Quik Thinking

For our last night in Sri Lanka, Anita and I decided to sleep in Negombo because it's actually closer to the international airport than Colombo is. But I really wanted to stop in Colombo on the way to have one last faluda before we left the country. When we tried to buy tickets for the train from Galle to Colombo, once again they had no first-class seats available. But having seen what second-class was like, we figured that third-class wouldn't be any worse and got tickets for the instead, thereby obtaining the trifecta.

As it turned out, there were a plethora of seats in third-class. Unfortunately, the only others in our car were a group of hooligans who acted like they'd never seen a woman on a train before. Ultimately I swapped seats with Anita so I was between them and her.

The faluda in Colombo was most enjoyable but afterward we had to wait a very long time for the train and it took far longer than we'd expected to reach Negombo. By the time we got there, none of the buses were running and we were forced to resort to a tuk-tuk for the third time so we could get to our hostel. We didn't have enough cash to pay for it and there wasn't really enough time to hit an ATM so I paid in USD and ended up with a lot of effectively useless rupees as change. 

Our flights were scheduled to depart only a couple of hours apart so we accompanied each other to the airport early in the morning. The tuk-tuk driver who was supposed to drop us off at the main bus depot actually dropped us off a block away and told us to wait for the airport shuttle to come by. Ever suspicious of tuk-tuk drivers, we went off in search of the actual bus depot and found the shuttle there. It was good that we did so because it by the time it left the depot, there was no room left on it and it shot right by the place we'd been dropped off without stopping to pick up any of the unfortunate people waiting there.

At the airport we discovered that everything was done backwards. We had to go through security first and then show our boarding passes. I didn't have mine yet but we somehow bamboozled the staff into believing that Anita's itinerary printout covered both of us. Upon reaching the airline counter, I was informed that they didn't use computers and had to look me up by name on a sheet of paper before handing me my boarding pass! Although the departure gates for both of us were right beside each other, they wouldn't let Anita through to wait with me because her flight wasn't for another two hours. So I blew her a kiss through the glass pane before stepping onto the aeroplane.

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!

Anita and I had wanted to ride to Ella from Kandy by train in 1st class but they were sold out by the time we tried to get tickets so we settled for 2nd class instead. Unfortunately, by the time we made it onto the train, there were no seats available in 2nd class so we had to stand. The journey lasted several hours and I quickly decided that I had no desire to stand for that long so I just squatted on the floor instead and Anita soon joined me. We did, however, take periodic breaks from sitting on the floor to hang out the side of the train and enjoy the gorgeous view as it rushed by. Eventually some seats freed up and a Spanish couple we'd befriended nabbed two of them but were kind enough to let us share one of the two seats for the rest of the ride while they shared the other.

Towards the end of the trip, we were approached by a man touting a hostel in Ella. Despite our misgivings about touts and the fact that we had already booked another hostel, his offer sounded tantalizingly good so we agreed to take a gamble and check it out. Incredibly, it proved to be as good as he'd claimed and we decided to stay there. After checking in we wandered around in search of dinner but I was put off by all the flies, although Anita seemed to almost revel having them around. In the end we ate at the hostel and their food turned out to be very good.

After dinner we stopped by a local bar for a bottle of coconut toddy and then went for a walk in the nearby hills. We ended up getting a bit lost as darkness settled, although we eventually found our way back. I was pretty hungry after our walk but discovered to my great dismay that the hostel shut down at 10pm and we were no longer allowed to order food or even to leave! After haranguing the hostel owner for a while, he gave me a complimentary snack so I wouldn't have to go to bed on an empty stomach.

In the morning we treated ourselves to delicious coconut and honey pancakes for brekki and then caught a bus to the nearby waterfall. There was supposed to be a historically interesting cave at the top of the waterfall so we tried to find it. Unfortunately, even my well-honed climbing skills were no match for the smooth rock of the waterfall and after several attempts at scaling it we were forced to give up. 

When we got back, I raised my tolerance for flies in order to inject some diversity into our cuisine and we were able to find a place that served brown rice. I had been craving brown rice for several weeks so was delighted to find some. After lunch we picked up a clay pot of buffalo curd as a snack and went off in search of a hill called Little Adam's Peak. Before we left, however, we stopped by the hostel to borrow spoons and the waiter gave us just one spoon, saying it would be better that way because then we could feed each other!

Along the way there we came across these steps carved into the rock and, being the curious creatures we are, simply had to walk up them. The moment we reached the top we were greeted (in English) by a really sweet Sri Lankan woman named Kanthi who invited us into her home. We accepted her invitation and she told us about the crafts she'd been working on. Anita shard her passion for them so they got along very well and she offered us some tea but we couldn't stay very long because we didn't want to get lost in the dark again. We did, however, promise to drop by again on our way back.

We hadn't gone much further when Anita spotted a little temple by the side of the road so we walked over to take a look and were greeted by the family who owned it. They were just as friendly as Kanthi had been and gave us a tour of their little vegetable plots as well as a brief history of the temple, which had been in their family for 3 generations. After leaving the temple we kept walking towards the peak but eventually realized that there was no way we'd get to it in time to find our way back before nightfall. Settling for a view of the peak from across a valley filled with tea bushes, we sat down and ate our buffalo curds with some honey that Anita had brought with her from India.

