Quik Thinking

Having alternated between cultural and outdoorsy experiences during our time in Egypt so far, we continued the tradition by spending the last couple of days in Dahab. After a few initial hiccups involving a defective key at the Red Sea Relax hostel, we were thoroughly impressed by the feast they laid out for breakfast.

With our bellies full, we embarked on a snorkeling trip in the Red Sea itself at a spot called the Blue Hole. The goggles I was given were loose so seawater kept getting into my eyes and I had to take a break to find tighter goggles. On my next attempt I got better at using the flippers, although it was still a tiring experience. That said, looking at fish and coral underwater was quite an amazing experience.

Having worked up a hearty appetite, it was time for dinner. The boardwalk was lined with overpriced restaurants all competing intensely but with pretty much the same fare. After comparing prices and haggling a bit, we somewhat arbitrarily picked one. The food was actually delicious, although we weren't the only ones to think so as our dinner was plagued by cats, all hoping to get some of it.

The next day Luke, Dave and I decided to get a professional shave at the local barber. It was amusing to watch Luke's reaction when his face was threaded! I ended up looking strangely Egyptian after they were done.

We spent our last night in Egypt scaling Mt. Sinai. I prepped by drinking a cup of coffee; the first I'd had in years. It took about two hours to drive to the base of the mountain and then another 150 minutes to ascend it in the dark using flashlights. But we managed to snag an excellent spot from which to watch the sun rise. Once that was over, however, we had to contend with a zillion other people who all wanted to descend along with us. Going slowly was just as well though, since I found the steep descent to be hard on my joints.

Once we made it to the airport, getting from Cairo to Luxor was a relatively painless operation, as was finding our hostel, where we reunited with Yvonne and Luke, who had been exploring other parts of the country while we camped in the dessert. The hostel was offering guided tours of the West bank so we took them up on it the next morning. After our excellent experience with Hani in the dessert, we were greatly dismayed to discover that this guide could barely understand English; each time we asked him a question, he answered a completely different question!

The first stop was a temple that had been destroyed by an earthquake in 37 BC. Only a pair of giant pharaoh statues survived the quake, each of which has a miniature statue of his wife beside him. Apparently that was the thing to do back then. The second stop was the Valley of the Queens, so called because no kings were buried there, although sometimes princes who died in childhood ended up there as well. Before we could look at the burial chambers, the guide made us watch a crummy documentary whose sound was barely audible. While looking at the tombs, the guide fed us some outlandish tales about the queens, including one about a queen who fabricated a myth about her mom being impregnated by a god so that she could hang on to the throne without having to cede power to a husband.

The third stop was at an alleged artist workshop, where we saw how they make alabaster jars, although we came away with the strong feeling that the guide just took us there in the hopes that we would buy lots of overpriced crap that he probably gets a cut on. 

With that out of the way, it was on to the fourth stop: the Valley of the Kings, where we had only enough time to learn about three kings. Ramses III had 42 wives but still slept around with others and Sety II died young so they did an astonishingly sub-par job on his tomb. The highlight of this stop was a descent into the underground burial chamber of Thutmosis II, where we had a chance to examine very early hieroglyphs done is a style far simpler than anything I'd ever seen before.

Stop five was another temple, featuring two engravings of particular interest: one was a series of engravings of the fertility god, whose limbs were chopped off as punishment for impregnating a bunch of women; the other was a queen who swallowed the sun in the morning and expelled it through her vagina in the evening. The last stop on the tour was the residence of some old British guy that was only marginally interesting. The guide also tried to make us go through a sketchy papyrus factory but we refused unanimously.

That evening we visited the Luxor temple, which contained some fascinating relics from the Greek and Roman conquests of Egypt, including statues of Alexander the Great as a pharaoh and some Roman paintings that covered older Egyptian engravings. Outside the temple was a large courtyard lined with massive stone columns, many of which had statues of Ramses II beside them. But the most striking feature of the temple was a giant stone obelisk that rose several dozen feet from the ground.

