SRI LANKA (part 1)
The adventurous bit.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED
​
TWO DICTATORSHIPS IN ONE TRIP
An interesting flight on China Southern Airlines to Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka, interesting in that they are so odd. This was a flight back to China with 100% Chinese passengers, bar us of course. They pay no attention to the stewardesses or each other, they just mill about a lot never looking anyone in the eye. The crew read the riot act to everyone prior to take off including a very clear warning that ANY bad behaviour will result in immediate arrest and imprisonment, usefully also announced in English, that kept Sara quieter than usual. But with the sad side effect that Sara has taken an immediate and irreconcilable dislike to the Chinese race, which somewhat scuppers next years plan to visit China on the presumption that the place will be full of the little monsters.
Mind you, they are really only on a par with the appalling Russians who are out in force in both the Maldives and Sri Lanka (this part of the world is one of the few they can visit nowadays, thank goodness). Talk about an race of dim, dumb, unsmiling, lumpen lugs. Young couples, not saying a word to each other, permanent glum faces, whole families with young kids never even cracking a grin or having a laugh. It is as if the whole of Russia has regressed 50 years back into the Stalinist era. Prior to their brilliant wheeze of invading a small next door nation, then taking three years and 100,000 casualties to basically invade Wales - and fail in the attempt, they used to be confident, brash, loud and all over places like Marbella. Now they are a shadow of their former selves. Quiet, weird, grey, depressed, sullen, silent, morose. Seriously, they hardly converse, they just sit there, not even looking at each other. Half of them are probably evading the draft. Personally I think it is bloody brilliant, they were horrible when they were confident, now they remind me of what the Germans must have been like in the post war period, pariahs. and knowing it.
So that is my take on the worlds current two most imperialist, militaristic and unpleasant dictatorships. Politics over.
TWO DAYS TO DO COLOMBO WILL BE ENOUGH
We were told by fellow travellers along the way. And it was. Nice town. SO much cleaner and calmer than southern India, which is MANIC by comparison. The same streets and architecture, just not the piles of rubbles and rubbish all over the hockey. Same cars, buses and tuk tuks, just not all jammed up around you, just not leaning on their horns all the time. A far more gentile pace of life. Buddhists you see. Om, om, om, om, om. So we grab a tuk tuk tour of the town for four hours, great guide, took us to see all Colombo has to offer, and we saw it all in 3.5 hours, job done.
​
Chinese influence everywhere, buildings, bridges, ports, new towns, Lotus Tower, and mostly resented by the locals.
​
But we flew round town and grabbed some memories, including going up The Lotus Tower, seen below, and I found time to chair a meeting of local dignitaries before grabbing a well earned drink.​​
One of the funniest things was room service in our hotel, carried out by the little robot in the video. It was hilarious and a good example of what weird stuff the chinks have sold the locals.
​
This little guy gets your order, jumps in the lift, comes to your door, rings the bell, you answer and punch a code into his head which unlocks the drawers which contain your order. Job done. NO.
​
One drawer wouldn't open so we tugged it, a bit, only a little bit. CRASH went the programme. REBOOT went I. BEEP went the little guy. "I return to charging station!" he said, so I followed him. He made it to the lift which opened, people inside, Mexican standoff, nobody moved. Passengers look terrified and push the close doors button. I call him a new lift and videoed his dignified and self possessed departure, as he explained each move to me. Sound button on the bottom right of the video window to hear him chatting.
​
To say that this is an expensive and time consuming way of running room service in a country where human labour is dirt cheap and people in Sri Lanka really need the work - is an understatement.
​
But boy! was it funny. Almost as funny as the next morning when we went to meet the driver and luxury SUV I had painstakingly researched and booked for a 1000 miles over nine whole days.
I MAY NEED TO UP MY RESEARCH EFFORTS.
To say that Sara was less than impressed is yet again - an understatement. The fact the our driver Kavishan looked about 15, his car was decked out like one of those jingly-jangly lorries you see in Afghanistan, inside and out, and most impressive for a tourist vehicle, the fucking back seat windows were blacked out, which, to put it mildly, somewhat interfered with the view of the majestic herds of wildebeest we may or may not have been privileged to have witnessed. Who knows? It was too dark inside to see. Oh, and his English was shit. Roll on 9 days and a 1000 miles! Cue a great deal of piss taking from one passenger and a game of 'I Spy' on my part "I spy with my little eye that almost all cars in Sri Lanka have backed out rear windows". All to no avail. On the bright side the boy turned out to be a calm, safe, considerate driver and that in itself was a bonus. I could leave my hearing aids on for a change safe in the knowledge that I was considerably less likely to be deafened yet further by Sara's piercing shrieks every 15 seconds as all previous drivers would have attempted at least one life threatening manoeuvre in approximately that time frame.
