Be Hungry Like A Wolf for tourism, Sri Lanka.
I was born in Colombo when Sri Lanka was a British colony known as Ceylon. My family were Burghers who insisted on being known as DUTCH Burghers which meant nothing to me at the time. I might as well have been called a Cheeseburger, but it was what it was just as these days, it is what it isn’t.
As a kid growing up in Ceylon, my days were made up of digging for earthworms and being mollycoddled by Podi, a dear, sweet Singhalese lady who looked after me. Her younger sister Alice did all the cooking for us, and were two servants who lived us.
Back then, I really didn’t understand the Kunta Kinte type connotations of human beings being called “servants”, but there was my dear Podi being playing cricket with me in our backyard, taking me to kindergarten, feeding me with her right hand, cleaning me after going to the toilet and always used the outhouse reserved for the servants. She made sure that I had an afternoon nap and when with Podi and Alice, I only spoke to me in Sinhala.
My parents were stenographers who I really don’t remember too much about at that time and certainly when not even ten years old. I only knew that they gave parties- and Dutch Burghers loved having and going to parties- and seeing in the New Year at the historic Galle Face Hotel.
Dad had his own Jazz programme on Radio Ceylon called “The Melody Maker” while my mother was always seeming to be doing the housekeeping accounts- and which she kept doing in Hong Kong and Melbourne where she passed away from the hell of living with crippling Alzheimer’s.
The highlight to my childhood was quietly running down the road and watching a travelling circus from America set up camp.
My dad did some freelance work for Donovan Andre, Ceylon’s most powerful impresario and nightclub owner with links to some very interesting goodfellas in Vegas. Mr Andre booked Filipino acts from Hong Kong recommended by dad into his venues on the island
Being a kid, I only heard about Donovan Andre, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting lost in the Nightmare Alley of the travelling circus he regularly brought to Ceylon from America with its clowns, tattooed and bearded ladies and faith healers. They were particularly popular as, for some reason, at that time, there seemed to be so many people on the island with goitres- hideous bulbous growths protruding from their necks.
These “goitre people” would form a queue onstage and when American faith healers would place their hands on these goitres, they would faint and there would be those to break their fall and carry them away and out of sight from the audience.
Showbiz? No idea, but there was a dark David Lynch type of weirdness to what was going on.
Despite having visited Ceylon when it had become Sri Lanka together with my parents, my then American wife and our baby daughter, other than an emotional reunion with Podi, I didn’t enjoy my time in the motherland.
My daughter was crying all the time, especially as she was being eaten alive by mosquitoes, and my wife wanting to “go local” by staying in cheap guest houses, all of which wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t until being divorced from what had become rather a routine relationship and in one of those sliding door moments, I met Kristine, a spirited and adventurous Danish girl with the gypsy in her soul and was wonderfully neurotic and erotic and made a much happier person out of me and helped me rediscover Sri Lanka without the earlier baggage.
Kristine had made plans to spend Christmas in Kandy with some friends from Dubai where she was working as an urban planner and made it clear that if we were going to get together, I would need to meet up with her for Christmas in Colombo. We did by getting to know each other at the Cinnamon Grand hotel and lived together in Hong Kong for as long as our relationship needed to last.
Kristine loved everything about Sri Lanka with a completely different mindset to anyone I have known and could see everything and more that the island could be.
Having run the Regional offices of Universal and EMI Music, and grown up listening to some of Sri Lanka’s Baila music, I could hear how this might be exported through musical collaborations with international artists like Gorillaz and Bad Bunny.
Sri Lanka could offer the world so much more than tea and beaches and gemstones and the eighth wonder of the world.
It could easily have its own Formula One race. It could have its own Ibiza festival and, “tribute venues” from around the world who might enjoy a home away from home for a day.
These days, with more and more high end spending tourists from especially Hong Kong and China visiting the island and being attracted to restaurants like the Ministry Of Crab, the beaches, all the other tourist destinations and seeing the more entrepreneurial opportunities, what I don’t see in most Sri Lankans is the vision nor what used to be the Hong Kong 24/7 “Can Do” work ethic.
In Sri Lanka, I have heard more than enough from those who talked the talk, but also saw those who couldn’t walk the walk, and didn’t seem to understand that all new journeys are impossible to turn into reality without at least some initial funding, reality checks and enthusiasm.
Of course, I know I would be able to turn around horse racing in Nuwara Elya just as I did by creating the Happy Wednesday brand for the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
The big question when it comes to horse racing in Sri Lanka is who’s going to fund the quarantine centres for horses coming from overseas instead of those poor things that, as they have done for decades, arriving from India on the Poonawalla freight trains?
The racing in Nuwara Elya is nice, but doesn’t the government and the Royal Turf Club want it to grow and for the global racing community to know that it actually exists?
What about having a new clubhouse with betting terminals and executives who understand the global wagering landscape involved in horse racing, all of which requires time, something that is in short supply?
With so many Hong Kong Chinese teeming into Sri Lanka, I don’t see any Don Draper type of creativity to build on this interest and attraction to an island paradise that is so uniquely beautiful and mysterious.
Almost two decades later, and there’s been zero strategic marketing- just gremlins going around in circles and opportunities going out the window quicker than soggy papadums.
Though Sri Lanka could be the International city that Hong Kong once was, and though I have met some very nice people, I don’t see forward thinking from those whose home is the island. They either don’t see its potential or are unsure of the future of home base. And with zero financial and perhaps even an emotional commitment to their motherland, it’s about no money, meaning no honey.
When Kristine took me to Galle, it opened my eyes to all that Sri Lanka can be- and not only for the usual suspects from around the world, especially those grifters from Eastern Europe who see easy pickings from somewhat naive locals.
At a time when I see “tourism marketing” needing to completely change, because travel has changed, there’s the need to be exciting and inviting- and smart.
With so much to see and Sri Lanka having so much to offer, I see tired and old school thinking that hasn’t graduated past the pitu and the pol sambal.
Real pity and pitu if it were to stay this way.
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