Finding his roots
Larry doing what he does best. Pix courtesy Larry T. Hill
What compelled Larry T. Hill to travel thousands of miles on the open seas so he could move from the country he had called home for decades to a strange land? It’s probably the same reason he handed in his notice at work to travel around his own country, then embarking on a months-long sea voyage with people he barely knew. He’s a man on a mission to find and understand his roots.
“I’ve had a long, deep yearning to travel back and connect with my motherland,” he explains. “I want to study Sinhala, and hopefully be able to sing in Sinhala one day.” Larry was born to Sri Lankan parents in Dubai, and they moved to Australia when he was very young, so he’s only spoken English and known the Western culture for all his life. “I do remember family holidays in Sri Lanka,” he says.
“The seeds for this were planted then I guess, and some time back I decided that I really want to be doing this.” Larry was working at a sustainable events company in Western Sydney, and after handing in his notice moved to Melbourne where he loved the intensely artistic scene. A ‘seasonal traveller’, he regularly took road trips across Australia, living with different people and groups, sometimes on farms and occasionally in warehouses. After all, how do you embark on a crusade across the waters without exploring your own land first?
Once he had decided on making the move, he set about the task of finding someone to take him on the voyage. “There are no commercial ferries leaving Australia so I had to find someone who had a private sailing yacht and were willing to take me with them.” Eventually, he did find a gentleman who “seemed perfectly nice” but unfortunately went through a personality makeover once on the water. Nine long, “horrible” days of misery and acute sea sickness followed until they landed in mainland Indonesia and Larry took off. He travelled through Indonesia, Malaysia and finally came to Phuket, Thailand where he met a friendly sailor willing to take him to Sri Lanka with him. “The last passage was magnificent,” he remembers. “We sailed with a couple others and it was just a lot of fun-very different to the first trip.”
And so, four months ago, Larry landed on Lankan shores in Galle. From there he travelled with his friend to Trincomalee, and then completed his journey over land until he settled down in Colombo.
He’s financing his project, this “reverse migration” plan, with a crowd funding initiative; a smart idea that has already raised over 3000 dollars on Pozible.com. “I’m amazed at the response,” he says. Family and friends chipped in by sharing his story, and random strangers would often leave him messages on his page. We ask him what the secret is to a successful crowd funding initiative is “Making it personal,” he says simply. “Throughout the trip, I shared my story on the site via my blog and I think that really makes a difference.”
With this funding, he will study Sinhala under a well-known instructor, follow Hatha Yoga and learn oriental music. Already he’s picked up a few phrases here and there. “Biscuit kudu,” he says when asked what sounds the most delightful to him right now. Then laughs uproariously when told that this alleges to a certain brand of music bus travellers are all too familiar with. “I love how you can say many things with a couple of words in Sinhala. It’s so precise!”
Larry is, first and foremost, a musician. “My work has comic elements to it,” he says. “It’s like an entire band in one person. There’s poetry, things I pick up along the way.” In Sri Lanka, he has already performed at a number of events and has even taken up a teaching gig at MusicMatters. He works four days a week-“coming from the background I do, that still feels like a full time job,” he grins. Will he move on to learning Tamil too? “I hope so,” he explains that he’s toying with the idea of trying to learn both. His plan is to make Sri Lanka his home for the next three years. “I want to learn as much as I can,” he says. Larry is certainly starting in the right place- for understanding a culture’s language, its form of communication, is definitely one of the best ways to understand its people and customs.
Find Larry’s project on http://www.pozible.com/project/183857 if you’d like to donate, or just want to know more of his story. There’s a great clip by Rehan Mudannayake about the
initiative as well.
Contact Larry at
quietbackroad@gmail.com