Quik Thinking

After a long bus ride, Anita and I arrived at the port city of Galle, home to an old Dutch fort. We had booked a room at a hostel inside the fort itself so we checked in there before going for a stroll around the fort's ocean-facing walls. Our walk was punctuated by the discovery and dissection of yet another weird fruit, a charlatan who dried piquing our interest in sketchy gems, and an accidental detour into the maritime academy. 

The next day we decided to compose brekki entirely of local fruit. Leaving the fort, we went into town in search of fruits and returned with, among other things, half a jakfruit. Anita had never cut open a jakfruit before and my memory of doing so was rather hazy so we forgot to remove the core and thus ended up with sap all over our hands. Unlike the sap of most plants, jakfruit sap cannot be removed by mere glycerine and water. We had to use coconut oil to dissolve the sap and then use soap to get rid of the oil! At least we did end up with a large mound of delectable jakfruit flesh :-)

Near Galle is a beach town called Unawatuna and we'd been hoping to bike there for a day trip. But the selection of bikes at our hostel was pretty awful and nobody else in the fort seemed to have bikes available for rent. So we ended up taking the bus instead. Unawatuna had gorgeous waves and wasn't crowded at all but the sand had sharp gravel in random places, the slope of quite steep and the height differential between when a wave hit us and the tide pulled back was a mind-blowing three feet. When we'd had our fill of playing on the beach, we ate lunch and then I promptly fell into a food coma for the next two hours. When I woke up, Anita informed me that she'd been trying to wake me up by waving jakfruit in front of my nose, which made me laugh because that's exactly the sort of thing I would do. 

Upon returning to the fort in Galle, we decided to finish our exploration of the walls. This time, however, we were accosted by sketchy people and security guards who didn't speak any English. Apparently we had been loitering near an active military camp the day before the president was supposed to visit the fort and they thought we were up to no good! But when we returned the next morning nobody seemed to mind any more so we had a chance to shoot some excellent photographs on the fortifications by the ocean.

We'd been running low on cash all this time and when we had lunch for the last time in Galle, we calculated how much food we could afford before ordering. Unfortunately, we neglected to account for the taxes and fell short of the amount required to settle our bill. To our great relief, the restaurant didn't make a big deal out of it and let us off with nary a scolding. We ended our stay in Galle with a trip to the marine archaeological museum, where I learned that Ceylon was populated in the stone age and even as far back as a couple of millennia ago it was trading with the Roman empire!