Sri Lanka Letter: Sri Lanka is the island formerly known as Ceylon. And Ceylon was to tea what Brazil still is to coffee. They've got an awful lot of tea in Sri Lanka but nobody ever wrote a song about it. The shock news is that they drown it in hot milk. Instead of the tiptoe through the taste buds that comes with a great cuppa, you have a trip down memory lane to those hot-to-hold glasses you took as a child to help you sleep.
Normally journalists get only to exotic locations when there is violence and/or destruction. If it bleeds it leads, unfortunately. Thanks to the second intifada, I got to see the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem all by myself. The tsunami and its aftermath brought thousands of hacks to Sri Lanka in the past year. But it's probably fair to say most of them would come back as tourists if they got the chance.
The tsunami was of course a great tragedy. The loss of life and all the disruption and displacement have left the people in a semi-traumatised state. Their faces have a disconsolate all-cried-out look that was hauntingly familiar. Then I realised the last time I saw that expression was in New York after 9/11.
But they still break into a smile of welcome for the visitor in Sri Lanka. For once the brochures are telling the truth. It's not as if the people haven't enough to be miserable about if they felt so inclined. Quite apart from the tsunami, which took more than 30,000 lives in an instant, they have come through two decades of armed conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the minority Tamils. An estimated 60,000 people had died by the time a ceasefire agreement was signed by both sides in 2002.
We know from our own experience that ceasefires can be shaky. The Sri Lankan peace process has come under severe pressure with the assassination of foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar last August and several deadly attacks on soldiers and civilians since the beginning of this month. The renewal of violence comes after the election of President Mahinda Rajapakse on a hardline ticket on November 17th.
The presidential elections, incidentally, were monitored by the European Union, with former Fine Gael MEP John Cushnahan as head of the election observation mission. The affable Belfastman has already observed three parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka for the EU in 2000, 2001 and 2004.
Sri Lanka is 93rd out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI) for 2005. Compiled by the United Nations Development Programme, the HDI is based on a combination of life expectancy, adult literacy and standard of living. Ireland is 8th and Ethiopia 170th on the table.
But an even more telling statistic is that Sri Lanka has one of the lowest levels of HIV/Aids in the world. Considering how Aids and poverty go hand in hand, or claw in claw, the estimated figure of 3,500 people living with HIV on the island at the end of 2003 is astonishingly low. Compare it with South Africa's incidence of 5.4 million and 2,800 for Ireland, according to the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS. Foreigners I met attributed the low Sri Lanka figure to sexual "repression", which suggests that repression may have its advantages.
Malaria is mainly confined to the more remote areas of Sri Lanka but dengue fever is said to be a problem throughout the country.
Sri Lanka has not advanced in leaps and bounds economically like its giant neighbour India. The tsunami inevitably killed off the tourist trade for a while but there are signs of recovery. If the peace process can be restored, there will be beneficial effects for the economy. It's a country of great natural beauty and an astonishing profusion of wildlife, but drive slowly because an iguana may be crossing the road and these extraordinary creatures like to take their time.
The handiest way to get around Colombo, the country's capital, is by tuk-tuk. These are tiny scooter-taxis, little more than automated rickshaws, which bob in and out of the traffic like minnows in a shark pool. Don't do it if you like your lungs. My driver coughed and spluttered, but any humanitarian concerns I had for his life expectancy were replaced by more immediate anxieties for my own as we narrowly avoided crashing into a sleek saloon at an intersection.
Ireland and Sri Lanka have something in common: we are the same size. In fact, ours is the larger island by about 5,000sq km, but they beat us on population with 20 million to our 5.7 million, north and south. The original name for Sri Lanka was Serendip and the 18th-century English writer Horace Walpole borrowed this to coin the word "serendipity", the faculty of making happy chance finds. You'll be happy you found Sri Lanka.