Martin Hesp on Saturday

Read Martin’s column every week in the Western Morning News

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WITH diesel at 30 pence a litre you can afford to go a long way. And that is exactly what I've been doing since we last spoke. I have travelled well over 1,000 miles on the roads of hot, humid, mad, bad, beautiful and totally magical Sri Lanka.

There have been hills and mountains, forests and jungles, flat-lands and seascapes. There have been elephants, monkeys, tuktuks, buffalo, a million feral dogs, goats, lizards and a single, lonely, Sri Lankan black sloth bear.

But above all there’s been humanity. Teeming humanity, writ large out on the long and winding roads, somehow avoiding one another in an endless perilous traffic dance. There was enough potential danger along any one of those 1,000 miles to make an English driver faint with fear.

But somehow it all works and I’m not driving anyway. Instead, I’ve been sitting in the front of a bus watching the whole spectacle ebb and flow through a giant windscreen.

If I had to, I could drive with relative safety on Sri Lanka’s roads, now that I've been studying the anarchy of it for days. The theory seems to go something like this... Don’t think of a road as something filled with rules and laws, instead regard it as a fluid river, You go with the flow - you avoid anything that’s stationary or solid and dangerous, just like a canoeist would avoid a rock in rapids. Bend, be adaptable. Above all, go with the flow.