This is my last post, for a good while anyway, on Sri Lanka. Apologies to my followers for the slow rate of posts over these last few months; but it has been quite a painful process, trying to describe this flawed paradise in a fair fashion.

So, I was travelling with M&M and a dear Sri Lankan friend. And my friend had much in the way of civil and familial duties to perform (the nearest description I can come to is village royalty in waiting) which M&M and I were there to add moral support. Except that I got an afternoon off for good behaviour. Now Jaffna is both the name of the city and the northern Tamil area of Sri Lanka. And it is very flat, with scrubby heathland, rice paddies and beaches. So, only the coasts really as a subject for a landscape photographer; and the coast is pretty flat with little in the way of rocks, just long white sand beaches, lagoons and salt marshes. So I elected to go to a nearby fishing village, nothing more than a few rough huts, a breakwater and a few boats. So uncle/driver took me to the village.

And  on the roadway in to the beach area was the obligatory sentry point and a soldier, large gun thing in hand. So Uncle asked if it was OK to go to the beach. So he nodded and started to walk along the beach. And the soldier came after me, waggled his gun in my direction and told me I couldn’t see this bit of the beach, I had to walk in the other direction. And I do say waggled rather than pointed, but he could have smiled and waggled his hand; and, funnily enough, I am not used to having guns waggled in my direction, even as a pointing tool, so went in the proscribed direction, with no idea whatsoever as to what was wrong with the other direction.  And the war ended 5 years ago, with no upsurge of any sort since, so time for a policeman, pistol in holster, methinks, rather than an armed soldier …. unless of course you are trying to frighten and subdue the local populace.

The beach was a mistake; the saltmarshes and lagoons would have been a better idea. But the timeslot was too narrow and I didn’t like to impose so I made the best of it. Most of the photos were, frankly, nondescript, but the image of this guy casting his net is nice. It took a lot of shots to catch the net at even approximately the right moment of unfolding. Now, as my son once put it, I am the only person he knows with his camera set up to fire in bursts; but, maybe it was the heat (intense) or the gun waggling, I had forgotten to do this. Moral of the story is to think about every photo location and what camera settings would be best for it.

And then as I was walking back to Uncle’s minibus a boat came into sight. Time for a few shots then time to go.

And time to move on from Sri Lanka.