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Sri Lankans witness their first highway, and yes we are still in the 21st century! To be fair for a neutral and curious observer, it’s not the ideal highway you see in Europe or Far East. But it still is called a highway and for the name’s sake, we decided to pay a visit.

I and my friend left with the remainders of our foot bicycles to witness the wonder of Asia through not so wonderful normal roads. After about 20 minutes of one hell of a ride, we saw a new road to our right.

It was a single track lane that we have never witnessed in Sri Lanka. There was no entrance like the stuff we had seen on the TV and people (and dogs) were just walking here and there. It was not the highway that we dreamt of. We decided to ask a lady who just looked as she was about to die where the Highway is.

”You are on it”, was her chaotic response.

“WTF”, I asked myself. “How come the Southern express operate if it has only one track and monitors (lizards) crossing the road whenever they want?” But looking at the way the country is surviving, that was not as idiotic as it sounded and we started riding our bikes happily, yelling that we are on the highway.

We rode fast as we felt that we should set an example to the people who will be using this road in a week and were breathing our lungs out when we reached Pinnaduwa entrance.

That lady was a puppet of a road instructor. We have been riding our bikes like our lives depended on how fast we could ride on the highway entrance road, which is just another road in Sri Lanka.

We could never make it to the highway. The authorities said you need a special pass to enter the highway on vehicles and we obviously did not have. We could keep the bikes somewhere and go there by foot but I preferred the safety of my bike over walking on a highway built for vehicles.

The highway has brought death sentence for many creatures on the lands surrounding the new road. The road we were travelling has been built on a mountain and water springs were visible on the walls of the destroyed mountains. The environmental system has changed a lot and we are yet to see how it will backfire.

After a pointless ride, we came back to Magalla, where the highway entrance started, and drove through the A2 until we saw a group fisherman pulling their fishing net out of the sea. We had money to buy about one third of a sprat but yet it was worth watching and we got to the beach. A group of customers were already there and were bargaining. Fish were just thrown on the beach and small fish were still alive.

I wore a white track shirt and a white short and had two white wrist bands on my hand. It was not much of a surprise that one drunken fisherman thought I was a foreigner.

“No luck today” he said in his own version of English. “Five hundred gone. One hundred, two hundred got. Bad. want fish?” he questioned me. And to make the incident funnier, he was telling the exact thing to my friend in Sinhala. He was drunk so much that he did not notice I was answering him in Sinhala!

From the outside, this looks as a laugh and forget sort of thing, But it is not so simple. People think it is a sin to be a part of the group who pulls the fishing net out of the sea because so many fish are killed. To get their mind off that feeling, they drink so much to the point that they do not remember who they are. The end result is spending five hundred rupees on arrack to earn two hundred rupees. This is a very delicate issue. A lot of people who could afford fish in the country eat them and I can’t see why they are not a part of the so called sin as well. They kill fish to feed your tummies and the society has made them think they are doing something wrong. This in turn has been the root for many problems among the fishing families.

It just adds to the point I have continuously tried to prove. A religion can kill a country. If the society wants to be so religious, give up eating fish completely and then maybe fisherman will find some useful thing to do. If you want their help, do not consider them as sinners. Treat them as human, just like you treat your neighbour.

The life will change in down south. Let’s hope such attitudes of people will change before the country becomes a worthless place to live.