As promised, we stopped by Kanthi's home for tea on the way back. Her 2 kids seemed quite excited by our visit and her daughter even gave Anita a dance lesson after performing for us in their living room! Kanthi herself taught Anita how to tie a sari in the Sri Lankan style that had captured her fancy when she saw women sporting it on the buses. We had a lovely time chatting with Kanthi about life in Sri Lanka before heading back to the hostel.

Suresh, the hostel owner had ofered to give us a tour of his organic farm before we left so we took him up on it. In the morning we checked out and got into a tuk tuk that he drove to the farm. Apparently he had teamed up with a Canadian to run the farm and they had been planning to turn it into an eco-resort at prices that blew our minds.

The farm had an impressively diverse mixture of crops. I can't even remember all the stuff they had growing there! It was 30 hectares and bounded by a river on 3 sides with a functioning well on the property. As I asked Suresh about his life story I was amazed by how entrepreneurial he was. After spending a few years working for Toyota in Japan, he had returned to Sri Lanka to open the hostel and then gotten involved with the farm in addition to that! After giving us a thorough tour of the farm, he dropped us off at the nearest bus stop so we could head South to the coast.

On the day we had planned to leave Colombo for Kandy, we didn't need to catch our train until 3:30 in the afternoon. Wanting to make the most of our morning, we checked out of the hostel, left our luggage at the front desk and hopped on the local train into the city to visit the Natural History Museum. By the time we were crowded out of there by an unending stream of elementary school kids, we were both quite hungry so we had lunch in the city before catching the local train back to Mt. Lavinia to rescue our luggage. Unfortunately, while on the train, we realized that we probably wouldn't have enough time to take the local train back into the city to catch the intercity express to Kandy.

Desperate circumstances called for desperate measures. For the first time, we decided to take a tuk-tuk to the hostel from the Mt. Lavinia station instead of walking. Upon getting there, we sought advice from the proprietress, who advised us to catch a city bus to the main train station, since those run much more frequently than the local train. When we got stuck in traffic on the bus, I wasn't sure if we'd make it after all but Anita remained remarkably optimistic about us catching the bus. Eventually the traffic cleared and we did make it into the city to catch our train. We even had a few minutes to spare!

The first-class seats we'd purchased were quite comfortable for the journey and we enjoyed the scenic beauty along the way, although it was dark by the time we finally arrived in Kandy. This time we hadn't booked a hostel room in advance because none of the cheap ones listed in the guide books or online seemed to have phone numbers! We'd hoped, therefore, to simply find one when we got there. Unfortunately, that proved to be an exercise in frustration. Both the places we had planned to check out were full and getting directions from the locals felt like dental extraction on large striped felines. Burned out from walking around with our backpacks in the dark, we caved in again and let a tuk-tuk driver take us to a random hostel that gave us a rather spartan room at a price that, while higher than we'd been hoping to pay, was not unreasonable.

On the morrow, refreshed from a good night's sleep and aided by daylight, we set off by bus to visit the Botanical Gardens. Like most other big attractions in the country, they had one price for locals and another one, 20 times higher, for tourists. Since I kept being mistaken for a local, we decided to try and sneak in as locals. The guy at the ticket booth didn't flinch when I handed him the amount for 2 locally-priced tickets. Unfortunately, when we tried to actually enter the park, the gatekeeper tried talking to me in Sinhalese and when I failed to reply, he requested to see our ID. We ended up having to pay full price after all but it was worth a shot.

Wandering around the gardens, we came upon a tree with a thick vine that looped down to form a natural swing. Unable to resist, we started hanging from it and Anita even sat in it. We'd been somewhat worried that the nearby gardener might object to us playing on the tree but he turned out to be remarkably cool and we even convinced him to sit in the loop himself! Not all the staff were like him, unfortunately, as I was thoroughly reprimanded for climbing up a giant Java fig tree in a different area of the park. In addition to climbing trees, we also found some odd fruits, one of which we dissected to identify as a type of almond.

After sitting out the afternoon heat in our hostel-room, we went for a walk around the lake. Despite having been warned by legions of tuk-tuk drivers that the perimeter was several kilometers, it turned out to be a fairly short (and very pleasant) walk. About halfway around, we discovered the famous Kandy cultural dance show was about to begin so, on a whim, we bought tickets and went inside. It was amusing to be amongst a scarce handful of brown people for a change as the audience was mostly foreign tourists. When the show was over, we continued our stroll around the lake with a stop in downtown Kandy for sketchy street food.

The next day we caught an intercity bus headed North and eventually ended up in the little town of Sigiriya, where we'd been told there was an ancient city built on a large rock. Finding lodging was much easier this time around but we quickly discovered that it cost $25 to see the ancient city. While that may sound relatively cheap by the standards of industrialized countries, both of us has been traveling around Asia for long enough that it seemed like a complete rip-off. Disgusted, we decided to rent bikes and see the countryside instead. The bikes we rented were in terrible condition but they worked. Eventually we dismounted and went hiking for a while, which was an amazing experience because the scenery was beautiful and there was virtually nobody around. We even found tamarind growing in the wild!

