Casting Off (29 page)

Yet another stop, proudly informing us of its height more than 1km above sea level, and finally we had a sight of the tea fields. Juicy, verdant, vast… but not fields; rather, choppy
little steps cut into the hillside. The train struggled with the terrain, snaking a zigzag so tight we could see the Harry Potter-style carriages further ahead curling back towards us.

As we rounded another bend we passed two women working. In their saris and bindis, with hessian sacks looped around their foreheads and backs stooped, they were the epitome of the Sri Lankan tea
picker, straight from the illustration on the side of a box of PG Tips.

Unfolding ourselves at last from our seats at Kandy, Tyrone and I shared a taxi van with Ben and Vicky. They got in at their first choice of hotel but Tyrone and I made our poor driver ferry us
from place to place, looking for a room with twin beds and internet access so Tyrone could start looking for new crew. The search went on for ages, up and down the narrow lanes on the steep hill of
Kandy, in the rain, until we eventually settled on the Thilini Guest House. It was little more than the spare room in the house of a widower and his daughter, with dead mosquitoes stuck to the
untiled bathroom walls, and very hard beds, but it was cheap and a hotel next door let us pay to use their computer.

Despite our crew problems, we were determined to enjoy ourselves and see some of this wonderful country, and we arrived at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage just as the elephants were having
their daily bathe in the river. There were dozens of them, being watched over by handlers, wallowing in the water and climbing up the opposite bank to have a roll in the mud. Hundreds of tourists
lined the river’s edge, watching and taking photos. A few of the elephants were brought on to flat rocks near the water for people to feed. The handlers weren’t very friendly – I
think they were frightened that things could get out of hand easily as the animals were effectively free to go wherever they wanted.

‘Be careful,’ our van-driver-slash-tour-guide, Jagath, had told us. ‘Last week they break a woman’s arm.’ A family of frightened Germans tried to feed pineapple
chunks to a young elephant but whenever the tip of its extended trunk came near their outstretched hands they freaked out and dropped the fruit, leaving the creature to scrounge around in the dirt.
As soon as the elephant walked away, out came the antibacterial hand gel. I smiled. I had long since abandoned all the hygiene practices the guide books advise you to adopt. I had thrown caution to
the wind and ordered salads, taken ice in my drinks, eaten at tables covered with flies, drunk rainwater: basically done all the things you are told you shouldn’t do. Not once had I gotten
ill and my antibacterial hand gel was gathering dust in my cabin somewhere. I was a different person from the one back in London who had packed syringes, a woolly hat and high heels ‘just in
case’.

Next, at a spice garden, a guide pointed out the different trees and shrubs and explained their medicinal properties as we went. There was a cinnamon tree with peeling bark, which I recognised,
and a vanilla vine, which I did not. I wasn’t even aware that vanilla grew on a vine. Like the ‘museum’ in Galle, the main purpose of the tour was to persuade us to buy some magic
lotions and potions. I looked down the list of products we could buy and sniggered when I came to number 22. It was a kind of herbal Viagra, the list said. I think maybe the application process
– rubbing an oil into the balls – might have had more to do with its efficacy than the potency of the herbs. Tyrone was the guinea pig for the demonstration of an amazing hair-removal
cream. Use this on your body just twice, the guide said, slapping some on to Tyrone’s shin, and you will be hair-free for seven years. True, Tyrone did have a little bald patch on his leg
when we left the spice garden, but he had the beginnings of stubble a few weeks later.

In Ella, a village high up in the mountains, where the climate was unbelievably different from that of roasting Galle, I had to wear all of the clothes I had taken with me at once to keep warm
in the 18°C temperature – I must have acclimatised to the tropics if I was feeling cold in what is not far off the average British summertime thermometer reading. We were so high, at 1000
metres above sea level, that we were level with the clouds and constantly wet. My umbrella had its first outing in months and was up most of the time. It was refreshing and it made a nice change to
not be sweating.

Ella was a one-street village, with nearly all of the hotels cut into the hillside to make the most of the views. A grey-haired man with no front teeth, tiny as a pixie, barefoot and wearing a
plastic poncho, trotted alongside us as we walked from the train station. He could show us a hotel, he said, and we followed him through a maze of car parks and steep steps – there were no
side roads here – to one of the highest in Ella. It had a beautiful garden of lush grass and a terraced restaurant; also wifi. We snapped it up. Tyrone got straight on to the computer to see
if he had any replies from potential crew. There was one, from a Canadian called Moe.