On our final day in Luxor we visited the Karnak temple complex, this time ending up with an awesome guide. He explained that the complex had started out fairly small as the venue for the annual wedding ceremony for the Thebian trio of gods but had been successively enlarged by waves of pharaohs until it was the largest religious structure in the world. He also cleared up the fragmented stories we'd heard from the previous guide about queen Hatshetsup.

This is the long-delayed post about our dessert-camping experience from November.

Unlike the car that was supposed to take us to the pyramids but never materialized, our guide for the Sahara camping trip arrived slightly early. His name was Hani (or something that sounded a lot like that) and he spoke English fluently, which put us all at ease. He'd brought along somebody else to drive the van, which initially seemed inefficient until I realized that this specialization of duties was quite effective; the driver zipped along at close to 150 mph while Hani was free to answer our numerous questions about the Sahara. In fact, we even picked up a police officer and gave him a ride to the police checkpoint in the dessert, which facilitated getting us through it without any hassle.

Once we were in the dessert, we stopped at the El Bahriya oasis and switched to a land rover that allowed us to roll down sand dunes without much ado. I was soon mesmerized by the sheer quantity of sand surrounding us; there was often nothing else to see in any direction! The first time we stopped to take photographs of the sand dunes, we struck the clichéd "walk like an Egyptian" pose, only to have Hani inform us that Egyptians no longer walk like that. I'd always assumed the pose was entirely fabricated for dramatic effect but he went on to explain that it was once used during religious ceremonies in ancient Egypt.

At lunch time we ate in a rest stop while surrounded by flies. I hate flies so much. After lunch Hani took us down a road built by the Brits during WWII to see the black sands formed by volcanic ashes. We even saw the flat-topped dormant volcanoes that had once spewed all this ash. Next we went to the "white dessert", which is composed of chalk. There were some very odd chalk formations that usually resembled mushrooms, although one of them actually looked like a chicken. This is where we set up camp for the night.

Hani and the driver cooked us a fine dinner of BBQ chicken and potato stew over a fire that also kept us warm once the cold dessert night set in. After eating, we slept under camel fur blankets. Although we'd been hoping to see stars, the full moon pretty much crowded them out. Aware that it is made of cheese, Don tried to eat it but to no avail.

Our second day in the Sahara devolved into a hellish amount of driving. But first we had to sit around for a long time at the oasis while the seats in the land rover were replaced. We killed some time by wandering around in some Coptic ruins from the 7th century. The Egyptians weren't too excited about those because they were "only 1300 years old", a sentiment only possible amongst people whose recorded history goes back for millennia.

With the new seats finally in place, we headed off in search of the Valley of the Whales. Unfortunately, Hani got a bit lost and we could not find the valley before nightfall so we just camped in the white dessert again. Such is the downside of navigating via old tyre tracks instead of GPS. On the plus side, this time we were able to see more stars before the moon came out in force.

In the morning we finally made it to the valley, which was dotted with fossils and striated rock formations, having once been a sea some 40 million yeas ago. Finding sea shells in the Sahara dessert is truly an eye-opening experience. Once we'd had our fill of this oddity, Hani took us to see a massive artificial lake that had been created from treated agricultural runoff and is now stocked with fish. That too was a bit surreal.

It was then time to leave the dessert, although we stopped at Imhotep's step pyramid on the way back to Cairo to see the first pyramid ever built. Unshockingly, it was far less impressive than the great ones at Giza and in a far worse state of disrepair. More interestingly, I noticed that there was an enormous difference in the quality of walls used to build dwellings for the pyramid workers VS the temple, although both were built by the same people at around the same time.

Once in Egypt, we needed to take a cab to the airport. Dave assumed that the cabbies would all speak English but after getting into one, we discovered that he thought we wanted to go to the Sheraton! I tried miming an airport but it only left him bewildered. Fortunately, he had the resourcefulness to take us to a police station where somebody could translate and we then headed for the airport.

On our first proper day in Cairo, we attempted to take a cab from our hostel to Coptic Cairo. We were thwarted by our complete inability to communicate in Arabic, since none of the cabbies knew any English either. In the end we were forced to have one of the hostel staff members haggle with cabs for us.

