The Waiting Sea

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Talalla Bay, Sri Lanka.

• 24mm • f/2.8 • 1/640 • ISO100 • 600D & EF-S24/2.8• circular polariser •

December 26th 2022 marks eighteen years since the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004, when the Indian Ocean rose up and killed over 35,000 Sri Lankans in two massive waves (the second measured as high as 11m, in places). The country suffered the second highest number of deaths in the Indian Ocean (after Indonesia which, being proximate to the epicentre of the underwater quake that caused the tsunami, lost almost 200,000 dead and missing). Over half a million people were displaced in Sri Lanka, as almost 90,000 coastal homes and buildings were destroyed by the waves. Over 250,000 people are estimated to have died in minutes, in fifteen countries, from Southeast Asia to East Africa. In island nations like Sri Lanka, the sea would never be looked at quite the same again.

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Signs of the Plague

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Maradana, Colombo. July 2021.

“Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility.”

— Albert Camus The Plague

Travel in the Time of Covid #2

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Shore By O! on Mt Lavinia Beach, just south of Colombo City, in August 2020; usually a popular place for sundowners, with both locals and international travellers crowding the tables. As Sri Lanka comes out of its latest period of round-the-clock lockdown, a year on, pubs and bars haven’t been allowed to open after they were ordered shut in mid-May.

Morning on Waikkal Beach

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Pristine and empty beaches north of Negombo, on the west coast of Sri Lanka. Shot for my photo story, ‘Waterworld Waikkal‘, which ran in the December 2016 issue of Explore Sri Lanka.

Travel in the Time of Covid

The Travelers' Bar at the Galle Face Hotel
The Travelers’ Bar at the Galle Face Hotel would normally be teeming with drinkers at this lunch hour, but the ‘oldest hotel east of Suez’ is completely deserted, even as Sri Lanka heads into what would, if not for the Corona pandemic, be its winter tourist season. Colombo, November 2020.

Monsoon Beach #3

Talalla Bay, Sri Lanka. July 2020.
Talalla Bay, Sri Lanka. July 2020.

Land of Salt

Salterns, Puttalam Lagoon, August 2017.
Salterns, Puttalam Lagoon, August 2017. Salt has been produced here from seawater since the 18th century, and the name Puttalam is likely derived from the Tamil word ‘upputhalam’, or ‘place of salt’.