Time Travel Yourself to Sri Lanka; See What Indonesia Looked Like in Its Previous Life

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Have you ever heard of “time travel”? Well, it doesn’t really exist in the real world, only exist in movies and fantasy novels, but it is fun to occasionally fantasize time travel.

From April 07 – 10, 2012 we spent exploring Colombo & Kandy in Srilanka.We only had 4 days, so it wasn’t much time to visit too many places or to do too many adventures, but we certainly saw a lot. In fact we saw so many things that made us shriek uncontrollably. The term I use here, shrieking with excitement, is more like a “shrieking with a mixture of excitement and disappointment”.

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We have just had an amazing 4 days in Kuala Lumpur, admiring every place we visited and capturing every view we could capture with our cameras and video cameras. I had been to India and Bangladesh before, so I kind of imagine Sri Lanka would be a little bit similar to those two countries.However, my sister and her family, have never been to any of those countries, in fact KL was the only country they have visited prior to this.

Before we purchased our tickets from Air Asia, I first checked the Sri Lanka’s online Consular section, and I was convinced that on this website they mentioned that Indonesians do not need visa on a short-term visit of up to 30 days, but evidently, not the case when we got to the airport, they told us that we had to apply at the visa counter.The airport was modern, clean and was truly seen as a great cover (cover as in a book) for the country. Is like looking at a beautiful book with an amazing front cover, you would want to explore it.We were told that we needed to apply for a short-visit visa which cost us US$ 25/person, children under 15 are free. We queued with the others, only a handful of tourist arrived at the same time as us.We waited....and......waited......and....waited.I immediately got bored and started grumbling, they were so slow.What happened if they have 100 tourists at a time, how are they going to cope?

We already booked our hotel long before this visit, so we only needed a taxi to take us there. Our hotel called Berjaya Hotel, it was advertised as 4 star hotel (not that I think it is), located in Mount Lavinia Beach, near Colombo.And....please don’t stay there, there is a very busy railway line right behind the hotel, they did not mention this on the internet. We hired a taxi from the taxi counter and waited to be collected. I have to admit that Colombo Airport was a little bit more organised than Cengkareng, and was very pleased with their service. The taxi driver came to collect us and then we headed out to the exit and started to observe the real Sri Lanka here.The taxi was slowly gliding through the airport compound then heading out to the main road.Our heads swiftly moving from left to right and occasionally poking each other on the shoulder with words such “Aduh, gile, lihat tuh, ya ampun, lah kok kayak Jakarta, etc”. I obviously have prepared myself for this journey, but my sister and her family had continuously shrieking and poking, and smacking my back (not angrily btw) I was worried that I would have a few bruises.I laughed....and laughed....and laughed.....until my stomach hurt. You should have seen their disappointed faces.

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To cut a story shorter, the thing that made my sister and her family so excited (or shall I call it “hot and bothered + disappointed”), was that Sri Lanka did not meet their travel expectation.Being in Colombo was like being in Jakarta in the 1980s. Everything about Colombo was so similar to Jakarta (Jakarta without the high rise buildings and the jalan Tol). To be very honest, I had to pinch myself a few times to remind myself that I wasn’t travelling in Jalan Raya Bekasi, or in Jl Raya Cililitan, or Bogor, etc. To me, Sri Lanka was like a “twin sister of Indonesia”, separated at birth. Just imagine Indonesia was adopted by different parents, and got a better chance to develop itself.

The similarities was so astonishing such as the traffic jam, the motorbikes, the ugly buses which reminded of Maya Sari Bakti and Metro mini, the Bajaj, the disorganised systems, the poverty, the litter, the unregulated building designs, shops on the side of the main roads, topeng monyet, the beaches and much more.Take out Central Jakarta business district and Pondok Indah, away from Jakarta, and the similarity would be inclusive.

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You could only imagine this comparison if you have spent a fair amount of time travelling in the suburban part of Jakarta, don’t just see Jakarta from Jalan Sudirman, Thamrin, Kuningan, Blok M, Senayan or Pondok Indah. Of course, hanging around these areas would make you believe that Jakarta is so like Singapore.

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Indonesia has achieved an amazing development in the country in the past 20 years; of course we should be very proud of this. Indonesia has engineered an amazing infrastructure around the capital, but pity that its government could not regulate the users properly, hence the traffic jam just got worst day by day. Indonesia has managed to build so many sky-scrapers and developed an amazing business district, which Sri Lanka doesn’t have. Another thing I am very proud of Indonesia is that we, Indonesians are so adventurous about food, and we could always find amazing restaurants wherever we go. We struggled so much to find good restaurants in Colombo outside of the hotel, in the end we ended up eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at the hotel where we stayed.

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Whilst we are so proud of Indonesia’s achievements, I was actually very proud of Sri Lanka’s health care systems. Even though Sri Lanka is very poor and probably has nothing in comparison to Indonesia’s achievements, the people are a little bit better looked after by its government there. We were told that in Sri Lanka the health service is free, so when they get sick, they don’t have to worry about dying without any treatment. Lucky people!!!

What do poor Indonesians get when they are sick? Stay sick or just die when their time is up? I leave you to answer this in your mind.

Have a great day and thank you for stopping by.

Nelly Andon Br Torus