The truck driver who went to Royal

The Lion flag fluttered spiritedly as the 18-wheel monster truck scampered through the treacherous Australian outback. Fifty-six-year-old Zola Rajapakse worked through his 18-gear manual transmission with consummate ease.

Zola and his American co-driver were locked in battle with six other drivers from England, Scotland, US and Australia for a shot at becoming the world’s toughest trucker. Picked from among 60,000 truckers Zola was the only pothunter from the developing world. As Discovery Channel’s widely publicised TV programme went on air, the presence of the Lankan driver put the island in to focus.

Sporting a cowboy hat and a steely bearded look, Zola stood tall, fit and debonair. He disdainfully employed the English language to berate his fellow driver for mishandling the high-tech behemoth. Now how does a local trucker cut such a polished look? Zola spent 20 years in the US. Oh, and he is an old Royalist, perhaps the only trucker from the Royal alumni. Our hero Zola was eliminated in the second round but not before putting Lankan truckers on the map. He may have done exceedingly better had he been exposed to Lankan roads and drivers.

Drove my 5-speed SUV to Buttala, some 260km southeast of Colombo. The Honda CR-V simply refuses to sit on the tail of endless three-wheelers as Police would have us do, and crawl all the way. The British gifted us with two lane roads for two-way traffic, minus a lane for overtaking. All that the Police have to do is paint an unbroken line and wait gleefully at some lonely stretch of road for us poor souls to cross that line. You never hear a ticket being issued to a motorist for slow driving, holding up traffic on long distance routes. Neither has a single VIP convoy been pulled over for driving only on the wrong lane.

It rained ice in Buttala, an unlikely place for such a phenomenon. The met people call it a hailstorm. Doomsday prophets call it a sign from heaven. 21 December is not far away. Today is 20 July, the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. Everyone knows his first words but listen to what he purportedly muttered just before re-entering the lander. “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky,” the Apollo Commander famously said. He refused to explain, until 1995.

Mr. Gorsky has died, so I think it’s okay to explain the story, he told a news reporter. In 1938, as a small kid in a mid-western town he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. The ball landed in the neighbour’s backyard, by his bedroom window. As he leaned over to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky: “Sex?! You want sex? You’ll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!” Today, we pay tribute to one man’s small step, which reawakened an otherwise elusive dream for another man. As for the legend, it remains one and Armstrong is believed to have refuted it.

It has been a tough week at the office. Ethics and values are fast becoming stuff of legend. Vodka in glass, I’m waiting for the ice to fall from the sky. At the rate society is spiralling towards anarchy, it seems as if 21 December is too far away. While I wait, I want to leave my current job and become a trucker in an 18-wheeler.

(The writer is a former foreign correspondent and military analyst. He is a brand consultant and heads The 7th Frontier, an integrated communications agency which masterminded the globally-acclaimed eco tourism hotspot KumbukRiver. Email him at [email protected].)