Quite a lot has gone down since we jetted off from NYC. It was time to start our South East Asia leg of the trip and Colombo, Sri Lanka was our first port of call. The flight from NYC was long and fairly brutal. Air con wasn't working properly, not enough water was drunk and sleep is never my priority on planes (too many movies to watch). But we got there in the end and exiting the airport in Colombo to the humidity and smell of spices was a really lovely welcome to Asia.
COLOMBO
The capital of Sri Lanka, it was hectic, hot and humid. We only spent a couple of days here, mainly to adjust to the weather and the time zone and catch up on some sleep. This wasn't particularly easy, given that our hostel didn't have air con. Spoiler alert: not a single accommodation we stayed in in Sri Lanka had air con. More on that later. Actually not too much to report from Colombo. We stayed in the Mount Lavinia area which is nice, close to the beach (although it didn't really look appealing for swimming) and there were a few nice restaurants around. Our hostel owner gave us a great recommendation for dinner and we ate two of the best curries that have ever graced the face of the earth. Seriously amazing but way out of our price range. At the time we were a bit annoyed at how costly it was (they stung us at the end of the meal with a service charge AND tax) but we've talked about those curries a lot since, so they must have been worth the money.
GALLE
The train ride to Galle from Colombo was our first public transport experience in Sri Lanka and it was a lot of fun. We sat in second class where there's no air con but the windows open and you can hang out of the door if you really want to cool down. The local people on board were super friendly and helpful, making sure we knew where we were supposed to get off and had all our bags. We had booked a cheap guesthouse online and the tuk tuk driver who took us out there did the usual 'oh no, it's awful, don't stay there' routine which we of course fobbed off because we didn't want him to take us to his brother's/cousin's/friend's guesthouse that was 'much nicer'. We've been playing this game for a while and it's not easy to fool us. Well. He was telling the truth. When we arrived the first thing we noticed was a smashed window in the entrance. Not a recent break either, as it was covered in cobwebs. It was very ghetto. We knocked and knocked and waited and waited. Nobody turned up. The place was either abandoned, or it was incredibly poorly looked after. Either way, not somewhere we wanted to stay. A 20 minute walk got us to a nice, clean, friendly guesthouse where there were free mangoes and no broken windows.
Galle is a pretty interesting town. It is famous for the fort area, which is like a walled city, built by the Portuguese in 1588 and later settled by the Dutch, before the Brits arrived in 1796. The fort area is pretty touristy these days, with more expensive accommodation and lots of cafes and shops. From different points within the fort you get views of the ocean and of the cricket oval where Shane warned took his 500th test match wicket and Murali his 800th.. This was actually the oval that he and Murali organised the funds to rebuild after the Boxing Day tsunami devastated this area in 2004. We met a local man who lost his daughter in the tsunami and he told us he likes Australian people because we donated so much money and helped out so much after this disaster. It was a nice change to be recognised overseas for something other than our refugee policy! Anyway, he very proudly showed us the oval and helped us convince the security guard to let us past the gate for a better look. It's a beautiful ground, in a lovely location and I really wish there had been a game on while we were there. Instead, we settled for watching some local teenagers playing a casual game nearby, Dave waiting by the fence like an excited puppy, desperate for the ball to come his way so he could join in.
We knew that the south west of Sri Lanka was heading into monsoon season so it would be a bit quieter with tourists but we certainly didn't expect the streets of the fort area to be completely deserted at night. There were hardly any other tourists in town, which was such an eerie feeling, given that the area is so set up for tourists. It was a feeling that would continue for most of our trip, and it seemed like such a shame that people only visit this amazing country for a few months of the year.
MIRISSA
One town that is apparently chockers with tourists in high season is Mirissa. It's a a sleepy little beach side town, just a couple of hours east of Galle by train. This was one of my favorite places in Sri Lanka, despite the fact that we only really got good beach weather one day that we were there. There were so many delicious cheap restaurants and we took full advantage of them. The beach had a row of restaurants along the sand, the perfect spot to watch the sunset with a cold Lion beer, paper lanterns twinkling overhead. Mirissa was also pretty quiet but I do think it would be a fantastic town to visit in high season, we would have loved to spend more time there swimming and sun baking if the weather had been better.