After returning to the hostel for dinner and a nap, we headed back out at dusk to look for wild elephants, taking our flashlights with us. To my dismay and Anita's relief, there were no wild elephants to be found. Instead we came across wild dogs. Well, they weren't actually wild but they sure acted like it. We had to use the beam of our flashlights to keep them at bay while we slowly retreated to the hostel.

We left Sigiriya the next morning and returned to Kandy. The bus ride this time swerved between exhilarating and terrifying as the driver awed us with his finely honed ability to pass in oncoming traffic. Our ride on the death bus ended shortly before it should have when the bus blew a tyre. We were all forced to disembark and board another bus for the last several minutes of the journey. On the bright side, it was early in the day when we returned to Kandy so we were able to scout around for hostels and found one closer to the lake for a slightly lower price. The place was being renovated so our room was surrounded by construction workers. We did our best to entertain them.

I met Anita at the airport in Colombo. She'd also quit her engineering job in California last year and had been traveling around India for a few months. Like me, she'd been part of the bicycling community in San Francisco and used to get her veggies from a local farm. Unlike me, she'd arrived in Sri Lanka with an enormous backpack containing most of the stuff she'd been lugging around the Himalayas all Winter. Neither of us had a concrete idea of what we wanted to see in Sri Lanka, aside from living in hostels, taking trains/buses and eating cheap local food. We were, it seemed, destined to be travel buddies.

As we left the airport in search of a bus to the city, we were harangued by a plague of tuk-tuk drivers. It was a herald of things to come. The bus ride into the city ended up taking over two hours, long enough for my hunger pangs to kick in. Fortunately Anita had brought with her a ripe guava from India. She gave it to me and it was delicious. I liked her already.

Upon reaching Colombo, we found a tourist information office and inquired about taking trains around the country. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves getting the hard sell for a fancy package tour from this alleged government official. Feeling uneasy about the whole situation, we insisted that we wanted to take buses instead of hiring a private driver and left, although we decided to roughly follow the itinerary he had suggested for us, since it sounded pretty compelling.

We also took his recommendation on a place for lunch. The staff there must have found us most entertaining because they stood by our table and watched us eat with giant grins plastered across their faces. Eventually, however, my slow pace of eating wore them down and they literally pleaded with us to leave so they could seat other customers! Acquiescing, we bought 1st class train tickets to Kandy and then caught a bus to a beach-side hostel in nearby Mt. Lavinia.

After checking into a triple room that we shared with a Japanese girl, we walked to the beach. First we splashed around in the salty waves, then we build castles on the beautiful sand. When the sun grew too hot, we lay down under a parasol and chatted, our conversation punctuated by the local train as it rumbled passed. Soon we grew hungry and bought some snacks, including a king coconut. King coconuts are different from the ones I'd been used to in Malaysia because they have only water and no flesh. Even so, they're cheaper than bottled water and far tastier.

As we devoured our snacks, a gang of young Sri Lankans, mostly guys, showed up on on the beach. They told us they were engineering students from a nearby university and had come to party on the beach. It was fun to watch them dancing and we spent some time talking to a few of them. One of them was shocked to hear that there were no coconuts grown in the US. Evidently he'd seen palm trees on CSI Miami and assumed that they were coconut palms!

At Anita's urging, we ended our night on the beach by dissecting the shell of a coconut. It was to be the first of many random things we dissected. A girl after my own heart indeed.

In the morning we walked down the tracks to the nearby train station and rode the local train into Colombo. We'd been hoping to lie on the grass in a park but the grass was withered from the heat so we strolled along the beach instead. Anita wasn't feeling too well that morning so we soon stopped to rest at a nearby Buddhist temple that had a large golden statue and an interesting pagoda with depictions of the history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

After resting for a while, we headed back to the train station for lunch. The place we picked for lunch had a wonderful surprise in store for us: they served faluda, a delicious milky drink that I that despaired about ever finding again after I left Karachi. Anita had never tasted it before but after just one sip she had been won over. Although we were bowled over by the availability of faluda, we did have some trouble asking for a more mundane item: salt. Anita wanted some to help with her dehydration but we simply could not get across the concept of salt to the one waiter who spoke any English! After a long and frustrating struggle to communicate our desire for salt, another patron took pity on us and translated the word. I think the poor waiter was almost as relieved as we were.

When we returned to the beach, I spotted a bunch of guys playing cricket there. I was a little surprised that they were able to do so without constantly losing their ball to the waves. I actually wanted to join them but I was too tired and thirsty to bother. Instead we just relaxed at our hostel for a few hours before heading out for a bite.

There was a little restaurant on the main road near the hostel that appeared to have cheap local food. Inside it was a guy constantly chopping a mixture of veggies and meat with a pair of large metal implements. It sounded something like a drum beat and grabbed our attention as we walked by so we walked in and ordered the stuff he'd been making, which is called kutto. I was fascinated to discover that they served the food on a sheet of cling foil! Not only does this eliminate the need for washing plates but it makes for an instant doggie-bag at the end of the meal.