Trigger's Travel Philosophy

Whenever I was discussing this trip with people, the answer to the question 'where are you headed?' was invariably answered with 'Africa and Europe', and this is all very true. It was only the very persistent and those who interrogated us thoroughly pre-trip that would be aware of what we have been doing for the past week, because quite rarely did I discuss the eight day stopover that was actually our first destination: Sri Lanka. I often omitted this leg of the of the journey not because of a lack of interest on my part or theirs, but because the focus was squarely on Africa, and understandably so; we would spend a good three months there, compared to eight days here. Many of my friends would be surprised to hear that we are, in fact, travelling through Sri Lanka (as well as Kuala Lumpur) as we speak, and enjoying every lasting minute of it.

Sri Lanka has a very interesting and sordid history, and after dinner on my last day at home with my parents, Mum, Dad and I were sitting around the table and discussing my forthcoming trip to Sri Lanka and the history of the place. My Dad and I, eager to show our worldliness, bet each other that the previous name for this small, tear-shaped island was something other than Sri Lanka. We both had different answers, and we were both certain we were right. As it turns out, we were.

Until 1961, Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon, as many Generation Y and Baby Boomers would no doubt be aware of (I, unfortunately, was not). Less well known is the much earlier name of the island: Serendip, origin of the word serendipity: to occur upon something by chance, with happy or beneficial outcomes. And so our tale begins through serendipitous circumstances, with a cheap one way fare to Johannesburg with a stopover in Kuala Lumpur, culminating in the the well timed booking of an AirAsia flight to Colombo that cost us a fraction of the normal price and thus was the very reason for our side trip through the tear-drop of India.