So off we trot. Windows down if you want to see anything. Boiling hot outside, fumes everywhere in town. Did I mention that on a Honda Creed the rear windows only go 2/3 of the way down. No? Well Sara did, and the fact that there was no armrest, and, and. BUT - winner winner chicken dinner!!! High speed internet - IN THE CAR!!!! That almost got me a reprieve, almost. So we roll on towards The Elephant Orphanage at PINNAWALA, some three hours up in the hills. Lovely Indian style hotel on a riverbank down a street lined with open shops.
​
WILL WE SEE AN ELEPHANT? - WILL WE GET ANYWHERE NEAR AN ELEPHANT? - INDUPITABLY!!!!
We did hope to see some heffalumps, to maybe get up close and personal with some heffalumps, maybe proffer a sticky bun to a trunk through some bars - but we did NOT expect the total immersive hands-on, standing on your feet, pushing past you in the street, total lack of Health & Safety kind of experience that this wonderful place offers! Below is just a sample of how flipping close you get to the amazing beasts, and Sara is afraid of snakes, little snakes, who nearly always run away when you approach - but has no fear of these lumps pushing past her!!!
And it didn't end there! Sara had found a senior guide to take us for a private tour which got even closer to nature.
_JPG.jpg)
After that experience which included visiting our guides really beautiful local Buddhist temple way out in the rice paddies we set off in our Jingle Truck for Lion Rock at Sirigiya. Another tourist must-do. Three hours on the road to a really lovely five start hotel overlooking a lake.
​
Turn off the main road onto quite a nice dirt track, after five miles think its odd the dirt track is now a potholed cart track in the jungle, after another three miles we reach an archway bearing our hotels name, and then we see in the gathering dusk the staff scampering about and turning on the lights................
To say it was hands on does not do it justice, QUITE AMAZING. Memorable. Unforgettable.
​
And then to cap it all we went back to our hotel at dusk and were sitting on the balcony when another amazing sight! A fly-past by about 3,000 flying foxes, massive great bat like creatures, that every night fly about 20 miles from their roosts to their feeding grounds. It can have a 5' (1.5m) wingspan!! Flipping monster.
​
Thousands flying past about 50 feet off the ground for about an hour, the sky was black with them. They just follow the river and were flying past almost level with our third floor balcony.
APPARENTLY THE HOTEL TEAM'S RESEARCH CAN SOME TIMES BE A BIT OFF TOO.....
NOOOOOO!!! Not again, Staff rush us, most of them in their teens, fight over our bags, into our room, not a soul in sight. We are the ONLY guests in a 100 room 5 star hotel. The manager lies saying there are five other guests due later - oh yeah! The only upside is they serve beer, just beer, no wine or spirits. Sara (who is the team member responsible for this malarky, I do crap cars remember) decides this is not on. We want to cancel our second night, and they meekly acquiesce, didn't even put up a fight. So its reveille at 04.30 for a drive to Lion Rock at the crack of dawn to climb yet another big lump of stuff in the middle of nowhere for no other discernible reason other than 'because it is there'. And another 1000 steps up to the summit, my poor, poor knees!
This climb is straight up a mile of steel staircases hammered precariously into the sheer rock face and straining under the weight of a couple of thousand tourists slogging up single file while on the right another thousand slog back down again.
At the top you wonder around the site of an old fortress with precious little signage or any explanation, which as they charge $35 a head for the privilege is a bit of a shame. But its a great mornings exercise.
​
At the top we eat our hotel provided sandwiches - with flipping chips, all cold and oily. We specifically said NO chips, but they are on the menu, so it seems we have to.
The picture on the right is 'The Reflecting Pool' built on the top of that rock 200 meters up, back in 400 BC. How did they do that????
​
The only shame is that the background view of miles of jungle below in partly obscured by morning mists.
​
Sandwiches scoffed, cold chips binned, and its back on the road to Kandy, the ancient capital and home to another great British gift to our grateful friends in our Empire of yore.
And I found Sinalese Marmite, in a box, and just in time before I ran out.
THE TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH FAIRY
The British gift to Ceylon was the amazing Royal Botanical Gardens, as big and beautifully kept as Kew Gardens. Then after 2-3 miles tabbing round said gardens in 30 degrees at midday singing 'Mad dogs and Englishmen' we went to our hotel, the Devon Rest overlooking the lake in Kandy town centre, and upgraded to s suite to assuage the guilt the Hotels Team felt over the debacle of the previous night. And then, high on my success as a world wide Marmite collector off we went to become stars of a culture-dancing-singing show, and obviously we got invited up on stage to have selfies with the performers, I am starting to ask THEM for tips now.
Then it was on to THE TEMPLE OF THE TOOTH. Big draw in Kandy, Even bigger for our day as it was POYA DAY. Yup, happening all over again, Happy Bloody Poya Day. Which is - you guessed it - DRY. National holiday, all bars closed, no alcohol served anywhere. I am going to have such a happy healthy liver on my return. Anyway, back to the Temple of The Tooth Fairy, as that is what it basically is.
