Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, Sri Lanka

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The Galle Face Hotel

I stumbled onto the platform at sunrise at Colombo station after dizzy and naseous after a 12 hour train ride from Trincomalee. It had been an unpleasant trip, sleepless on a hard seat winding ponderously through the dark and now presumably-guerrilla free jungles of the Sri Lanka Night.

Colombo was a city I’d never visited and about which I knew next to nothing. I knew the name of one hotel, the Galle Face, from a biography I’d once read about Arthur C. Clarke, the Science Fiction writer who had called the hotel home. Though I suspected it would be above my budget, I was too tired to care. I threw my knapsack in the back of a rickshaw and muttered Galle Face.

A distinguished gentleman

Despite my unwashed and slightly dazed appearance, I was treated like royalty from the moment I arrived. This is how it was done I suppose in the days of the Raj, and at the Galle Face at least, the Raj has yet to end.

“Would you like to check in immediately, sir? Never mind that it’s only six thirty AM. They’ll be no extra fee. Your day begins now, sir, and ends upon checkout at noon tomorrow sir, or later, should you wish.”

After checking in, I was led up the grand staircase to my room on the second floor, whose high ceilings made air conditioning superfluous (though a/c was, of course, available). I took a long bath in a claw-foot tub that, in contrast to the small tubs found in hotels in East Asia, was almost too long. Afterwards I collapsed in my bed, comforters white as a cloud and soft as an angel’s kiss.

In the afternoon I had high tea in the first floor restaurant after a long swim in the Galle Face’s salt water pool, Invigorated, I headed out to explore Colombo before returning to the Gale Face for the evening. And while I can’t claim to have seen Mr. Clarke’s ghost wandering the halls of Colombo’s Galle Face Hotel, I believe I saw him oh-so briefly, from the corner of my eye at sundown. He was sitting on the sea wall and looking out over the Indian Ocean, gin & tonic in hand and note pad in his lap.