A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

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The Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera is dedicated to Chinta, marvellous, calm and caring, who worked for many years at the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel; whose smile could transform the bleakest of days and whose death came far before its proper time.

And we start with a little bit of retail theory – which will take you down the one of the world’s busiest high streets.

And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands.

Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out , where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace and returned to Colombo and defeat.

Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalization and changing consumer habits have made only the most modest of footprints. Within the next 30 years this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk tuk is like time traveling in Tardis. Once upon as time, your village looked a little like this.

The tour may may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no change of breaking for martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter. Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail park.

Galagedera high street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and business on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road.

At almost any time of the day it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks. Pause and watch. People talk. They pause and gossip, trade news, they know one another. In amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fish mongers, and butchers, wood carvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, are a wide range of businesses and services.

LEFT OUT OF THE GATES and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country. Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant death. It runs parallel with paid-for private health care with its faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system that is supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching collages and a bespoke government ministry.,

Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and around 20 who are admitted to its wards, cared for by around 5 doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care and maternity care are all provided for, but the more complicated cases and conditions are referred to the main state hospital in Kandy.

This includes – on average – 10 snake bites it encounters annually but not the scorpion bites which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts.

Next up is the village’s central bus station which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala all through the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide and a short walk away from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide.

Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: real looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric.

Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School. Founded in 1906 this is the only girls school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on.

The village’s main school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the village. Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students from ten to eighteen years, with about 70 staff members to educate 1,000 students.

For hardcore consumers, a retail treat offers itself next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 bothers, the hardware tycoons of the village. The second brother trades in such item as cement, plumbing and electrics and the third in glass. They are as second generation business family, the enterprise having started 40 years earlier.

Their rather surprising neighbour is Green Life, a plantation investment company that specialises in guavas.

Given that the fruit, delicious in jams, deserts and chutneys, originated from south America but has been used in traditional Sri Lankan medicine for hundreds of years, it is likely that it arrived sometime after 1505 with the Portuguese. Guavas are grown mainly in the dry zone, not the hill country of Galagedera so this anomaly of an office is rare and mysterious thing, as much to me as to its manager.

Then you encounter one of the village’s great retail treasures: the Ayurveda Medicine Shop. Once little larger than a wardrobe, this enterprise has ballooned in the past 8 years and sells over 100 different pungent herbs, which are made up to whatever prescription the customer presents.

Amongst its many wonders is devil’s dung. Made from the dried latex of carrot related plants from central Asisa, this curious version of Asafoetida finds greater favour amongst cooks than patients for the smooth onion like flavour it bestows with generous grace to any dish to which it is added.

The village boasts a branch of Durdans Laboratories whose range of basic medical tests often saves a longer journey to the main hospitals in Peradeniya. The chain began in 1945 and is one of several leading private health care providers, such as Lanka Hospital and Asiri.

The village, being about 40% Muslim, naturally boasts its own mosque, this one a large white and green structure, whose Imman’s call to prayer, a welcome musical improvement on the previous incumbent, can be heard daily across the jungle.

Sri Lanka has well over 1 million tuk tuk on its register, so it is no surprise to find several 3-wheel garages in the village, one of the better ones being New Chooti Motor Centre. Most tuk tuk drivers are careful and law abiding souls; even so, the vehicles account for almost 4,000 road incidents annually, almost 8% of them fatal.

As the row of sh...