Coptic Cairo wasn't nearly as exciting as we'd hoped. Perhaps it would have been better with a guide. Actually, in what would turn out to be a portend of things to come, a random Egyptian attempted to weasel his way into being our tour guide. We paid him what his information was worth: 17 cents. One interesting thing we did encounter in Coptic Cairo was a series of paintings that date back to around 18 A.D. Most of them seemed to have been preserved remarkably well, prompting me to wonder about the accuracy of whomever dated them.

Given our previous failure at catching a cab, we decided to try the Metro instead. That turned out to be a good idea because the Metro in Cairo is frequent, fast and dirt cheap. It cost a piddling 17 cents per ride, encouraging us to use it often during our stay there. In addition to taking the Metro, we also walked around a fair bit. While most street-crossings were tests of will and bravado, the few traffic signals we saw were delightful to watch because the little green walking man on them would speed up as time went by until he was sprinting at a good clip just before the sign changed to the red hand.

The reason for all this subway-riding and walking was our quest for lunch. But not any old lunch; we were searching for the best kushari in Cairo (and therefore the world). Kushari is a dish that originated in Cairo and is made from a combination of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, browned onions, garlic infused vinegar and tomato sauce. The word on the street was that the best place to eat it was a restaurant called Abou Tarek, which served nothing else. It took us a while to locate that place but we were rewarded by what I consider to be one of the best meals I've had in ages. I badly wanted to chow down a second bowl of the stuff but somebody else's better judgement prevailed.

Now sated, we ambled over to the Egyptian museum, where we got a guide to show us around. He was pretty good, although he kept telling us how he had recently discovered rather momentous facts about ancient Egypt, which made me suspicious about the veracity of his tales. But then I've never been one to let facts get in the way of a good story. The museum was quite interesting but after walking around in it for a couple of hours we were worn out so we headed back to our hostel for a rest.

That evening, I decided to get a haircut at the nearby barber. He didn't speak any English but the previous customer did and translated for me. To my surprise, after cutting my hair, he whipped out a length of thread and proceeded to thread my face with it. Having never experienced this before, it was an interesting sensation, albeit slightly painful at times.

With my newly coiffured look, we set off to watch the whirling dervishes or, as they are known locally, sufi dancers. The sufi are a mystical sect of Islam who believe that by whirling around they enter into a divine frenzy. Sounds vaguely like Thupasam, minus the sharp hooks! To our pleasant surprise, the event was free, having been sponsored by a cultural grant from the government. In addition to the dancing and whirling, they also played music on horns that had only one volume level: loud. The dancers wore brightly coloured skirts that looked awesome when they whirled around.

Having gotten our fill of mystics twirling in gaudy skirts, we ventured into the surrounding bazaar, known as the Khan-el-Khalili. I had been curious about a local spice called gad and at one point we found some for sale at a spice store but the proprietor evidently had better things to do than talk to a bunch of tourists so we moved on. We hadn't gone very far, however, when an English-speaking local who claimed he was a doctor offered to show us around the spice store. He seemed harmless enough so we took up his offer. He certainly did show us all manners of curiosities in the store, including dessicated and shrunken animals. In the end we bought some spices, only to discover that we'd paid an order of magnitude more for them than the going rate. 

No trip to Egypt would be complete without a visit to the great pyramids of Giza (and the accompanying Sphinx). Conveniently, Giza is right outside Cairo. Our original plan had been to hire a car to drive us there and back but the car broke down the morning we were to go there. Ever resourceful, we thought it would be a good idea to take the Metro to Giza and then either take a cab or microbus to the pyramids. Our guide book warned us that many locals would try to scam us into entering through the gate designated for Egyptian students and then make us shell out for a camel ride across the dessert. Sure enough, as soon as we got off the subway in Giza, we were set upon by a small horde of annoyingly persistent cabbies all trying to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students in order to pay the much lower entrance fare. We must have lost half an hour trying to get them off our backs before we found a microbus that took us to the pyramids - but not before they also tried to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students.

