Captured with our Faces

This is a story of desecration and celebration, a detective’s tale and a technological fail. Now that I’ve got you hooked, here’s our caveat for the piece you are about to read: this was not a actually a challenge posted to us, but a spontaneous misadventure which we found amusing. I hope the more hard-line readers amongst you will forgive this aberration. We promise to try and complete some more conventional challenges soon (and, on that note, please send some more in! Fresh inspiration might give us just the boot-up-the-bum we need).

The day started typically enough. We were in Anuradhupura, Sri Lanka: a city whose beauty derives from its vast ruins and temples. Once a major intellectual centre for early Theravāda Buddhism, and a kingdom which boasted some of the most complex irrigation systems of the ancient world, it is now bustling with tuk-tuks, kotthu stands and Sri Lankan tourists come to visit the holy sites. Flashes of orange cut across the browns and whites of giant, domed temples. These are either monks or young, novice monks called samanera (not ‘monklets’, as Jonny would have you believe).

You might think this is a city well worth exploring, and you’d be right. In fact, if you’re into your religious sites or Sri Lankan history, this might even be on top of your list of places to visit. However, to be completely frank, Jonny and I simply weren’t in the mood. Call us cultural heathens if you must, but the long and short of it is that we had already hit the temple scene too hard and couldn’t face another moment of it. Please don’t misunderstand us – we are not always such infidels – but it was one of those days when you’d rather go to the cinema to see Brendan Fraser in The Mummy Returns, than be led by a local bedouin tribe to the foot of the Great Pyramids.

We discussed the possibility of heading straight for accommodation and having a lazy day but, even in our current moods, we couldn’t bring ourselves to pass through this prominent city without so much as a glimpse at its main sights. Therefore, we decided to turn sightseeing into a game. This game was to capture Anuradhupura with our faces. Let me explain: During previous excursions, we had been both fascinated and appalled by people who visit world-renowned heritage sites, paintings or monuments simply in order to take a quick selfie of themselves in front of the exhibition and move on. Often, the heads of these photographers largely obscure the sight-in-question. I call this style of photography ‘capturing it with my face’, and believe a collection of these portraits would make for excellent toilet reading.

Essentially, we’ve entered an age where proving you’ve visited a point of interest is much more important than visiting it (this is fuelled by sites such as Instagram and Snapchat). Even Walter Benjamin couldn’t have foreseen quite how little aura remains around art in this age of instant reproduction. But you know what they say: don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. So we decided to give this new artistic style a go, albeit in a silly manner. The idea was to completely detract from the point of interest by obscuring it with our faces, or doing something ridiculous in the shot. Obviously, there are some sites where this behaviour would be completely inappropriate, so we intended to limit our shenanigans accordingly.

We hailed down a tuk-tuk and managed to negotiate a good price with our driver, on the understanding that he would take us on a whistle-stop tour rather than the usual, exhaustive circuit. From the off, we skirted past the standard photograph opportunities and only stopped at the most iconic places. It was already late afternoon, so many of these locations were practically deserted. First up was Mirisawetiya. This was a stupa: one of the huge hemispherical structures that often contain Buddhist relics. In the cold light of day and without a crowd of worshippers, I fought off the impression that it resembled an oversized marshmallow. Such a banal resemblance was easier to ignore later when we visited the great Ruwanweliseya Stupa, which rumbled with prayer and whose magnificent dome was lit up, transforming it into something much more sublime.

Jonny wasted no time posing for his photograph, and scaled the temple’s steps to sit behind a statue of Buddha in meditation.

Retrospectively, we decided that posing behind Buddha might be a step too far. A few months previously, during our trip round Siem Reap, we had been unimpressed with the amount of tourists taking glamorous photoshoots in the temples, or seductively draping themselves around statues. It had seemed crass, and we didn’t want to be guilty of the same behaviour. We decided to lay down some rules for our own less-than-glamorous photoshoot: we would not take any shots from inside the temples and avoid conspicuously foolish behaviour. Besides, a true champion of “capturing-it-with-your-face” would not pose by Buddha, or indeed put any effort into engaging with the site of interest; they’d simply take a snap and move on. The essential banality of this movement evolves from the photographer’s complete lack of effort, and we were going to have to work harder if we wanted to capture that.

Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that this blog post is building towards a hilarious set of pictures from our day out, where we slowly refine our photography skills to master the complex art of “capturing-it-with-your-face.” Unfortunately, you would be wrong. In fact, the only handful of shots we took are scattered through this post along with some original examples from more experienced capture-it-with-your-faceographers. We do seem to be getting the hang of it in a couple of shots, but such a small selection would hardly make a compilation suitable for your bathroom-biblioteca. In fact, no matter how thorough the descriptions or how generous the spacing, you’d likely have flicked through the lot by the time you’d passed a single stool.

No, in actual fact, this post is about what happened afterwards. Or, rather, in the middle of our project, when I realised that I’d lost my phone somewhere along the journey. I wasn’t too worried. After all, I’d owned my phone for over 5 years, the screen was a poor, cracked replacement, and the memory card might as well be a octogenarian goldfish. However, I was planning on keeping it until the end of our trip and replacing it in Bangkok, so it was a bit of a bore to have lost it now. We retraced our steps and looked under the seats and in our bags, calling the phone every five minutes in case a kind stranger picked up. Jonny, although forgiving, was quite sanctimonious about the whole palava, reminding me that I was a forgetful old bee and that I should take better note of where I put my belongings. This seemed a bit rich from someone who had lost or broken three kindles in the last year, but I wasn’t in a good position to argue. As evening approached, we decided to lay the game to bed and visit Anuradhapura’s great banyan tree and the impressive Ruwanweliseya Stupa, before heading to our lodgings. Finding the phone, we decided, was a lost cause.

That’s until it hit 11:30pm and we were in bed, after playing yahtzee and sharing a couple of beers with our neighbours. We were looking through the day’s photographs and ruing our failed attempt at ‘Capturing Anurhadapura with our Faces’, when we realised that the pictures might give us clues to the phone’s whereabouts! Detective hats in place, we replayed the day’s events, looking for moments when I might have dropped the phone. I was sure that I’d put our rucksack down for the photograph where Jonny and I mimick the gate guardians at the ancient ruins, and we decided that this was our best bet. Despite the late hour, it seemed silly not to check out our lead; so we ventured into the darkness to hail down a ride. The hotel manager offered to give us a lift but we didn’t want to put him out at such a late hour (besides, he’d been drinking with the rest of us and seemed unsuited to driving). After being growled at and followed by a pack of angry dogs, we wished we’d taken him up on his offer, but we made it to the main road in one piece and were grateful when we managed to wave down a tuk-tuk.

Although the city was obscured under the night sky, the driver fancied himself as a guide and wanted to take us on a thorough tour. This was kind, as he was not asking for much money, but it was the last thing on our mind. We were adamant: please take us to the ruins, wait for five minutes and then bring us back. As he let us out, he suddenly seemed worried. Were we not allowed here at night? Would we be stopped by security? It was hard to understand with the language barrier but we were certain our excuse would be considered fair in those circumstances. It was only when we were half way across the grassy site when he remembered the word he’d been looking for and shouted across, “…Snakes!” Up until that point we had thought it best to retrace our steps under the cover of darkness, but needless to say Jonny whisked out his phone and we used the torch for the rest of the journey (earlier that same day, we had been warned to get off a path as we were likely to be crushed by passing elephants. What with that, the dog-pack and now the snakes, we thought our luck must be running thin.)

(No, this isn’t just a shot of my face. You can just about make out the moonstone behind me.)

We reached the site and had a quick search but, alas, there was no phone. There was nothing for it now other than to head back and get some sleep. That was until we were almost back at the hotel and Jonny had a brainwave: wasn’t there such a thing as a ‘Find My iPhone’ app? There was indeed. All I needed to do was put in my Apple details and hope I hadn’t left the phone on aeroplane mode. Within a minute the app had loaded a map of the city, tracking our location and… yes – the location of my phone! According to the app, it was right back where we started, at the Mirisawetiya stupa. Our driver was more than happy to drive us back the way we came, though seemed a little confused as to why two strange foreigners were choosing to spend their night visiting closed temples and ruins swarming with snakes.

Indeed, Anadhapara is not a city designed to be travelled at night and, unsurprisingly, a large gate stopped us from entering Mirisawetiya. Jonny considered leaping over, but we decided not to risk yet another dangerous encounter on the off-chance the temple was guarded by dogs. Fortunately, we called out and a security guard came to the entrance. Although a stern-faced chap, we got the impression that he was happy for the distraction, and after a few mimes explaining our dilemma, he let us in with a gruff nod and a suspicious twitch of the moustache. On our journey over to the temple, our ‘Find My iPhone’ app had proved a little erratic (at one point it claimed the device was at the bottom of the lake) but, as we walked inside the complex, the phone icon was now certain that we were within feet of the right location. Yet, as we circled the giant dome once, twice, thrice, the phone was nowhere to be found. That’s when it hit us. It must be up the steps, where Jonny had climbed to sit behind Buddha!

