Bandaranaike
Posted: 30/04/2025
As I waved goodbye to my parents in the hotel van and passed the army men holding their Kalashnikovs into the international section of Bandaranaike International Airport, there was another sense of slight relief. The streets of Colombo proved to be worse than on a Poya Day at Koggala and it was still on my mind when I realised I was walking into security without a boarding pass. Except, nobody had boarding passes; the check-in counters were all an hour's wait away beyond the airport police and their x-ray machines.
After having my passport stamped (a rare occurrence nowadays) I headed right for the gate. It turns out my parents' maxim of "arrive two hours before take off at any airport - UNLESS it's Colombo or New Delhi, then three hours" was a good one, one I willfully ignored when I was at Melbourne attempting to take the flight to Colombo two weeks earlier. There I met yet another queue for another x-ray machine - it felt a bit like trying to get to America, the way they had the security post set up separately to the rest of the terminal.
As I quickly drank all my water in front of the police personnel and was emptying my pockets I felt the thousand rupee note in my pocket. Before I left the van, my parents insisted on giving me a little bit of change in case I ever needed it at the airport. Feeling it was safer to just have nothing in my pockets like every other airport I'd been to, I placed the note on the tray without further thought; until the airport policeman looked at me and said, "Stop. No money."
I was a little bewildered at first, but then I realised that he had a job to keep. It is not a proud fact that the policemen of the country were corrupt to the bone, but this was someone who was dealing with foreigners, and the government of the day had a cleaner image to promote. It was not a bribe, but the presence of that note could still mean a lot.
A thousand rupees is just over five and a half New Zealand dollars. I looked at him for a moment, tenderly put the note back into my pocket, and walked through the body scanner.