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| Sunday, 16 January 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Beach Wadiya comes up defiantly by Karel Roberts Ratnaweera
Wellawatte's world-famous Beach Wadiya was getting ready to celebrate New Year's Eve, December 31st, 2004 in grand style. Bookings were being made, best of seafood, wines and spirits were being stocked up to welcome the New year 2005 under stars and jets. Man proposes, God disposes, as the saying goes. On a brilliant sunlit morning after Christmas Day, the waters of darkness swept everything away in one fell swoop. Among the witnesses - the Wadiya's proprietor Olwin Weerasekera, his son Sudarshan and family. Thirty years of success were swept away by the monstrous waters of Tsunami . And as the waters swept in, a human tidal wave of looters from God know's where swept in across the railway lines and spirited away crates of the finest wines, seafood and the restaurant's valuable assets, while still more, in cash and kind were washed away into the Indian Ocean with relentless force. Someone stood on the cashbox on the counter, but the human tidal wave tore it from under his feet. Millions of rupees worth of goods were swept away into the cruellest of seas this country has ever seen. 'If I could have saved my books in which people from all parts of the world had written praising the Wadiya I would have been happy,' Olwin Weerasekera said, as he described the horror of the scene to the 'Sunday Observer'. But all the enconiums also went with the sea. The Beach wadiya had been patronised over three decades by all rungs of society both local and foreign. Britain's Queen Elizabeth's daughter, the Princess Royal had dined at the Wadiya, as did members of the Nepalese Royal family who were wiped out a few years ago by a fanatic who wanted them out of the picture. Now, reconstruction is foremost in Olwin Weerasekera's mind. After years spent in building the restaurant on the beach - really, a modest cadjan and brick room with a few additions such as kitchen and bar - he is determined that life must go on as it once did. Work on putting up a new restaurant was going on apace-hammering, sawing, and the usual sounds of reconstruction with the once-again gentle waves lapping the shore. Millions were made - and lost in the twinkling of an eye. 'But I must count myself lucky. At least I have a square meal a day and a roof over my head, unlike so many hundreds who have lost everything,' Olwin Weerasekera says. His loyal workers, carpenters and the chefs who turned out some of the best seafood dishes in Sri Lanka, not to mention stewards and others, are working day and night to reconstruct what was destroyed that fateful December 26, 2004. Olwin told me that one comment in his priceless Comments Book was that if you hadn't been to the Beach Wadiya, you hadn't seen Sri Lanka! Some customers with a flight delay of several hours to sit through, decided to go right back to the Wadiya for one more meal before eventual take-off! Reconstruction will be on the same simple lines-cadjan and brick, with the same cadjan beach umbrellas in the seas and 'garden.' Never again, Heaven help, in our lifetime to be swept away by another tsunami. |
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