In India and Nepal I stayed in the nicest rooms on the tiniest budget, thanks to the power of word of mouth within a travel community I’d spent years as a part of.

For the less-visited side of Sri Lanka I didn’t know what to do. Facebook forums had tided me over my first five nights but the hotel worker was getting creepy (detailed in the final drop-down).

My first RAC night at the place of some bloke before he got creepy (also detailed below), I asked the guy dining next to me where he stayed. Little did I know he had 45 years of surf experience and spent 25 seasons in Sri Lanka. I couldn’t have picked a better future neighbor.

Once I’d moved into my little half-cabana surrounded by nature and two minutes from the beach, it’s hard to imagine myself shifting elsewhere this summer (packing my bag is increasingly pissing me off). The mosquito net is big and new. The cement floors are polished with some sort of water-absorbent titanium fanciness. I’ve got two shower heads, a foot faucet, and a bidet in the nicest bathroom I’ve ever rented.

The banana palms framing the window are the first and last thing I see every day.

The common fridge is full-sized with a freezer that actually freezes. The blender is full-sized and actually crushes frozen fruit.

My favorite detail? The porch bidet for sandy feet.

$150 monthly.

Gotta love word of mouth.

One morning I was awakened by a crow landing on the windowsill, scoping where in my room to start wreaking havoc. Out this window goats and cows graze, peacocks stealth by, and langurs tear across the field. In the mosquito net spiders jump and web design while the occasional ant hurries across the sheets. Geckos galore.

The shared kitchen has been proofed for is monkeys and crows. Squirrels climb in the second the humans step out and lift the lid to the container of oats.

Early on I figured out not to leave food on the table. The first fruit fest at home started with losing a quarter of my avocado (which I’d taken the pains to go to the next town to obtain) to a crow. The other piece had also received a good stabbing of the beak.

You never know where a beak has been. One innocent morning walking down the main drag of Arugam Bay, I pass a group of crows picking apart a lifeless kitten.

At home I naively thought leaving hot drinks on the table was alright. I recently left my table and turned around seconds later to a crow hopping over to my coffee and dipping his beak inside, multiple times. Can I please be hallucinating?

You never know where a beak has been.

I watched a squirrel let loose on my neighbors’ table. He threw his whole body into the mysterious leftovers of a mug. The only parts of him visible were his tail, bum, and hind legs gripping the rim of the cup. Whatever it was, he needed both hands to shove fistfuls into his mouth.

I am smitten by Salticidae, or jumping spiders.

A couple days back I was on my floor, the coolest part of my room, watching a jumper flex his fuzzy fangs, wondering why he stays inside, not outside the mozzie net. Flies keep landing on me throughout the day (find me someone on the island this doesn’t happen to), and one liked my shin.

Before I could react, the Salticidae had scrambled down my bed post, landed on my heel, and leapt to the shin of my opposite leg. The fly flew away.

Later on my porch a Salticidae successfully nails its prey. They don’t have wings, but the flies kept returning to the table surface, and these spidies make quite the distance in one sneaky leap.

Minus spirulina, ABay has got all my cravings covered. Salty Swamis does the best coffee with two options of specialty beans while Kāffi doles out some of the greatest American baking found in Asia.

Sri Lanka has been a blur of flat whites, vegan lattes, muffins, cakes, brookies, and my own frozen smoothies, but the star of the show will always be RAC in my neighbor’s home.

Always present in this RAC are the plain white rice and gottukola sambol, a salad of raw or cooked pennywort greens with grated coconut bursting with tang and spice. The sides are brothy, mushy concoctions of some of my most beloved roots: manioc (tapioca), jackfruit, specimen that appear a hybrid of manioc and jackfruit, yams, and beets. Pumpkin and eggplant are equally mouthwatering.

Sometimes Laleni boils me an egg or includes fish that I am 99% sure is caught by her husband (the 1% owing to the barrier between my English and her Sinhala). Other days it’s a vegan spread with dal that carries the taste of the firewood she’s used.

While having Laleni’s colorful RAC every day for $1.11 sounds picture perfect, the food is cooled down if I ordered dinner past sunset. After chronic struggles with digestion at the end of my Indian chronicles, I recently started avoiding ‘curries.’

My guesthouse family has somehow, somehow managed to scrounge out a small canister of cooking gas for guest kitchen. I see them still starting their own mornings with breakfast simmering in pots over wood fires.

Until the miracle gas is used up, I’ll be making RAP. Rice and potatoes.

Looks like I’m due for another Chasing Calories location guide.

What Is More Beautiful Than A Bat?

Day 1612

7 July 2022

Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka

“Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I respond with clarity, without looking back, to an unknown man doing something in the grass.

