Contemplating a trip to Sri Lanka? Read this first

Sri Lanka is a subtropical island which has been a favourite for Australian surfers for years – a ‘pristine, sultry and as yet undeveloped paradise’. But it has a dark underside.

Sri Lanka is a subtropical island which has been favourite for Australian surfers for years.

I first heard of Dasha Ross and her husband John Pinder when I was living in New York in the late 1980s. A journalist friend told me this Australian couple had moved to Harlem to set up a comedy club.

I was surprised and a bit shocked. Harlem in those days was not considered a safe neighbourhood. Were they crazy brave to live in Harlem at that time, let alone attempt to set up a comedy venture there, or just crazy?

I was not surprised to learn that it didn’t work out.

I bumped into Pinder and Ross years later through friends when they had moved from Melbourne to Sydney.

As I learned, New Zealand-born Pinder, with his trademark big yellow glasses, had been a big force on the comedy scene in Melbourne, opening The Last Laugh Theatre, Restaurant and Zoo which featured comedians such as Wendy Harmer, Brian Nankervis and Ian McFadyen, and he been involved with the development of Circus Oz.

Dasha Ross was a documentary producer at the ABC whose work included a fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

Pinder had grand plans for a “groundbreaking” comedy festival weekend on Sydney Harbour’s Cockatoo Island.

John Pinder and Dasha Ross outside their hotel in Sri Lanka.

Big Trouble Coming by Dasha Ross.

When it fell apart six weeks before it was to go ahead, he was devastated.

Ross had left the ABC, taking redundancy after 17 years as a production executive, and they began thinking about living overseas, financing their offshore lifestyle with the rent from their property in Australia.

Then, our mutual friends told us, they were moving to Sri Lanka to manage a hotel.

How I envied them.

Sri Lanka is a subtropical island which has been a favourite for Australian surfers for years.

I had been there twice – once as a young journalist on a media tour when I met writer Arthur C. Clarke, stayed at the historic Galle Face hotel and visited the tea plantations on the way to the ancient capital Kandy, and more recently doing an Intrepid tour with a friend.

Like many Australians I held romantic visions of ­returning.

Now Ross and Pinder were about to live out the dream. Two lucky Australians managing a beachside hotel on the shores of exotic Sri Lanka, sipping cocktails as the sun goes down. What could go wrong?

Ross’s book about the experience, Big Trouble Coming, outlines what exactly did go wrong.

She details their arrival with such hope and optimism, throwing themselves into renovating the rundown hotel owned by a British friend on the southwest coast of the island, bringing it up to standard, bringing out an Australian friend from Italy to help revamp its menu, battling power cuts, cyclones and cash shortages, finally getting it open but facing increasing hostility from a brooding former manager who was still living on the property with his family.

Comedian Wendy Harmer describes Big Trouble Coming as “a rollercoaster read of a grand adventure for all those who have wondered ‘why not’?”

Little Adam's Peak, Sri Lanka.

Ross describes the breakneck speed of around the clock work to make it all happen. Just when it seems like it was all going well – guests arriving at the hotel, and the coveted Trip Advisor reviews coming in – things go wrong.

The title, Big Trouble Coming, comes from the warning given by one of their staff when something went wrong that might anger local officials. But, as the book unfolds, it comes to have a broader meaning for the couple.

Anyone contemplating a trip to Sri Lanka, inspired by glowing weekend magazine travel style stories where the author “travelled as a guest of…”, should read the book.

Ross has a filmmaker’s keen eye for colour and detail which will delight the would-be tourist to Sri Lanka, such as her description of watching the Buddhist Perahera Parade in Colombo.

“A hundred elephants cloaked in a rainbow of sequined burqas ambled through the sticky night air, hobbled by ankle chains.

“They passed by, accompanied by the rhythmic beating of hundreds of drums, packs of dancers stomping their feet, stilt walkers towering over the crowd and posses of fire twirlers spinning their flaming sticks – a dazzling eruption of colour and sound.”

But as they struggle to get their hotel ready and deal with a disgruntled former manager, the book gradually reveals the darker underside of the country.

At one level, Ross’s book is comedy – an easy and entertaining weekend read.

A story of travel, hopes and dreams and grand plans to live in an exotic location which came unstuck.

Maybe an Australian version of Fawlty Towers on the beach? Faulty Palms, they joked themselves.

But, told through the eyes of two not so innocent Australians abroad, it also raises deeper unsettling questions.

How can such a beautiful country, one which could be described as a paradise, be so riven with violence?

Sri Lanka has been a favourite for Australian surfers for years. Picture: istock

It has led to terrible civil war in the north of the island, with tensions still simmering under the surface between the majority Sinhalese ethnic group and the Tamil minority, between Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

It is a violence which has led to refugees seeking asylum in Australia, risking their lives by coming here in leaky boats, at the same time as Australians happily visit the island for ­tourism.

Ross takes on her personal journey as the dark underside of the country gradually reveals itself, lurking insidiously in the background.

Tales of casual kickbacks to local authorities and local Sri Lankan boys seeking out Western women on holiday for sex, with the hope of being sponsored to a better life overseas, and drug-selling German backpackers, are all told with amusement.

But there’s a deeper prediction of violence in the country which Ross sees but can’t understand.

She describes the “nameless uneasy prickle” under the skin as she watches a glorious sunset while sipping a Negroni.

“It seems impossible to reconcile that Buddhism’s pacific image could be associated with this sectarian aggression,” she writes after learning how Buddhist monks led a rampage of 200 men against a local church not far from their hotel.

She comes to believe that “jealousy and false accusations” are a “cultural trait” of the country.

A friend warns her: “They have a saying here in Sri Lanka, when voices are raised, machetes come out.”

And another: “The tiger in the belly of the island can always become awakened by a trigger that comes out of nowhere.”

“To the tourist’s eye,” Ross warns her readers, “Sri Lanka is the most pristine, sultry and as yet undeveloped paradise. But, as with any paradise, there is always a serpent ready to strike in the garden of Eden.”

After eight months of throwing themselves into the job of a lifetime, Ross and Pinder leave in a hurry, fearing for their lives.

The couple returned to Australia, making another attempt to live the dream offshore in Spain before their plans were dashed by cancer, which finally led to Pinder’s death in 2015 at the age of 70.

Ross looks back on their experience in Sri Lanka as part of their marriage and Pinder’s wild life of ambitions and dreams, successes and failures, including trying to open a comedy club in Harlem or stage a comedy festival on the windswept Cockatoo Island.

Pinder was not a man, like T. S. Elliot’s J. Alfred Prufock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons.

As he was dying, Pinder barked at a nurse who asked him if he had anything left on his bucket list: “I don’t have a f..king bucket list: I’ve done it all.”

It is for the reader to decide if Ross and Pinder were crazy brave or just a bit crazy to embark on their Sri Lankan adventure – and for any future tourists to decide whether they still want to go!

Big Trouble Coming is available print-on-demand from Valentine Press, and online, and from bookstores.