UDAWALAWA
Caught our first public buses in Sri Lanka to get out to Udawalawa. They are slow and crowded but if you make the right connections and ride the buses for long enough you will always get to where you want to go. The main reason we had come here was to visit the Elephant Transit Home (ETH) and go on safari in the national park. The ETH is a fantastic organisation which rescues orphaned elephants (unfortunately many elephants are continuing to be killed due to human/elephant conflict) and rehabilitates them in a safe part of the national park, ensuring they are bonding with the other elephants and becoming independent. Once they reach 4-5 years of age they are ready to be released into the national park to join a herd and live in the wild. For this reason they have minimal contact with humans, only to receive their milk from their handlers four times per day, which is when the public can see them. Watching those little babies come running in on their stumpy little legs, squealing in excitement for their food was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. The youngest ones were still learning how to use their trunks properly and were just like human babies, clumsy and awkward. Hilarious.
There is another more popular elephant 'orphanage' in Sri Lanka, however we researched it and found that they are actually breeding elephants to continue the business, some elephants are restrained with chains, they have no intention of releasing them into the wild and they have a huge amount of contact with humans, with the public actually being able to bathe and feed them by hand. Such a shame that the exploitation of these beautiful creatures continues for the profit of humans. Animal tourism is really hard, particularly in Asia. When in doubt I'd prefer to err on the side of caution and would rather stay away entirely than give money to an organisation which may not be acting in the best interests of the animal.
The following day we took the safari to Udawalawa national park. It had started raining overnight and showed no signs of relenting when we climbed into the jeep at 6am. It continued to rain heavily throughout the whole safari (the whole day in fact) but it was still nice to see elephants in the park, munching away on their breakfast. I got a little too close to one of them and she gave me a mighty warning trumpet which our driver thought was the funniest thing ever. We didn't get to see the elusive leopard but a bunch of jackals, deer and heaps of birds braved the rain to come out for us, which we appreciated.
Udawalala was also the town where our celebrity status really hit fever pitch. You see, being a white person in Sri Lanka makes you kind of famous. People want to say hello to you or practice their English, and kids on buses get particularly excited to see you. However, Udawalawa was the only place we visited where locals were literally slowing down and hanging out of their car windows as they drove past us, waving and yelling greetings. We were only in the town for 24 hours but we caused quite a stir while we were there. Now I kind of know what it feels like to be Kim Kardashian and I have to say, it's the best.
ADAM'S PEAK
Getting to Adam's Peak from Udawalawa was our worst travel day in Sri Lanka. We had to catch three different buses, totaling 11 hours of travel. The distance was about 200km, just to give you an idea of how indirect and slow our journey was. We arrived in town at 9:30pm, without a guesthouse booked and without any dinner. It had been raining the entire day. A lovely guesthouse owner took pity on us and gave us a room at a discounted rate and offered us free access to the dinner buffet. People are the best. Our intention was to climb the peak the following morning but we were so wrecked we decided to hang out for a day and then do it the next day. It rained all day - we were glad we'd chosen to wait to do the climb.
The next morning we got up at 4am to climb Adam's Peak. This climb is a Buddhist pilgrimage because there is an indentation towards the summit which is said to be the footprint of Buddha (or of Adam, the first man, if you're Catholic - hence the name Adam's Peak) and consists of 5,500 steps. I don't think I've ever climbed 5,500 steps in one go before and I definitely underestimated how tough it would be on the knees. The extra days wait hadn't helped the weather - the heavy rain that had started two days prior was showing no signs of stopping so we climbed those steps in rain jackets, ponchos and with umbrellas. We still reached peak wetness at about the 2,000 step mark. The sunrise views from the top are supposed to be incredible, however I'll have to take other people's word for it as all we saw was heavy cloud, mist and rain, before we turned around to walk back down those 5,500 stairs. All our clothes and shoes were completely saturated but there was no time to sort it out because we were heading to the next location that day, in a desperate attempt to get somewhere dry.
NUWARA ELIYA
Our attempts to escape the rain were unsuccessful. After catching a tuk tuk, a bus and a train we arrived in Nuwara Eliya where in addition to being wet it was also cold. This was the point when we really started to regret traveling to Sri Lanka in wet season. I had expected that it would be similar to being in Cambodia for wet season - hot days, a torrential downpour each afternoon for a couple of hours then clear skies and business as usual until the following afternoon. It was completely different. Once the rain in Lanka started it just didn't stop. For five and a half days straight it rained incessantly, not breaking for even a minute. We travelled long distances in this time and the rain was consistent everywhere. We were actually quite lucky to be in the towns we were in, as although the rain was very heavy and there were power lines down, mudslides, and roads washed away we never experienced heavy flooding which was occurring in other parts of Sri Lanka at the time.
