A tragedy that deserves remembrance in Sri Lanka

I’m standing, heart bursting, in her ruined home, which survives as a ramshackle photograph exhibition near the resort of Hikkaduwa that pays tribute to the worst disaster in living Sri Lankan memory.

I left you last week in Kandy boarding a train to Hill Country, but it feels wrong to start there, given the seismic effects – literally and metaphorically – of the tsunami. It feels right to write about Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans are a resolute people and people tell me they want tourists to come despite the tumultuous, multifarious issues of the last two decades.

So here we are, exploring Hill Country. Historically, Scots made this cool breezy land that drifts above Munro height their home. A tea parcel has “Edinburgh” emblazoned across the hillside. Lipton was Scottish; Taylor too, so I visit the latter’s operation. Scottish heritage lingers, with machines forged in Scotland still proudly powering on in a country of stoicism.

After a brief swirl around Hill Country, I descend to the coast. That coast. The tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 hangs heavy. I left it out last week as it needs respect on its own, a scything aberration from any norm that only Mother Nature could ever explain in all her dumb power.

I stay in the slick Cinnamon Bentota Beach. Scotland again surfaces as the architect behind it – Geoffery Bawa – cut his teeth in a Scottish firm. A plaque plays tribute to Asia’s César Manrique. The hotel is sublime – natural curves sweep around the landscape and fit into the beachfront, rather than try to dominate; hardwoods and stone abound. I sleep, eat and relax here. Cosseted, I see why people flock to Sri Lanka’s south coast to flop on a beach.

But the coast harbours another story. The tsunami – an omnipresence that the government would like to forget. But so many people still carry trauma. And the tortuous weight of lost relatives. All 35,000 of them; more if you count the 5000 missing and others uncounted in the Tamil Tiger north. It’s hard to comprehend. I think of Hampden. Of that recent full house against Spain standing alongside cheery faces singing together: men and women. And children.

The tsunami spared no one. That’s not true. People did survive, somehow, in the most cruel Russian roulette. I see a photo of a five-year-old girl clinging to a tree who survived as her parents evaporated. This “positive” flicker is thundered asunder at the Community Tsunami Education Centre, where I find one of the old railway carriages from the train that skipped gleefully out of Colombo with over 1700 holidaymakers. In a cruel twist, the phone call to stop it at the penultimate station wasn’t answered.

The train did stop when it hit the first wave’s floodwater. Locals and passengers hid behind the sturdy metal, pushing children atop the carriage to “safety”.

“Then the second wave came,” explains my guide Heesara. “It surged across the ocean at 700km/h, soaring to 15m-high as it hit our village.”

People had little chance – the train was tossed 100m into the jungle. Only a dozen bewildered souls survived.

Walking around their exhibition, Heesara explains I should observe silence. He doesn’t have to – I couldn’t speak if he paid me. The mangled twists of metal scream of mangled lives, of hope snuffed out. People drowned inside holding their loved ones. Of mothers who could no longer hold their babies, letting go for the last time. Others were mercifully crushed instantly. This carriage writes the dictionary definition of incomprehensible.

My time at the two exhibitions blends into a wet-eyed collage that I cannot bear, but have to see. People here want you to see. In an unpalatable ocean of savagery, one photo strikes. A bulldozer squashes corpses into a mass grave, trying to stave off cholera.

It’s not just the villagers who died, but the puffy white limbs of us too: Westerners on family holidays.

This tsunami-hit coast is a hard place to take positivity from. I do when Kamani de Silva tells me of Scottish travellers who survived. They refused to catch flights home to their known worlds, staying to help the locals sift through unspeakable horrors.

The second room of her exhibition is topped with the canvas tent she lived in for six months. It talks of looking after the planet. Of not wasting lives in conflict and division. She has stared down a natural barrel packed with 15m-high waves. Anyone visiting Sri Lanka should come here; must come here. I leave a donation. It’s all I have, but not enough. It never could be.

Kamani points me to a massive Buddha statue memorial that vaults above the village, striking as it shows the height of the highest waves. And a memorial on the site of a mass grave. The solidity of the modern isn’t as moving, nor as powerful, as the lost emptiness. As we peer out to the ocean she says: “No one here was untouched by the tsunami. It is still with us. And now you must tell people to come from your country.”

Robin travelled to Sri Lanka with Hayes & Jarvis (www.hayesandjarvis.co.uk), who offer tailor-made trips taking in both Hill Country and the coast.