The pestering didn't end once we finally reached the pyramids; it just changed form. Now we were being offered horribly overpriced bottled water and camel rides. Between all these fascinating offers, we managed to sneak a few glances at the 4500 year old pyramids. Although the were a bevy of tourists around, none of them ventured to the far side of the pyramids so once we got there, we had relatively unobstructed views of the giant structures. Despite being so close, however, we did not touch them because doing so is forbidden in order to protect them against further decay. There are guards stations to enforce this rule, although, based on what we saw, their loyalties can be swayed by filthy lucre.

Later in the day we went for a cruise down in a Nile in a felucca. Having been conditioned to bargain for everything, we were dismayed to realize that the felucca owners had no interest in bargaining. Eventually we realized why: they were all situated across the street from a clutch of 5-star hotels whose patrons probably couldn't be bothered to bargain for anything.

We ended our stay in Cairo by visiting a hookah bar where Luke and I schooled the others in the fine art of nasally exhaling smoke.

Last weekend Anita and I decided to spend a few days this week visiting the Eastern Townships as a break from city life. With a bit of effort, we found somebody in Magog with whom to couch-surf for 3 days mid-week. Our intention had been to take our bikes on the bus and use them to get around once we were there. Unfortunately, Anita forgot to lock hers up for a few hours the night before we were supposed to leave and it was only while packing that she realized she still had the lock with her. By then, of course, it had already been stolen. Faced with this last-minute hiccup, we figured we could just hitch-hike our way around instead.

Much to my surprise, the bus was packed. I had no idea so many people would be going to the Eastern Townships on a Tuesday morning. Upon arrival in Magog, we ate lunch at a little place called Chich Taouk, which our hostess, Marthe, had recommended. Anita even had some meat! After lunch we hitched a ride to Marthe's house, where she told us a few things about the town and then sent us on our way to the lake. Walking down the street, I was puzzled to notice that the traffic lanes had been created using wet toilet paper!

The lake was cold. Not so cold that we didn't immerse ourselves in it but cold enough that we had to keep moving around in it to generate heat. After we'd had our fill of swimming around, we lay around on the grass to dry off before playing frisbee and then returning to Marthe's for dinner. We helped Marthe make a casserole type dish. It was fun cooking with her because she had so many culinary gadgets. Marthe regaled us with fascinating stories until it was time for bed.

I joined Marthe for brekki around 8:30am. Although she doesn't eat fruits because the citric acid makes her fingers hurt, she had bought some just for us. I cut them into little pieces and proceeded to eat them very slowly until Anita eventually joined us and took over that task. Energized for the day, we were driven by Marthe to Mont Orford so we could hike up it. 

Despite stopping a few times for some impromptu bouldering, we made it to the summit, where we enjoyed a view that extended as far as Vermont. There were several yurts around, which are probably used by skiers during the Winter. I'd never been inside a yurt before so was quite enthralled by them. We took a gentler route down but, even so, I had to walk backwards to relieve the strain on my toes. It took a few tries this time but we were again able to hitch a ride back to Marthe's for dinner.

This time we followed dinner with some Coaticook ice-cream, which is made in a little town near Magog using the traditional method. It started raining while we ate but we decided to go out anyway because Marthe had told us about a free concert going on nearby. She drove us there and we enjoyed performances by 4 different string quartets playing pieces by Hadyn, Shostakovich and Beethoven. There was also some lovely vocal music by an opera singer but by the time she went on all the carbon dioxide in the church hosting the concert was making me sleepy. But not so sleepy that I didn't eat a bowl of porridge when we got back.

I ate porridge again in the morning and then Marthe drove us downtown so we could stroll through the marshlands. There were a few informative signs about the local fauna but of course none of them were in English so we made hazardous guesses at translation. Once we strayed far enough from the edges of suburbia, the marshes made for some gorgeous views. But the best part was when we discovered wild blueberries growing in them. We tried to offer some to passers-by but only one family accepted them.