The weather did impact our enjoyment of Nuwara Eliya which is said to be a beautiful town with gorgeous scenery and lovely waterfalls in the surrounding area. We didn't see any of these, instead dividing our time between a cafe and a pub, using their wifi to organise travel plans, which hit a massive roadblock due to our bank back home repeatedly blocking our flight bookings. In the end I had to purchase a SIM card and phone credit and call Citibank, spending a total of 2 and a half hours on the phone with them before the issue was finally resolved. It was when the conversation was getting the most heated that a local guy at the pub requested a photo with Dave and I (I told you: CELEBRITIES). Dave had to explain that it wasn't a good time for me, but he happily posed and talked cricket with the guy while I tried to limit my profanities to one per sentence only. You'll be pleased to know that I kicked up so much of a fuss over the inconvenience and expense that Citibank had caused me that they gave me $50 as a goodwill gesture. The lesson I learned was that banks have a lot of money and you should always try to get some of it from them.
ELLA
Oh my god you guys, the sun came out while we were here! Wet, smelly shoes and backpacks were finally given the chance to dry off and perhaps lose that moldy scent. Our guesthouse was in a beautiful jungle setting, and do you know what's better than being in the jungle? Being in the jungle when it's not raining! Our time in Ella was delightful, it was one of our favorite places in Sri Lanka. Lots of hiking to do, most of which included STEPS which my still-recovering knees were not happy about. The town center is just one street but there were a lot of nice cafes along here and we ate some really good food. Our accommodation had a TV with the Australia Plus channel so we watched our first game of AFL since last year's grand final, while drinking cold Milo. If only we had a packet of Pizza Shapes we could have been back home. The monkeys living in the trees outside our room provided lots of entertainment and after a few depressing days of being stuck inside and smelling like wet dog we were feeling much better about continuing our travels through Sri Lanka.
KANDY
Kandy, Kandy, Kandy, I can't let you go. I sang that a lot in Kandy, because making a classic song into a city-based pun is hilarious. (See also: 'you can stand under my umbrELLA' and 'take me down to the PANAMA City'. Don't you wish you were traveling with me? Honestly, the fun never stops). Anyway, in this case it wasn't true. Kandy, I can let you go. Not one of my favorites, it was busy, dirty and hectic. There are some nice sites here, including the Temple of the Tooth and the giant Buddha but they were both undergoing restoration while we were there. We visited a tea factory which was super interesting as they are still using the same machinery since they started operations 112 years ago. It's obviously working for them because the teas we sampled were delicious. Other than that the lake was quite nice and we became locals at the pub for a few nights (the live entertainment was hilarious and kept us coming back. I particularly enjoyed the guy who sang a cover of Sacrifice by Elton John, complete with a keyboard on 'jazz' setting and no knowledge of the actual lyrics).
I can't neglect to mention the train ride we took from Ella to Kandy. It's kind of a famous trip due to the beautiful scenery you go past as the train line climbs up into the mountains. Sri Lanka is so green and it was really lovely to see the little villages in amongst waterfalls, jungle and mountains. We were lucky to get a reasonably clear day for this trip and we were rewarded with 7 hours of gorgeous views.
DAMBULLA
Somehow we arrived at the bus station just as an air-conditioned mini bus was leaving for Dambulla. This luxury cost us $6 and took 2 hours, as opposed to the normal bus which was $2 and would have taken 3 hours. It was the only transport with air con we took in the entire month and you have no idea how grateful we were for it. Dambulla is home to the Golden Temple and cave temples which was our main reason for visiting. The cave temples date back to the 1st century BC and they are now filled with enormous statues of the Buddha, as well as some Hindu deities. These were so impressive and I particularly enjoyed the giant murals painted on the rock face inside the caves.
Typically, tourists will take a day trip out to Sigiriya from Dambulla but we just couldn't justify the $42 per person to look at what is essentially a giant rock. Sorry Sigiriya, you do look lovely in the pictures we saw.
