Packing for Serendib

An April in Sri Lanka

I’ve always loved the word, antipode and its adjectival form, antipodal. It sounds old fashioned, and conjures visions of steamships and khaki, sweating glasses of gin and quinine-laced tonic, from a bygone era when long distance travel took days and weeks, not hours. I recently found a website that allows you to plug in your current location and find out what is the diametric antipode on Earth to your latitude and longitude. As it happens, the antipode of Minneapolis is Port-aux-Français on remote Kerguelen island in the French Southern Territories. Port-aux-Français lies in the middle of the chilly Roaring Forties of the Southern Pacific, and has a history of a number of national overlords and activities that have included whaling, scientific research, and atomic bomb testing. I’d love to visit there one day, but likely never will. But I digress, because I’m actually packing for another trip this week, to an equally far flung place: Sri Lanka. 

Turns out, Sri Lanka is not antipodal to Minneapolis. It’s not even close. For starters, it’s in the Northern Hemisphere (barely). But it is a full twelve and a half (give or take) time zones away, almost exactly halfway around the planet, longitudinally at least. There will be khaki and gin in my future, but no steamships or weeks of travel. No, between me and the land formerly known as Taprobane, Serendib, and Ceylon are 27 brutal hours of air travel, followed by some fierce jetlag.