Carl Stearns Clancy, the first round the world biker, whose journey we are recreating, stepped ashore in Ceylon with scarcely a penny to his name, since his letters to the American magazine Motorcycle Review asking for payment for his articles had either disappeared in transit or vanished into the bowels of the magazine's accountancy department.
Stepping into a rickshaw, he was borne to the Globe, a favourite watering-hole of expats and the cheapest hotel in town, at which he arranged a line of credit for a room at $1.65 a day, including meals.
That night, sitting on the hotel veranda with the palm trees swaying in the warm, aromatic air, the sun sinking to the ocean and a large lizard at his feet eating a moth in instalments, Clancy had already fallen in love with the tropics.
And if he had dined like a pauper on board the Lutzow on the voyage there, he feasted like a prince in the Globe, for he was woken at 6.30am by a boy with “early tea for master”, followed by breakfast, tiffin, afternoon tea, dinner and supper – all, except for afternoon tea and supper – seven-course meals involving heaps of curry washed down with lashings of lemonade or lime and soda.
He could see why the early Arab traders who stumbled on the island had called it Serendib, which became in English serendipity, the art of happy coincidences. We stumbled on one ourselves, in the form of Alfons van Hoof, a Belgian ex-teacher who was going to take a few days off from his job as a freelance translator and show us around.
Since the Globe is long gone, possibly as a result of feeding its customers six meals a day for $1.65, that evening we met Alfons at a little restaurant by the beach for lashings of beer and that well-known Sri Lankan delicacy, lasagne.
"Fascinating but odorous"
With Clancy's stomach full – if not with lasagne – his wallet followed suit two days later with a cablegram bearing the news that he was back in funds. Leaping into a rickshaw to the docks to get his Henderson, he treated it to a pair of new Goodyear tyres and motored through the "fascinating but odorous" Pettah bazaar district, across the great Victoria bridge and off onto the jungle road, dodging naked children, small alligators and large bullock carts.
We found Victoria Bridge, but it was a modern concrete replacement rather than the ornate wrought iron structure Clancy rode over.
The Pettah bazaar was just as fascinating as when he was there, give or take a mobile phone shop and internet café or two, and possibly less odorous, but the tall neoclassical building which once housed the Globe now lay an empty shell, so we drove to the Automobile Association to get our Sri Lankan licences.
Inside, the billiards room was in full swing, and a pleasant lady in a pink smock sitting at a desk surrounded by bound ledgers relieved us of 5,400 rupees – about €33 – then made out our licences on a manual typewriter.
Satisfied that we could now have accidents with impunity, we prepared to set off into the interior – until the rain started, hammering so loudly on the roof that we were reduced to miming conversations, as if we were characters in a production of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau directed by Marcel Marceau.
At noon, it cleared slightly, if only to the extent that we could now hear each other, and we set off.
Next week: jungles, elephants and celestial nymphs.