NILAVELI
Idiotically, we came all the way north to Nivaveli only to find that prices in town were pretty high (it's a very touristy area) and that the only accommodation we could afford was kind of in the middle of nowhere and we would need to rely on tuk tuks to get us around all the time. So we decided to spend just the one night and then embark on another massive travel day all the way down to Aragum Bay, which is a bit more chilled, a lot cheaper and would also be an easier starting point for the long trip back to Colombo airport. Still, the beach in Nilaveli was nice, although a large chunk of it is inaccessible due to it being a military zone (the further north you get the more apparent the signs of the civil war are, apparently. We only visited this one town very briefly so I can't comment on that but it seems logical). We did some swimming at sunset here in the clearest ocean we saw in all of SL. Definitely on my list to return to when we have some cash to splash.
ARUGAM BAY
For our last week in Sri Lanka we decided to hit the relax button and just stay in one spot for a while. Arugam Bay was the perfect place to do this. It's a little surfie town, with a super relaxed vibe, a lot of young travelers and a hilarious local dive bar. We settled into a pretty nice routine here, one that revolved around swimming, sun baking and eating, with the occasional walk over to the point break to watch the surfers in action. Nights were spent drinking beers on the beach, stargazing, and inevitably heading to The Secret Garden for their amazing happy hour cocktails. The town had a similar vibe to that of San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua, just the kind of place where you can really rest and recharge when the travel is just getting too much.
After our perfect 6 days here, it was a couple of hellish travel days to get back to Colombo for our late night flight to KL which would eventually get us to Bangkok, the start of the next leg of our travels. Here's a little rundown of my favourite and not so favourite things about Sri Lanka:
THE GOOD
- The People
The Sri Lankan people are hands down the friendliest people I've ever encountered in any country I've visited. I mentioned before the celebrity feeling we got from people always wanting to wave and say hello, and from kids catching sight of us on the bus and excitedly pointing us out to their parents or friends. Once the kids realised we were looking back at them they would have one of two reactions: either they would give us big smiles and wave or they would get incredibly shy and look away. Often people would want to talk to us about cricket once they found out we were from Australia and if I had a dollar for every time I'd been asked 'How you like Sri Lanka? It's good, yes?' I definitely wouldn't be on a budget right now. The people loved hearing that we loved their country as they're obviously very proud of it. Bus drivers would sometimes call us to the front of the bus to point things out as we were driving past and nearly every tuk tuk driver became an unofficial guide of their town, showing us landmarks and giving advise on where to eat. I definitely became a more smiley person when I was in Sri Lanka, in response to the constant smiling greetings and friendliness from the locals. Even the hawkers were friendlier than most, and I cannot remember a single interaction with a local person that sticks out in my mind as rude or opportunistic. Truly, a country full of wonderful people.
- The food
Oh my god, you guys, the food. If I come back from this trip the size of a house (likely) Sri Lankan food will definitely have played a big role in fattening me up. We ate so much, and for so little. After a few days we wised up to the fact that the portion sizes were huge, especially at the little local places and we started sharing meals. For about $3 we'd get vegetable rice and curry, which was a pile of rice with five small bowls filled with different vegetable curries and poppadoms, easily enough for two people. Kottu was another favorite, a huge pile of rotti freshly cooked and chopped into small pieces with vegetables or chicken, then smothered in a spicy sauce. Spicy! That was probably the biggest thing for us, spice and flavour. No offense to South America but the food is definitely not what I'll be going back there for. Perhaps it's different if you've got a bit more cash to spend but for us, there's a few standout meals I remember from those 6 months but a lot of bland in between. Breakfast in particular was incredibly depressing, toast and coffee being the standard, maybe with some fruit if you were extra lucky. In Central America things finally started to improve, with gallo pinto for breakfast everyday, which I loved. But we really hit our straps in Lanka, with coconut rotti and curry for breakfast or my absolute favourite - string hoppers with Dahl and coconut sambol. Oh man, I want to go back! Throw in sweet and savoury rottis, short eats and egg hoppers and we were completely satisfied in our stomach regions every single day.
-Prices
I was really nervous coming to Sri Lanka because I'd read a bunch of blogs that warned that Sri Lanka was not as cheap as you think it's going to be and that it's quite expensive in comparison to Thailand, Cambodia etc. So I was feeling pretty worried about our budget, which turned out to be unfounded because Sri Lanka is CHEAP. Of course there are expensive ways of traveling here, like hiring a driver to get around, staying in nice guest houses or hotels, and eating at nice restaurants where they cater to western sensibilities but that is not our Way. We caught the local buses (we were ALWAYS the only white people on board), we stayed in cheaper guest houses and never paid extra for air con (sometimes the room would be double the price just for turning on the A/C) and we followed the locals to the kind of places were the decor is a bit shabby and you'd never want to use the toilet but the food is fresh, authentic and delicious. We found it pretty easy to get by on $50AUD per day for the two of us, including all transport, accommodation and food. Sure, our 70c bus rides were nowhere near as comfortable as the people getting ferried around in air conditioned cars, and there were nights I lay awake thinking about how I'd be sleeping if the bedroom were cool, but all in all it was fine.