‘Moe has some concerns about civil unrest in Egypt and pirates,’ Tyrone told me. ‘I can’t tell if she is definitely interested or not. What do you think?’ I read
the email over his shoulder. It seemed to me that Moe was making polite excuses and I told Tyrone that. We tried to remain positive that our crew problem would get sorted.

The hotel kicked us out the following morning, even though we’d booked in for two nights – I think they took umbrage with me for having the gall to ask them for an extra blanket. We
found another place at the other end of the village on the edge of the woods that was a cross between a guest house and a hotel, Nelly’s Forest Paradise. It rained all morning but cleared
enough in the afternoon for us to take a walk up to Little Adam’s Peak, a lookout point on a ledge in the middle of the tea plantations. We passed two tea pickers as we followed the path and
they asked us for money to take our photo. No thanks, we said, and they bent to their work again.

That was one of the great things about Sri Lanka. The locals would make a gentle attempt at making money out of us but their hearts weren’t really in it and if we said no they always
backed off immediately, not in the least affronted. In many towns and villages the tourism industry is still in its infancy, being stunted by years of civil war, and the people haven’t had a
chance to grow hard-nosed and cold-hearted.

When we returned, drenched, from our walk, Nelly, the Sri Lankan owner/manager of our guesthouse, knocked on our door. He wanted to talk to me about yoga, he said. I followed him through to his
private sitting room, wondering if he was about to launch into a spiritual discussion of enlightenment and becoming one with the universe. I’m not really into that aspect of it; I just like
the stretches and the promise that I’m going to get a smokin’ hot body if I do enough downward dogs. Nelly invited me to sit in an armchair and ordered one of his two ‘Tamil
boys’ to bring us some tea. I waited for him to settle into his chair and begin. He didn’t want to talk chakras at all – he needed help with a business plan.

He had two guest houses, he said, one at the beach in Unawatuna and one here. He wanted to build a yoga centre on some spare land here in Ella, next to the guest house, and hire a live-in yoga
teacher. The two of them would split the proceeds – Nelly would have the income from his rooms and dinners and the teacher would get to keep what he or she charged for the classes. What did I
think?

‘This one Ireland man came last week,’ Nelly said. ‘Ireland man said people would only want to go Unawatuna for yoga.’ In his hoodie emblazoned with the logo of an
Evangelical church, which he wore every day even though he was a Buddhist, and with his short hair and glasses, he looked, despite his 50 years, like a little boy who had just been told he
couldn’t have the puppy he had been promised for months.

I thought it was a fantastic idea. The climate was cool enough here to do exercise, those bendy types love the outdoors and there was plenty of hiking to do around Ella between their yoga
sessions. There was also an ayurvedic clinic with a good reputation in the village, so they could sign up for some treatments as well.

‘I don’t see why people wouldn’t come here, Nelly,’ I told him. ‘It’s so beautiful. I would, if I wanted to go on a yoga holiday.’ His eyes lit up and I
became his best friend after that. He invited us to have dinner with him and his Tamil boys served us rice and curry – what else? – all steamed together inside a banana leaf. Tyrone
left for the south the next day because he was sick of the rain but I stayed on, helping Nelly with some research on the web. All I did was use Google to find yoga websites where he could advertise
for a teacher but he thought I was the cleverest person alive.

‘You come and be my yoga teacher,’ he said. ‘I give you free apartment, my Tamil boys cook you free food.’

‘That’s very kind, Nelly,’ I said. ‘But I’m not trained as a yoga teacher. And I’ve already signed a contract for a job on a boat for the summer.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘You come in October after boat. I will give you free apartment to live. I will buy you a small car so you can go Unawatuna, too. Good life for you,
England lady.’

I have to say, it was tempting. The next morning, as I walked to get the train to the tea plantations, I thought about his offer. It could be a good life. It was beautiful here and if I charged
just £5 per yoga session and offered two sessions a day, with no rent or food bills to pay, I’d be able to save good money in Ella. But I’d be lonely, I knew, in this tiny village
hours from anywhere. Its tranquillity appealed to me now but I doubted that it would always. Still, it was nice to have an option 5 to add to the list.