​
It's a shagging great temple built to house the upper right incisor from the mouth of Buddha. And to make matters worse the Portuguese apparently stole the tooth in the 1700's and ground it down to make an aphrodisiac. Somehow the Sinhalese miraculously recovered it and put it back together (before it had been snorted presumably) and 'voila' here it is on show in its own Tooth Temple. We attended the 6.30 service, along with a thousand or so others all weighted down with lotus flower offerings, and dutifully spent an hour filing round a sort of Disneyland trail of crowd barriers before, packed like sardines, before having a whole two seconds to peer through a hole in the wall at a box said to contain a broken tooth. It takes all sorts.
Big temple for just one tooth wouldn't you say? On the right is a 'Where's Wally' shot of Sara in a tide of smelly humanity flowing slowly upstairs to look at a jug containing an incisor, or maybe not.
​
That excitement over we repaired to the pub, which was quiet. The gloom was punctuated with the arrival every few minutes of tourists from around the world entering, saying "What?? The bars closed??!!" and leaving again.
​
Our next port of call are the highest parts of the island around Nurawa Eilya and Ella, the teaplanting regions. Cooler, mountainous and beautiful.
ONWARD AND UPWARD TO THE HIGHEST TOWN.
To further make up for any previous dodgy hotel choices the Hotels Team decide to use the age old solution, so loved by our current Labour government, called 'throwing money at the problem'. The simple expedient of doubling the hotel rack rate in our Booking.com filters leads us to a delightful old Scottish tea planters club, The St Andrews Club. Now a luxury hotel by Jetwing. Mainly English guests, fabulous gardens, lovely food, a pub with a roaring log fire (it gets cold up these mountains at night) and beautiful views.
_HEIC.png)
We had planned to take 'The Most Beautiful Train Journey In The World' from Kandy to Ella, an 8 hour ride, but due to the overwhelming amount of publicity this choo-choo ride gets you have to book tickets a flipping month in advance. So NO CHANCE was the reply we got when we tried.
​
So we will drive halfway we decided, and try from Nurawa Eiliya, again, NO CHANCE was the reply there too.
​
So we drive on to Ella, which also happens to be the young backpackers capital of Sri Lanka, hence them all jamming into the train for the journey, and keeping us in our jingly-truck.
ROMANCE IS NOT DEAD
It was also Valentines day so that may have added to the romance of the train journey through stunning mountains and valleys, we wouldn't really know as we are basically in the back of a van. But we too enjoyed an amazingly beautiful run to Ella and our next hotel. VALENTINES DAY is today! So where are we staying? In a bloody Monastery is where! Seriously, we book into a Buddhist Monastery, a steal at £35 a night including breakfast, lay our weary bodies on our palliasses (straw filled mattress) and our heads on a block of stone, just in time for the 5.30 chanting, prayers and meditation, compulsory, for me at least. Kidding, it was OK, not kidding about compulsory OMMM'ing.
_HEIC.png)
_HEIC.png)
In fact the food was excellent, simple, native, but really good, the rooms were fine, and all in all this was serious value for money, with free OOMs and the most amazing views ever.
​
The way into town was to walk along the main railway track, which took us too the station where we realised that 100% of the passengers on the pretty train ride got off at Ella, but the train went another hour on to Badulla, and that bit of the line was some of the most scenic. So quickly bought two tickets for the following day.
I paid the whopping £36 for two 2nd class tickets, Sara remonstrated with the ticket office and was told that "Yes, they were expensive but it is the fabled 'Blue Odessy Train', and yes, the next train is just £1, but it is a brown colour. We saw the brown train and it was fine. Even had an open cattle car with a band! Our fabuloso high end train has 1st class A/C with locked windows. What a waste! Luckily we were in the cheap seats where all the windows were open, as were the doors, and you just hang out or sit with your feet dangling.
A stunning ride, no concerns from the railway inspectors about literally hanging out of the doors, I was tempted to climb on the roof but common sense prevailed, and it was hardly needed in an empty train. Our driver collected us at the end of the line and we drove back to our luxury hotel for two more nights in Ella. NOT.
​
The hotel was a building site and the beneficiary of some right dodgy reviews all of who missed the building materials, piles of rubble and general air of disorder. So we threw another handful of money at the problem and added in a new venue of YALA NATIONAL PARK. Checked out after one night, and headed another 4 hours down to the south coast in our jingly-truck to a wonderful (= expensive) hotel inside one of the countries biggest national parks.
The next phase of the trip is the wind down, the coast, sun, sea, sand, sangria, the last week before heading home to Blighty. Down from the mountains, down to the coast. But before we go - one last fantastic view.........