THE BAD
- Public transport
I told you we caught a lot of buses and trains, and I told you they were super cheap. There's a reason for that. Having clocked up countless hours on buses over the past year I have a pretty high threshold for hours of sitting and waiting, but the buses in Sri Lanka almost broke me. It takes so long to get anywhere. We'd sit on a bus for three hours and then check a map to see we'd travelled 50km in that time. Painfully slow. They are also incredibly cramped, with tiny seats made for tiny bums and a tiny aisle due to squeezing in five rows of seats across the bus. In the window seat my shoulders would be cramped right up but if I had the aisle seat I would be getting touched constantly by people walking or standing in the aisle. Trying to keep the bus cool requires opening all the windows which are capable of opening and hoping it starts to move fast enough to actually get some air circulation in. And then if it starts to rain All the windows get closed which turns the bus into your own personal sauna, shared with 75 strangers. Delightful. The train is slightly better with larger seats and overhead fans which go some way to dropping the temperature slightly. There's also snacks for sale and toilets on board, which do increase the comfort levels significantly on a 7 hour journey. One thing I found from taking either the bus or the train was that I would always arrive at my destination covered in a thin layer of grime, I guess a combination of sweat and the dirt and smoke coming in through the windows. Luxury travel, this was not.
- Alcohol regulations
I know there's talk that I'm 'drinking my way around the world' but the stark reality is, if you don't have a job to go to what else are you going to spend your evenings doing, other than relaxing at a local bar? I would have loved to do this in Sri Lanka, however they've got some really strict rules around the sale of alcohol and sometimes a cold beer was nigh on impossible to get. You can only buy alcohol in 'Wine Stores' which we saw only in about half the towns we visited, and it's really difficult for restaurants to obtain licenses to sell it, which meant a lot of the time we had to eat our curry without its perfect match - ice cold beer. The more western orientated restaurants generally had beer and wine on the menu, but they were also charging a lot more for it than we were happy to pay. Add to this the flooding that occurred in Colombo, which flooded the beer factory (there's also basically a monopoly on beer in SL with Lion [owned by Carlsberg] the only beer available at most shops and restaurants) and halted supply across the country and our monthly alcohol-free-day count was the highest it's ever been.
THE UGLY
- Rubbish
It was be remiss of me not to mention the rubbish problem that I saw in Sri Lanka. I won't go on about it for too long because it's upsetting and because it's the only massive negative about a country that I really loved visiting. It's not fair to compare a developing country to Australia but in this regard Sri Lanka is definitely lagging behind other developing countries I have been to and it's such a shame. I don't know what waste management systems are in place on the island but I do know that I was heartbroken by seeing how much plastic crap was ruining the beautiful green landscapes. The train lines were littered with it, waterways were being used as dumps, the supposedly 'secret beach' in Mirissa which is secluded and quiet had so much glass and plastic in the sand that I didn't even want to take my thongs off, and I saw children on buses throwing their rubbish out the windows with no comment from their parents. The walk up to Adam's Peak, a sacred pilgrimage, was the worst for me with piles and piles of trash on the side of the mountain. Often you'd smell toxic smoke and you knew that the locals were burning their rubbish, an option that without knowing the consequences probably seems like a good solution. I don't know what the solution is but I do hope that there's a system that can be implemented and that the people can be educated to take better care of this beautiful country that they are obviously so proud of.
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Dave and I both loved Sri Lanka and on our one year travel anniversary where we sat on the beach in Arugam Bay drinking longnecks we compiled a whole bunch of 'top 5' lists from the past 12 months - Sri Lanka easily made it into both our lists for top 5 countries. It's such a special place and I'm so grateful that we got to see so much of it AND that there's still so much yet to see when we return.
We are currently in Laos and thinking up ever more creative ways to make our money last as long as possible so we don't have to come home to Melbourne winter! Seriously though, being in Asia is lovely, knowing our favourite people are only a few hours flight away when we finally do decide it's time to go home. Until the next blog, stay warm. x
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