Colombo Scooter Day Tour

Overview

A day on two wheels out of Colombo, running down the coast with stops at a mask workshop, a walled colonial town and a mangrove river. The scooters are automatic and you ride your own, which is the detail that determines whether this trip is right for you.

You need a local permit, and it is not optional

Sri Lanka does not accept an international driving permit on its own. Foreign riders must have that permit formally recognised locally, a process handled by the motoring association or the transport authority and completed in a day. Riding without it is illegal, and more importantly it invalidates any insurance you are carrying, so a minor collision becomes entirely your problem. Sort this before you arrive, not on the morning.

What the riding is actually like

Traffic runs on the left. The road surface is generally good along the coast and generally not once you turn inland. Expect buses that overtake into oncoming traffic on the assumption you will move, three-wheelers that stop without warning, and dogs asleep in the carriageway. None of this is hostile — it simply runs on different conventions, and the ride leader in front of you is worth following precisely. If you have never ridden in South Asia, say so at the start.

The masks are medical instruments

The workshop is not making souvenirs, or at least it did not start that way. Traditional carving here produces eighteen specific masks for a healing ritual, each one representing a demon believed to cause a particular affliction — one for blindness, one for deafness, one for vomiting, one for madness. A patient's symptoms determined which masks appeared, and the ceremony ran all night with drumming and dialogue until the demon was persuaded to leave. Ask which is which and the carver will tell you.

The wood has to be right

They are cut from a soft, light timber that carves cleanly and is then smoked over a low fire for about a week to drive out moisture and stop it splitting. The tree it comes from is poisonous in its seeds, which is part of why nobody uses it for anything else.

Coconut husks rotting in the river

Look for bundles of them staked out in the shallows. Husks are left submerged for months so bacteria break down the pulp and free the fibre, which is then beaten out by hand and spun into rope and matting. It smells exactly as bad as you would expect and it has been done this way for centuries.

A temple on an island

Somewhere in the river network is a monastery on its own island, reachable only by boat, which is said to have sheltered the country's most sacred relic during a period of unrest. Monks still live there and visitors are expected to remove shoes and cover shoulders before landing.

The walls that held

The old town's Dutch fortifications, walked in about forty minutes, are the reason the place survived 2004 largely intact while the coast either side did not. The rampart took the water. Its seventeenth-century drainage system, flushed by the tides, is also still functioning underneath the streets.

Practicalities

Wear long trousers and closed shoes, whatever the heat: a fall at twenty kilometres an hour removes a great deal of skin. Admissions along the route are your own. Note the unusually long cancellation window: seven days.