Lately it’s either hot or pissing down rain. I mean hot like soup and rain like reign. The thunder sounds like artillery, cascades like sheets over the windshield. I turn the blades off to see what happens. The car is underwater. I’m seeing fish and shit. I remember monsoons as a kid, water up to the wheel wells, saris splashing in the rain. But I don’t think it was this time of year. The gods must be crazy. Then you come out of the rain and it’s just hot, a heavy humid hot you can feel. Feels like the inside of my mouth, but it’s all over my skin. I feel like walking around town in my underwear. I feel like bathing in the intersection. I envy the slum kids, wearing nothing but black thread. Rain or shine, they’re doing fine.

My friend had a dream about some island where his ancestors were buried, so we went looking for it. Modera, Crow’s Island, at the edge of the Colombo Port, near the Leper Hospital. Abouts. The city is my new fascination, only becoming a destination after the war. It makes Colombo cool again. I realize I’ve spent all my time in the suburbs. It’s nice to explore the slum beaches and alleyways of the city.

My friend has this magnificent book called the Ceylon Traveller, published by Studio Times. Written a lot by Nihal Fernando I think. It is a charming and deeply erudite guide to Sri Lanka, written by locals, going far beyond any Lonely Planet. It has all these back trails, short-cuts, inside knowledge, etc, written by guys who really know the country. One gem is this poem about hunting. This was before JVP era gun control. It’s a Sri Lanka I can barely imagine.

World’s End is a large cliff in the middle of Horton Plain’s national park. Peeing off it has been one of the more satisfactory experiences of my adult life. You have to trudge through what seems like an active river bed to get there but, God willing the clouds will have parted by then. They say you can see to the sea on a good day. On ours you could see snakey roads and lakes like puddles.

I’m at a crumbling house in Nuwara Eliya. The paint peels, the lights flicker. A fireplace burns at night. Dust pervades my ENT. In the morning the lights in the volcano are out. You can see the painted blue hills in the distance, terraced tea in the middle, untended gardens in the fore. The scene is framed in a picture window. My eye sees both the crumble and the clime. The camera can only expose one, the interior scene is obscured into black. This is not the way it is. It’s just the frame.

In a sort of 1984 Ministry Of Love kinda way, Mervyn Silva is the Deputy Minister of Media. Previous qualifications include smashing Sirasa TV cameras and physically assaulting the head of Rupavahini TV. So now when the media has complaints they can address them directly to the usual source. At this point, for me, it is just funny, but I wonder how you say FML for a country. FMC?

Harsha De Silva is my friend. Not in the sense that he’s a guy I know around Colombo, but in the sense that he’ll always share his Coke with me and he’s bailed me out of more trouble than you can imagine. He’s also a damn good friend to a lot of people. I know a (Tamil) programmer who got arrested under Emergency Law and was locked up for months. From day one Harsha was on his falling-apart rubber band phone finding out where the guy was and helping the frantic family out. Which is the kinda guy he is. More than his professional and economic qualifications, that’s why I’m really proud that he’s a National List MP.

I kept seeing this girl around and she was really hot. She was always kinda alone, or just wandering around, being hot. My friend saw me gazing at her forlornly and he was like ‘dude, go talk to her’ and I was like ‘no way dude, she’s probably stupid’, like sour grapes cause you can’t get no wine. So he went and talked to her for me, like high school. I didn’t know this but his first line was ‘are you stupid?’ I was wondering why she looked horrified at him and talked to me, but that worked out well. I also wondered why she kept going on about studying law but that also makes sense now. She even offered me her number, which was sweet, though I think she wants something in the paper. But whatever. I have her number. Now what?

If there’s one thing that seems to unite Sri Lankan travellers, it’s the constant quest for crab. This flesh of sea insect is craved and devoured by all ranks and stations with gusto. I have spent many hours driving around extremely random places for crab, especially lagoon crab, effectively the cocaine of crab connoisseurs. Personally I find crab a bit stressful being as you sorta have to kill the thing again to get the meat out. That said, I have had a few lagoon crabs that were fat as hens, and that was pretty good. Crab is like crack though. Everybody I know seems to be looking for it. So where do you get?

Downtown Colombo is a strange post-apocalyptic scene – full of troops, barricades and crumbling, shuttered buildings. After shattering bombs from the LTTE at the Central Bank and planes flying into Inland Revenue, the whole place has been and remains locked down. But, like the road to Jaffna, things are loosening up. It seems like someday the roads within Colombo 1 and 2 will open up and people can freely walk around again. I mean, you can actually walk around now. You can buy Saddam-era dinars and visit the ruins of White Horse. You can shop at the first grocery store or just walk under arches that feel like old Mumbai. A bit further, the entire colonial era Municipal Council is preserved in wax figurine, at the edge of Pettah. A bit like Fort itself.