“Why didn’t you say good morning just now?”

Am I getting attacked? I turn and answer the truth, tired, on auto, without thinking.

“Some people get super weird around here when you speak to them.”

“What are you, some fucking Chinese who doesn’t say good morning? Some Brazilian? Fuck off!”

My eyes widen with lack of preparedness. The road is empty. I am hardly awake and high off of endorphins from an early surf session. I feel the painful strain in my right forearm as I keep my 8’2 rental tucked to my armpit. I make the wide turn back around, eager to put distance between me and the paradigm example of why I avoid eye contact in ABay unless they are exuding light in their eyes and smile.

His logic, and the fact that he correctly guessed Chinese on his first try when it usually takes people like him at least three before I have to say it myself, compounded with the fact that he then took a 180 (literally around the globe) and added in Brazil just for good measure, almost amuses me. That is until I hear his next lines.

“Fuck off. You are not a beautiful person who deserves to be in Sri Lanka. Fuck off.”

Describing the way men in this community treat a woman walking alone in broad daylight as “super weird” is an understatement. The “hiiiii” that come from behind as a man bikes by or loiters in his tuk tuk are outright leery. One gets the feeling of she is constantly getting eaten, and not in the good way.

There are the “konichiwas” or “from Japan?” or “Korea” tossed at me every few hundred meters every day.

There is the worker of my ex-hotel who followed me into a bar on open mic night and put both hands on my chair and said “HELLO” as always, this time adding, “DO YOU WANT A BEER?”

I hope he was drunk, for his sake. I declined, only to receive a “WHY NOT” as he continued to grip my chair and hang over me. A British boy tells him to fuck off. He leans in closer and quietly informs me, “I am a big guy, you know.” I tell him multiple times to leave me alone because I don’t want to talk to him.

He’d always been intense with his stares and his eagerness to “help” when I was his guest. I’d always smiled with the benefit of the doubt.

“You want me to leave? Okay I am leaving now.” Seconds crawl by as he does nothing, stalling, before he finally goes.

There is the man whose RAC I’d appreciated until he demanded why I didn’t move to his place (where I’d have a filthy bed in a shithole of a room and a squat toilet shared with a restaurant and an outdoor shower I’d have to bathe under while fully clothed). His wife is a teacher and not around. He, a stranger, asked me if we could be business partners because it would be good for me. He asked if I wanted to learn how to cook rice and dal from him. I said no without hesitation.

“You see? You see?!” His voice was full of accusation.

I well know how to do different dals from living for two years in India and how to boil rice from living on Earth. Not wanting to cook the fucking staple foods of South Asia alone with a married man where it would take forever with firewood as Sri Lanka is out of cooking gas, is apparently an offense.

But apparently a smaller offense than saying good morning.

What happened this morning was a first. In 59 foreign countries I have never felt as irritated as I do in Sri Lanka when walking down the bloody street. Arugam Bay is by no means representative of this nation. Stepping out of the house could feel just as toxic in countless locations across the United States. I’m just being unfair because I’m pissed.

This morn was a little much for the time of day. For doing nothing. For happening shortly after some guy with hair longer than mine paddles in front of me just after I yield a beautiful wave to a soft-boarder who never yields for me. I otherwise would have gone for the next wave, and when I try to turn, we are in each other’s way. He grabs my board and shoves me in the opposite direction I’m paddling. He practically growls, “watch where you’re going, sweetie. Don’t paddle in front of other people.”

As someone who paddles around the others, I try to tell him I was already waiting for this spot. He insists that no, I’m paddling in front of others. I lose my appetite for surf and catch a broken wave on outta there.

Back to The Asshole of School Road. The calm sunrise surf was too serene, the veiled sun too good to let anything take away my enjoyment. I was so pleased that I actually got out there, into the water, by 6:15.

At home I am happy, but the questions come anyway.

If I were with a friend, would you have gone after me? If I were some big Russian man with a deep voice? Some quick-tempered Israeli or Colombian male? Of average height, since you’re so tiny and short? If I were a European or American who was not Asian, not African, not Arabic, not Native American, and not Latina?

Where is your shame, as an Asian yourself?

People with a fucked up sense of entitlement and a likely alcohol problem like yourself are exactly why I don’t go around handing out good mornings to strangers these days, I did say good morning, and you’re a racist little cunt who can go choke on a dick.

If anyone can help remove the men who are stuck up my ass, please drop a comment below.

Leave it to me to get mansplained by a sunburnt twat and racially slurred by a fellow Asian before 7:30 am.

Oh, and now and then I’ll remember the policeman that went “hey baby” when I passed by.