Back at
Gillaroo
Tyrone had, at last, some good news: Moe had agreed to come. She was in Colombo with a friend and would arrive in a couple of days. She was interested in staying on the
boat until Egypt.

This was a fantastic result. Sailing two-handed would have been quite difficult, having to be on watch for 12 hours a day each and having no long stretches in which to get a good night’s
sleep. Lots of cruising couples do it, and indeed prefer to have their boat to themselves, but after sailing with a crew of six for six weeks, to be just two people would have been a bit of a
shock.

Moe’s arrival at the boat – she seemed to materialise from nowhere, her professional photographer’s camera tucked into one bag on her back, her MacBook into a second and her
clothes into a third – was the quietest thing about her. She was one of the funniest, most confident and most interesting people I had ever met. A 41-year-old freelance photographer, she had
been based in London until she left the city with her boyfriend, who had bought a boat with the aim of living the dream in the Caribbean, but their relationship had soured and she had flown off to
Asia to travel solo. She was hilarious, gregarious, blonde and beautiful and very, very tanned. We hit it off immediately, swapping tales of woe from our tough times with our skippers and doing a
lot of female bonding.

Tyrone warmed to Moe instantly, too, and his personality underwent a change. I don’t think he fancied her – ‘She’s too old for me,’ he told me. ‘Too
old!’ Moe protested when I passed on the information. ‘Well that’s nice!’ – but she seemed to bring him out of his shell. The computer games and monosyllabic replies
were gone; in their place came smiles, jokes and flirting. He even got a tan from spending more time outside with us. He made a comment about how it was easier to get into the galley and that
confirmed my theory that having six people on board had overwhelmed him. Tyrone and I had grown closer during our time upcountry in Sri Lanka. I think the seriousness of what we were about to do,
sailing across an ocean non-stop for two weeks, and the way we had had to draw up a plan of action after Pablo and Libertad left, had pulled us together as a team. In the event, it was a very good
job the three of us liked, respected and trusted each other. Because we were about to be tested to our limit.

T
he brightest of blues, the Indian Ocean stretched flat and calm all the way to the full circle of a horizon around us. Nothing – no other
boats, no birds, not a breath of wind and not even, for once, any floating rubbish – disrupted the smooth, silk-like surface of the water. It was just mile upon beautiful, calm, isolated mile
of space. The engines, behaving themselves (unusually), hummed as they pushed us along at a steady 100 nautical miles a day and the blissed-out crew of
Gillaroo
had no cares in the
world.

The first night out of Galle had been very windy and I knew as soon as we hit short, steep waves just beyond the harbour wall that I was going to be seasick. I had started taking anti-malarials
– this time, doxycycline – and they added to the disgusting churning sensation in my stomach. I managed to fight down the nausea for my first watch, keeping my eyes on the horizon, but
sure enough, as soon as the sun went down and the line between sea and sky vanished, I started up-chucking. I sat in the dark at the helmsman’s seat, a bucket wedged between my knees, waiting
for the next build-up of nausea to reach its peak so that I could be sick and feel human again for five minutes before the cycle repeated. Five times in one three-hour watch the pattern went like
this: I would start to sweat, shake and feel bad and the metallic taste would grow stronger in my mouth until I threw up, noisily, into the bucket. Then, feeling momentarily better, I would tip it
over the side, rinse it out with salt water ready for the next round and brush my teeth. It was one of the worst seasickness episodes I’ve ever had and all the more unusual considering I was
sitting outside in the fresh air, which normally helps. But I didn’t accept any offers of help from Tyrone or Moe to take over my watch from me.
If I’m going to make a career out of
yachting
, I told myself,
I’ve got to learn how to deal with this.
Then I yacked again and counted down the minutes as they ticked away, achingly slowly, towards bed and freedom
from this feeling that I was dying. Seasickness is weird in that way; it has a deeply depressing psychological element to it, quite different from being punished by your body for drinking one too
many on a Saturday night. Thankfully, after a few hours’ rest between watches, my body had reset itself, the wind had dropped and the waves had calmed.