By the time we got to the end of the marsh trail, my feet were pretty sore and I wanted to take the shortest route back to the city so we could grab lunch and rest. Sadly, we got lost trying to find the lake. After buying snacks from a dep, we managed to hitch a ride back into town, only to discover that Chich Taouk was closed for an hour between lunch and dinner and we'd just missed the lunch shift. We spent the better part of an hour looking for another place that offered reasonably priced vegetarian fare but in the end we just came back when it reopened for dinner. After we hitched yet another ride and packed up our stuff, Marthe kindly dropped us off at the bus station.

Interestingly, the bus we took back to Montreal was nearly empty.

In Bangkok, for the first time, we stayed in a hotel with a swimming pool. The pool was necessary because Katherine had been so badly bitten by mosquitoes that she was in dire need of chlorinated water in which to soak. After checking in, we ate dinner at a nearby restaurant that had an awesome tuk-tuk sign posted outside and then went right to bed, exhausted after a long day of travelling.

In the morning I awoke early (as usual) and set off on my own to find some street food for brekki. Before eating I stopped by a park to enjoy the fascinating sculptures on display there. While doing that I discovered a swimming pool that was open to anybody who wished to purchase a very cheap annual membership. And, of course, there were a bunch of people practicing Tai Chi. As I was about to leave the park, I heard music start playing all around me and everybody suddenly stopped and stood very still. It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on: the daily national anthem!

When Tony and Katherine had been trying to catch their flight from Tokyo to Bangkok a few days before, they'd missed it because Tony had forgotten his passport at home. They were able to purchase and take a different flight later that day, at which point they thought the incident had been put behind them. Unfortunately, however, Expedia then left them a message informing them that their return flight had been cancelled by China Airlines because they'd missed the original one. Annoyed at this reckless behaviour, we decided to visit the China Airlines office in Bangkok.

Getting there proved to be complicated because Google Maps gave us the wrong location for the office but eventually we found it. The woman at the customer service desk was extremely nice and promised Tony that he could get most of his trip refunded. She explained that, although the original return flight no longer had any seats available, they should be able to take a different flight within a day of it. That seemed reasonable enough so we left. But it then took several additional frustrating phone calls to Expedia before they were actually able to get the refund.

In the afternoon, after returning from China Airlines, it was very hot so we hit the pool. We had the entire thing to ourselves, which was nice. But there's only so long we could handle lounging in the pool and eventually it began to get a little chilly so we left for the Victory Monument, which is where I'd accidentally ended up when I caught the express bus from the airport a few days earlier.

By the time we reached it, we were rather hungry. The monument is littered with snack vendors so Katherine and Tony wanted to just nibble on snacks as we wandered around. Normally that would have been a problem for me because eating is a heavyweight operation for me thanks to Invisalign. However, at that point I had just completed the fortnight-long cycle for that particular pair so I decided to try an experiment. Removing them for the rest of the evening, I snacked with impunity. The freedom of being able to eat at will gave me quite the rush! The experiment was marred only when I managed to cut my thumb while peeling a local fruit.

After snacking, we took the skytrain to Bangkok's largest park and walked around for a while. Katherine bought a can of beer before we learned that drinking alcohol was not permitted in the park. I thought it was odd that beer could be sold in there if nobody was supposed to actually drink it. While Katherine furtively stole sips of her beer, we amused ourselves by watching an enormous crowd participate in an outdoor dancercise session. Although the participants were mostly female, there were plenty of guys too. 

As darkness fell, we left the park for the night market just outside it. There was a wide variety of food available there, although they wouldn't take our money. We had to purchase coupons and then use those to buy food. I was initially skeptical about ending up with extra useless coupons at the end but Tony pointed out that they would happily refund unused coupons. I guess they must have instituted the system to isolate the handling of cash to a small number of people. The food stalls are arranged in two inward-facing rows on either side of a lawn filled with tables and chairs on which to eat. At one end of the lawn is a stage on which various musical numbers are accompanied by dancing. It's a very pleasant experience.

