Sri Lankan Driving

Ok, to continue with part two of this special Sri Lankan series I thought I'd talk about one of the islands most notable features: it's drivers.

Although I'm not a big fan of drivers in Liverpool, and their particular fear of indicating, they are just not in the same league as Sri Lankans when it comes to driving. Obviously they aren't helped by the fact that there are no laws on vehicle maintenance, so if it drives, you can drive it. This means you get an incredible variety of vehicles on the road, from world war 2 era lorries to 1960's English Morris Minors and Hillman Imps, to little 3 wheel tut tuts, to all kinds of Japanese cars and 'wans'.

Add to this heady mix the fact that I'm not sure that there exists such a thing as a Highway Code in Sri Lanka, and you get a recipe for chaos. Here are my favourite 3 Sri Lankan driving stories.

1) Driving into Colombo in Rodney's car with his two sons and one of their friends as passengers. We were going to test out the first McDonalds to be opened in the whole island, well sometimes you just have to. Anyway once we'd eaten there we were going to head to a really cool ice cream shop, but as we were heading to a roundabout I noticed there was a bit of a problem. I'd taken my foot off the accelerator, but the car wasn't slowing down, in fact it was accelerating. I managed to slam on the brakes and somehow get round, but I realised we had a problem. In the end I had to drive back from Colombo to Kandana, a distance of about 15 miles with the throttle stuck fully open the whole time. It was lots of fun, and required a good mix of changing gears, trying not to destroy the brakes and messing with the clutch, but we got there.

2) Driving back from the hill country late at night after having spent a couple of days doing outreach, I had the joy of driving the 'wan' down about 4,000 feet over about 50 miles with no brake pads, which meant slowing for hairpin bends was a definite challenge. It was again with immense relief that we got home in one piece.

3) Sri Lankan bus drivers own the road. They must, considering the way they drive. The most emphatic example of this that I encountered was when I came round a bend onto a reasonable straight stretch of road to find 2 buses heading down the road towards me side by side. I'm thinking 'he's going to yield, he's surely going to yield, he'll move over soon, won't he? He's not going to yield!' and so I slammed on the brakes and took to the grass by the side of the road. This is not an unusual experience.

And so, there it is, my 3 favourite experiences of driving in Sri Lanka, though there are many others I could share.