As Jonny began the ascent, he was called down by the guard. No one, not even security, was allowed on the steps. We had thought the temple began at the dome, but now we realised that in clambering up the steps, Jonny had in fact been sitting on the temple itself. This was a sticky position to find ourselves in. Surely, after all this faff, we couldn’t just walk away and leave the phone there, buzzing behind Buddha’s head like some bizarre, modern-day tribute? But nor did we want to deliberately disobey instructions, especially now we realised we had been wrong to climb the temple in the first place. I’m afraid to say our desire to retrieve my phone and put an end to this ridiculous, midnight misadventure won out over our sense of piety. As I distracted the guard, Jonny bounded up the steps and, in an impressive three seconds flat, he returned with my phone in hand. “I found it on the floor,” went the excuse, and everyone seemed pretty happy with that.

The whole situation had been pretty whacky, from rifling through deliberately obscure photos to locate a missing item, to taking a midnight tuk-tuk round Anadhapura (one of Journey’s less catchy tunes); through to being chased by a pack of dogs, and watching our footing for fear of being bitten by snakes. Really, my cracked old phone shouldn’t have been worth it, but whether it was from adrenaline, lack of sleep or incredulity that we’d finally located the bugger, Jonny and I were elated. Plus, I had the added buzz of being proven innocent: for once, it wasn’t me who’d lost the item; it must have fallen out of Jonny’s pocket when he dashed up to pose for the photograph. How typical that, of all the places to fall out in the whole city, it had been there: inches away from our reach, in the one spot we weren’t allowed to retrieve it.

Finally thinking the matter was over, we thanked the security guard, who in turn seemed pleased that we had found our phone. The three of us walked towards our tuk-tuk, where we flashed the phone to our driver, who finally pieced the story together and realised why he had taken us on such a bizarre tour. Even he seemed to share in our joy, and gave us a high-five for finding it. As an apology for taking up his time and a thank you for letting us into the complex, we insisted on tipping the security guard. Strangely, that’s when the mood turned. He turned to our driver and spoke in Sinhalese. Both looked stern. The guard walked off and asked us to stay put. We asked our driver what the problem was and, to our dismay, he replied, “police station.” By this time it was one in the morning, and the guard had seemed happy only moments before. Our driver made a solid attempt at explaining the problem: it seems that, by giving the guard a tip, we had effectively bribed him to let us in.

We were crestfallen. It was hard to know whether our tip truly had been misconstrued as a bribe or if the guard felt like spicing up a boring evening shift. Either way, going to the police station for the sake of a tip seemed like a smack in the face, especially after we’d already got away with the naughty part of setting foot on a temple. In a moment of heroism (or perhaps he was as eager to leave as us), our driver motioned for us to get in the tuk-tuk and drove off before the guard had time to return. It was all very exciting, and seemed like the sort of daring get-away you might catch in a James Bond movie… only a significantly slower, bumpier, three-wheeled version.

Back at the hotel, we had time to assess our day’s adventure. Despite the earlier lack of enthusiasm, we were pleased to have taken a tour around Anuradhapura. At every turn there is another temple, ruin or site of interest, and it was a pleasure to hear our guide talk about his home-city with such pride. We actually enjoyed the sights more after I lost my phone, proving (unsurprisingly) that to truly appreciate a place it is best not to be stuck behind a screen.

We also learned some important lessons:

1. Playing a game where you take the mick out of awful tourists might actually make you an awful tourist, so watch yourself before clambering up anything that might be a temple
2. Watch out for angry street-dogs
3. Watch out for snakes
4. Watch out for elephants, for that matter
5. Never tip bored men with moustaches
6. In case you’ve accidentally forgotten 1 through 5, it’s always a plus to have a daring getaway driver on call for when things get sticky. Here’s a terrible photo we took with our own three-wheeled-wonder, back at the hotel

If there were to be a 7, it would have to be: if you’re feeling a bit travel-worn, cut yourself some slack and schedule in a day to guzzle popcorn and watch The Mummy… but if you’ve got the opportunity to do something fun today, take it. It might lead to your own mini-adventure. So, phones away (just not in your fiancé’s pocket), and enjoy yourself. Brendan can wait.

I’ll leave you with these guys. Unlike us, I’m pretty sure they’ve mastered the game.