Once we'd eaten it was time to hit the shops. Bargaining was underway everywhere we turned. Tony and I eventually grew tired of walking around and sat down to rest while Katherine continued window-shopping. I noticed several old white men accompanied by cute young Thai women. That didn't surprise me but what did was a young European dude with tattoos all over his arms yelling at an overly made-up Thai woman for trying to steal his medicines. She returned them and slunk off, disappointed. 

On our final day in Bangkok we decided to visit the zoo. I've been to many zoos in my life and this one was by no means among the best. However, I think I saw more interesting things there than I have any any of the others! At one point we were walking around when I spotted a strange lizard on the road being attacked by a crow. Never having seen a crow attack a lizard before, I stopped to watch. The crow seemed to be taking its time, waiting for a few seconds between attacks. The lizard, meanwhile, was desperate to escape and struggled mightily every time the crow grabbed it in its beak. Suddenly a young European woman walked by and, taking pity on the lizard, tried to shoo away the crow!

Some time later, we were looking at the reptiles when I noticed a snake that had just gotten hold of a mouse in its mouth. I think it had killed the mouse already and was about to swallow it. I hung around, curious to see what this swallowing process looks like, having never witnessed it before. The snake appeared to be in no hurry as it just lay there with the mouse in its mouth, tail sticking out, for a couple of minutes before finally getting down to business. Unhinging its jaw, it slowly stretched its mouth open even wider and very slowly used peristalsis to move the mouse into its gullet. Eventually the tail had vanished and there was a bulge in the snake's body that continued to move down. An amazing sight to behold.

At one point we walked into the sea lion show and found a troupe of monks in training. I'd never seen so many young boys in the traditional orange robes with their heads shaved! Despite being well behaved, they were by far the most playful monks I've ever seen. They seemed quite amused when I decided to climb onto a large dinosaur statue. 

By the time we left the zoo, we were quite weary from walking around in the heat for hours and watching a movie in an air-conditioned mall seemed like a welcome change. Alice in Wonderland was playing in IMAX 3D so we saw that before returning to our hotel room. I had an early morning flight to Toronto by way of Tokyo and Washington DC so I asked for a wake-up call. As it happened, I woke up on my own right around when I wanted to, which was good because that call never came! 

I took a cab to the airport, rescued my luggage and caught my flight, making it all the way to DC without incident. In DC, however, I had to go through the US CBP and the line was so long that I missed my flight to Toronto. The CBP officer was amused by the fact that I've had four different kinds of US visas but since I was just in transit he didn't ask me any questions and I was able to get on the next flight to Toronto easily enough.

Rather than flying back to Kuala Lumpur again before heading to Canada, I decided to simply fly into Toronto directly from Thailand. This meant that, unlike my forays into Cambodia and Sri Lanka, I had to take all my stuff with me when I left KL. That proved to be problematic because I was flying from KL to Bangkok on Air Asia, which has a much lower baggage allowance than my flight from SF to KL did. I ended up discarding a bunch of stuff in KL and still having to pay $40 in excess baggage fees. 

I also needed to exchange hundreds of ringgits for dollars after getting my rental deposit back. I'd hoped to do this at the airport but ended up getting there later than I'd meant to and standing in the wrong line for a while. To make things worse, I almost left my passport at the check-in counter. Fortunately, the flight had been delayed so I had enough time to visit a currency exchange booth. They were able to give me some Thai baht but when I asked for Canadian dollars they did not have any so I ended up settling for greenbacks instead.

When I landed in Bangkok, after leaving my suitcases at the Left Baggage station, I caught a bus into the city. According to Google Transit, I needed to transfer to another bus so I could meet my friends Tony and Katherine, who were visiting from Tokyo, at the Ekkemai transit station. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing when to get off the bus and the conductor gave me the wrong information so I ended up going too far and found myself at the Victory Monument, which is quite far from Ekkemai. I was supposed to meet them at 2pm and it was already 1:40 so I took a cab to Ekkemai and got there with barely a few minutes to spare.

