Tourists come to Sri Lanka not for ‘cities rising from the sea’
A recent issue of the Sunday Times carried a lead story headlined “New Tourist City to rise from the Mount Lavinia Sea”! This is shocking news, indeed.
For centuries the Mount Lavinia beach has been enjoyed by people young and old, being the closest beach to Colombo and one of the safest in the island. This beach was made world- famous after the Governor’s mansion was turned into a hotel with the bathing pavilion situated in the bay framed by coconut trees on the slope reaching to the sea. It was a truly tropical paradise.
Palms still sway along the coast and visitors can have a meal or drink in the many restaurants. Retired tea planters, civil servants of yesteryear and those loving a tropical holiday came to Mount Lavinia year after year even before this recent tourist rush. Tourists come to Sri Lanka in search of originality, antiquity, tropical flora and fauna, most of all for the sunshine, not for “cities rising from the sea”. Tourists will enjoy walking through towns with clean roads and lit up streets without potholes, stinking drains, unbroken pavements and pestering touts and thieves. In short: A rehabilitated town!
Why not do it? Plant a tropical park on the mound, clean all the byroads, plant greenery along the walls, macadamise these lanes, get dirty walls painted and ask owners of empty lands to clean and fence their properties and plant hedges. For the safety of visitors to the beach, set up a police post. This will cost only millions -- but not billions.
A recent publication titled “Public Space and Quality of Life”, a case study of the Mount Lav i n i a Beach by a group of professionals describes the beach as a great public space, facilitating the coexistence of many different types of people and things.
Mount Lavinia is indeed “beautiful” in its own way, a robust public space which is self-organised and functions in a harmonious manner while accommodating co-existence and diversity. Doesn’t this say enough? Why take all this away from us?
I have one technical question: The portion of the beach to be filled should have a retaining wall, called a dyke by the Dutch, to keep the sand in and the water out. Visitors who come for a sea bath will have to jump from the dyke into the deep water for a swim and climb back to land via a ladder? What about children who want to frolic in the shallows and those who cannot swim? No more surfing or youngsters playing water-ball?
This plan is a spectre rising from the Mount Lavinia sea!
A kind of tsunami taking away what is good! A very sad Mount Lavinian Johanna D. Bandaranayake