Fawlty Towers - Sri Lanka style
From The Island 23rd February 2003 - Original article
Nigel Kerner
Most people in the English speaking world will know about Fawlty Towers. The perennial English TV hotel comedy. We all thought it was still in Torquay, England. Wrong. Youve seen the title. You dont believe it! Believe me it exists. In Pottuvil - Sri Lanka of all places. Basil Fawlty is alive and well and living, with a few more grey hairs. For Basil read Per, for Sybil read Marete. A Danish couple by origin. They started in Sri Lanka 22 years ago and have not stopped since. Small wonder. Just meet them and you will see immediately why Basil was unstoppable except by Sybil. I met Per and Marete where the road ends in Sri Lanka. In Pottuvil, on the extreme Eastern side of the island, only just opened to more tourist traffic. This island Paradise had an inland Paradise of its own. An enclosure of about two acres where a tall lean and maturely handsome Danish Chef called Per Goodman and his bold and hearty wife Marete, an architect, have built their version of the semi heavenly set up. They call it the Stardust Beach Hotel and unlike the English hotel, it is no laughing matter.

They say we are all made of stardust. I know a little more what this means now. I read through the hotel journal and compliments were spread like stardust all over it. The most recent ones from the Sri Lankan Minister of Parliamentary Affairs.

A place is only really its people and the inspirational centres of it all - a chef and an architect - have brought their expertise together with a magic that has to be experienced to be believed.

"I came here to help Sri Lanka export her rice and at the same time introduce the Danes to a new culinary delight," said Per. "I loved the island and her people the moment I set eyes on them but my interest here was to get your red rice to Denmark." As a chef he appreciated what a culinary icon this variety of rice is, all over the world. They set up a paddy exporting business, bringing some much needed Danish organisational expertise and enterprise to one of the sleepiest and most extreme outposts of the island. Paddy export turned into people import when his wife loved the place and wanted to settle here. They lived in Pottuvil for quite a time before they set up in the hospitality stakes, and their contribution to the place was such that the MP for the Ampara area, one of Sri Lankas more enlightened politicians, Mr. P. Dayaratne, helped them establish a hotel that could bring some of the worlds elite and waifs and strays alike (some call them surf or beach bums) to a harbour of peace and tranquillity and thus boost the area. The surrounding beaches are superb with Arugum Bay complete with wild dolphins who come in to swim with bathers.

Dont expect five star facilities at the Paradise Beach Hotel. Basil Fawlty will tell you that is the last thing he offered his guests in Torquay, England. Per is no exception. Expect comfort, cleanliness, infrastructure innovation bordering on genius, the culinary art surpassing cordon bleu, (the best home made ice cream in Sri Lanka), a wonderful Danish lilt of spoken English and most of all a family and personal sense to your holiday you will not get anywhere else in the world.

The couple were in Colombo, 322 kilometres away, when I got there and I had the whole place to myself for two days before they returned. I tried to gauge their measure by looking around me. Their task in doing it all, the antiques, the little target with a spray of airgun pellets left by a wall, the beautiful blend of east and west through the furnishings - solid expensive exotic woods, mostly functional. Their sense of what was best locally. Above all - the setting. A Spanish tiled block, thatched beach bungalows, thatched beach cabanas where young muscles could rest after challenging the great blue, on white melamine boards. Beach and lagoon tied by land spits and promenades of both to show them off to best effect. Good surf for body boarding off season and the promise of huge 20 foot stingers in the stirfing season.

You can live in plastic palaces. My job as a film writer author and journalist has taken me to the best of them in the world - they are all driftwood in comparison to this oasis of hope. They are all flotsam and jetsam these five star ogres, pleasing only the eye and hearts that beat like clocks and minds that count numbers and stare blindly into empty space.

One thing I ask anyone who goes to the Stardust Beach to do is this. In whatever accommodation you choose there, from fan conditioned loftiness to humble beach cabana - go and take a look at the cabana toilets. A work of sheer genius. They should be on all ordinance survey maps as an icon. They defy description for their innovative glory. They deny the axiom that East is east and West is west and neer the twain shall meet. Per and Marete have managed to make them meet with a flick of the wrist. Im sure many a happy hour will be spent by many - on them.

The Danish duos form of stardust was to be found in the staff. Trusted and cherished. All locals. Many poor locals who stay and do their jobs, more as an act of love than one soliciting stipends.

To say it is all Paradise is an understatement. After all we know what happened to Adam and Eve in Paradise at the end. But that must not happen to these two marvellous people. They have given too important a lesson to us all the world over about kinship, fellowship, and the best senses of the family of man. For they have bound our planet together North with South, East with West. Theyve showed us how its done. Theyve taken the anachronistic and fashioned the familiar out of it. Theyve made it all fit together by taking peoples hearts, and complexions pink brown black yellow and all sepia tones in between and forged from it the colour gold - over 22 years.

Pottuvil is neglected and out of the way. It is as dead end as any place in Sri Lanka will ever get. The people here seem to have been put away. It is an area of extreme poverty where NGOs marshal much of the welfare of the people. They have a district hospital here where I would not treat a dog, where nursing volunteers, who have helped in these draconian conditions for four years, are used as labour fodder earning just a paltry Rs 2000 a month, with no hope of being trained into the proper variety. It was run by loving hearts, where the meaning of practicing medicine is truly realised and realised truly. The District Medical Officer here Dr M. M. M. Sameem, is a dedicated local man, who has stayed on over three years because he is just that, home grown. I met the only consultant Psychiatrist in the whole province serving 85,000 people. He was by coincidence there on a visit. He said please send me sewing machines, typewriters, and old computers. They help so much with occupational therapy. I visited there with the intention of providing some much needed sophisticated medical equipment through a charity project I am in touch with. I took a highly qualified English Midwife with me. I thought I was being given a guided tour of an abattoir. I saw the true meaning of the conflict in the north, half way down the island. A hospital kitchen leading directly off a ward for diarrhoea patients. The kitchen so filthy it was darker than a cave and looked to have nothing in it but a primitive clay wood stove, soot, wood ash, and a little man in a sarong, who dropped it down from his waist and disappeared round the corner somewhere as I made my surprise entry. A maternity delivery room that looked like a medieval torture chamber. An operating theatre that would do justice to the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. Air conditioning in the operating theatre was a hole in the wall that looked like it was made by a dump truck crashing into it carelessly. I asked the doctor to provide me with a list of what he needed and went back through the gates of paradise for a beer - more out of a sense of rectitude than thirst. The contrast with my life of luxury was stark and I felt so guilty. These people suffer so much in a hallmark of silence.

Yet there was hope. The island has a Minister of Health now who I know from personal experience will do something when this is brought to his notice. Yes he is the same Mr P Dayaratne who is MP for the Ampara region. The scope of it all will change as peace comes. There is hope in the ever young Per and Marete too. In their sense of the right. Its harder to live in paradise than you think. It begets conscience and invites lessons and answers. It makes for thanks too. Thanks for lessons and answers searched for and reached with a sprinkle of stardust.