From Ekkemai we caught another bus and then a ferry to the island of Ko Samet. It was already dark when we arrived and we weren't sure exactly where our cabin was but Tony managed to lead us to it. The cabin had a miniscule bathroom and the veranda had a low-hanging beam on which I kept bumping my head but it did offer a nice view of the water. And there were a couple of pigs outside!

In the morning Tony and I set off to explore the island while Katherine slept. I noticed a tamarind tree growing near the cabin. Although most of the fruit had been eaten by ants, I managed to find a couple of god ones. I kept one for myself and fed the other to one of the pigs. As in Sri Lanka, there were no bicycles to be had. Apparently motorcycles are all the rage these days. What we did find was a place that served amazing pancakes and had hammocks to lie in after eating them.

We also found a better place at which to stay. It was run by a guy whose name was also Tony! Although we had to share the bathrooms, they were very pretty. Initially I thought there was no wifi but when I asked about it, they told me they'd just forgotten to turn on the router that morning and then did so. These people take power-conservation seriously! 

After moving our stuff to the new hostel, we headed to the conservation park where, for a few dollars, we gained access to a beach with gorgeous white sand, an incredibly gentle slope, crystal clear water, no current and barely any waves! We played in the water for hours, amazed by how the water seemed more like a giant swimming pool than a seashore. For lunch I ate congee and cheap fruit at a beach-side restaurant. The only problem with the beach was that there didn't appear to be any toilets anywhere on it, which eventually forced us to return to our hostel. 

Katherine and Tony decided to take a nap but I wasn't sleepy so I headed out on my own. Finding a little store that sold fruit, I bought and ate a mango and a coconut. I also picked up a pair of imitation Crocs before deciding to get a massage. Traditional Thai massage turned out to be similar to Khmer massage at the macro level, although the details are different. By the time I got back to the hostel, the mosquitoes were starting to make their appearance for the evening. Tony didn't seem to be bothered by them much but I got several nasty bites and Katherine was practically covered in them.

Once we'd picked up some more insect-repellent, we went out for dinner. I'm pretty sure our waitress was a tranny. I ordered fried noodles and they were really good. During my time in North America, I hadn't been a huge fan of Thai food but those noodles made me realize that I simply hadn't eaten good Thai food before. I washed them down with a pina shake that was gone almost as soon as my lips touched the straw.

Having sated our appetites, we strolled over to see what the beach looked like at night. There were glowing coloured balls hanging everywhere and music playing from various restaurants, all of which were packed with tourists. On the sand there were some fire dancers, a few of whom looked like their daytime activities were confined to a classroom. Also on the sand were some food carts hawking roti pancakes. If it hadn't been for my Invisalign, I would have eaten a pancake.

The next morning a thunderstorm broke over the island and we were stuck inside the hostel waiting for it to end before we could catch the ferry back to the mainland. The staff took advantage of the excess water to clean the floors! We watched the storm for a couple of hours before it finally died down enough that we could make a break for it.

When we got to the mainland, we had plenty of time before the bus was supposed to leave for Bangkok so we killed time at the market across the street for half an hour before returning to board the bus. Unfortunately, when we tried to get on, we were told that what we thought were return tickets were actually vouchers for tickets and we needed to exchange them for tickets to board. Kinda annoying but the ticket booth was right there so it seemed simple enough.

Ten minutes later we finally got to the head of the short but slow-moving queue and were told that all the seats on this bus were already sold and we'd have to take the next one in an hour. We could see quite clearly that there were several empty seats on the bus but pointing that out didn't seem to get us anywhere. So we had to watch in frustration as a bus they claimed was full pulled away with entire rows of empty seats staring tantalizingly at us.

We amused ourselves for an hour with the free wifi and a gigantic cockroach before boarding the next bus. It made good time until we hit traffic in Bangkok, at which point we crawled along beside the Skyrain track as trains whizzed by us. I would have loved to just get off and take the Skytrain but we had luggage that had been stowed so that wasn't an option and we had to wait nearly a hour before we could disembark.

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.