Week 3 – Sri Lanka

We arranged for our driver to drop us off at Haputale where we planned to catch a train through the scenic tea plantations to Ella. We bought our ticket and were told that the train would be leaving at 12.15pm (scheduled departure 11.25am), however it was after 2pm before the train arrived. It was a picturesque journey in wooden carriages past vegetable gardens, tea plantations, and green valleys. We arrived at Haputale three hours late! We went to the Rawana Holiday Resort to watch the friendly chef cook a selection of vegetable dishes including garlic and tamarind curry, beetroot and coconut, kang kong, deep fried bittermelon, mashed potato with onion, mint & chilli, sweet and sour eggplant, lentil dahl, spicy coconut fried rice. We enjoyed all of this for dinner, plus a lotus root curry, pineapple chutney, lime pickle, chilli sambal and coconut sambal.

From Ella we went to the beach resort of Unawatuna. We drove down the Ella Gap, past the Rawana Falls enjoying the lovely scenery, stopping at the bottom at Buduruwagala Temple where we saw Sri Lanka's tallest standing Buddha. Then we checked into the Happy Banana at Unawatuna and spent a pleasant afternoon on the beach. Suzie had an encounter with a giant centipede (10 cm long) in the bathroom. We think that it crawled out of the drain in the bathroom and marched over her foot!! Luckily it didn't bite her. The next day we caught the bus from Unawatuna to Galle – the buses barely stop, they kind of slow down and you need to leap on while they're still moving. We walked to the Fort area (old town) past a bustling fish market and the cricket stadium while a match was in progress. We walked around the Fort walls admiring the crumbling architecture, including the Dutch Reformed Church, All Saints Anglican church, the District Court and the massive fort walls and many huge trees. We visited the Historical Mansion Museum, which was a 350 year old Dutch house constructed from coral and mud. It was filled to the rafters with old cameras, antique china, old surgical instruments, spectacles, antique jewellery and new jewellery (and gems). It was more of a shop than a museum – entrance was free and many of the items had price tags on them. We headed out towards the new town after that and wandered along the main street. We also walked a block behind the main street which was a bit like walking through a slum, with corrugated iron shacks and open drains.

The next day we set off back to Negombo with a new driver. We drove up the West coast and could see some Tsunami damage to old houses. We crossed some big rivers before we got to Colombo where we drove past Victoria Park and saw the White House (Town Hall). We stopped at the Independence Memorial where Keith got photos of a python and a cobra before heading out of Colombo to Negombo. This morning we walked a couple of kilometres along Lewis Place to the Clock Tower, fish markets and Old Fort (now a prison). We walked around to the bridge over the lagoon and then to St Mary's Church where we had some water and some shade from the sun before catching a tuk tuk back. We've arrived at Colombo airport only to discover that our flight to Chennai (Madras) is delayed for 4 hours!