still I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be there amid the stench and the shortages and panic and despair.

I have seen no newsreels of Yala – just one aerial photograph of the sandswept foundations of the vanished tourist bedrooms in which we stayed – but I can imagine it, or think I can. There will be little wreckage there, because there was so little to be wrecked. It was an outpost in the wilderness, and the wilderness will have reclaimed it. From the single photo I have seen, most of the palms and frangipani trees that fringed the beach remain; it is the buildings that have been uprooted. Doubtless there is debris, but the debris will have been strewn over a huge area of bush and jungle, lost in the lagoons and mangrove swamps.

The overturned jeeps and land rovers will be recovered from the Nature Reserve. Such bodies as can be found will be identified and buried. Others will rot amid the underbrush, or be picked over by nature’s scavengers.

Strangely and thought-provokingly, all the reports from the area remark on how few of the reserve’s wild animals appear to have become victims. An Associated Press photographer who flew over the wave-swept park by helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, but not a single animal corpse, despite seeing many human ones. Some observers speculate that the animals have a sixth sense that gave them warning, a sense atrophied in over-civilised humanity.

Perhaps. That is not a debate to which I feel I have anything useful to contribute. Nor do I have anything very original, let alone profound, to say about natural disasters. They occur; they destroy some lives and devastate others. In my view if we can help the survivors we ought to, out of common humanity and because, who knows, we may ourselves need help at some time in the future. The world shows no sign of ceasing to be disaster-prone, rather the reverse if anything, as climate change and rising populations exact their inevitable effect. That is no less true because this particular disaster had nothing to do with climate change.

This review is not intended as an appeal, just a personal reflection, but it would be remiss of me if I failed to mention www.dec.org.uk for donations to the Disaster Emergency Committee that is coordinating aid to the needy across the whole tsunami-affected area, and www.emergencydonations.gov.lk for those specifically intended for Sri Lanka.

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As for Yala, the National Park is now closed “indefinitely”.

For a few years perhaps, the area will be much as it was before men ever came there. You could argue that this would be the most fitting fate for it, but I know the locals would not think so. To them, the need for work would be paramount, and for the jobs and foreign currency that tourists bring.

So eventually no doubt the road will be restored and the Safari Lodge rebuilt, in some form or other. Maybe even survivors of the fishing folk, if there are any, or others like them, will return to reconstruct the primeval village round the headland, and life will go on much as before.

Will the people not fear further tsunamis? Yes, of course they will, but they will be impelled by the need to earn a living. They will reflect that life is never risk-free, that men lived along this coast for many generations without such a catastrophe, and will hope that they can do the same again, especially if some early warning system of the kind now being mooted can be put in place. And they will trust the tourists to return, as they have returned to the scene of other disasters, both man-made and natural. The knowledge that Tokyo and San Francisco are both statistically overdue for major earthquakes doesn’t seem to deter people from visiting either.

By the same token, those who were at Yala on 26th December were no doubt fatally unlucky. Had I been there then instead of in March I would have been fatally unlucky, but the odds were always stacked against it – just one day in all the days of my life that I might have been there. If you let such things put you off, you’d never go anywhere and life’s experience would be diminished in consequence.

When and if the National Park is restored, if you are able to visit it and don’t mind taking this slimmest of chances, let me recommend that you do so. It was a lovely and exciting place when I was there, and I have no doubt it will be so again. And the last thing that the local people would want as they rebuild their shattered lives would be for you to stay away and withhold your custom.

© torr 2005

For obvious reasons, most of the mandatory information below is of no immediate relevance. Since I have to include it I have done so on the assumption that Yala will eventually be restored to something like it was when I was there.

 

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