Sri Lanka!

When I first arrived in Sri Lanka, I could already tell that the people were very welcoming and kind. We landed in Columbo, (the capital of Sri Lanka), and then took a taxi to the train station. It was already so much different than SouthEast Asia. I also noticed another thing; there were very few restaurants, (I didn't know at the time, but I read later that Sri Lankan's prefer to eat at home with their family, so there are fewer restaurants in Sri Lanka than most Asian countries). There was also lots of traffic, so instead of a half hour drive to the train station, it was about an hour drive. When we finally got there, Robin and Mommy waited at the train station, while Daddy and I headed off to find lunch, which was hard because as I told you earlier, there are few restaurants. Everyone waved at us and smiled when we were walking down the bustling streets. I liked it already. We finally, (after a lot of searching), found lunch at a small, busy local restaurant. The lunch was really good, and satisfying. We waited a very painful, long time, and FINALLY the train came after about a three hour wait. The train ride was beautiful. It was also very fast and bumpy, (which made it enjoyable!) and the scenery of mountains and farmland was amazing. I didn't know what to expect when we arrived in Kandy, (East of Columbo),  and I certainly didn't know it was up in the highlands. Similar to Cameron Highlands, the weather was amazing! It was a nice change from forty degree weather! Close to where our guest house is, there is a really nice man-made lake, which adds to Kandy's beauty. Our guest house is pretty nice too; clean, and the people who own it are friendly (of course!). During our stay in Kandy, of course we discovered a go-to restaurant. The Garden Cafe is a really good, super cheap cafe right near our guest house. And by cheap, I mean fifty cent, really tasty, good portioned meals! Some of my favourite dishes at the Garden Cafe, are kottu, (stir fried chopped up vegetables, roti, and/or meat), paratha bread and dahl, (lentil curry). We have also visited some cool temples and a lovely botanical garden. I've only just scratched the surface of Sri Lanka, but so far I like it! 

Day 111: Sigiriya and Dambulla

Just another day knocking off UNESCO World Heritage Sites..... Sigh.

I'm kidding. We are taking nothing for granted. Sri Lanka has 8 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which is a very important designation for significant man made or natural wonders of the world. One of the most important point of achieving the designation, for outside onlookers, is that the host country is responsible for maintaining and securing the designated site so that it is there for generations to come. For locals, a UNESCO designation can mean a huge influx in tourism dollars. In Sri Lanka, we have...

- the ancient city of Polonnaruwa (1982)
- the ancient city of Sigiriya (1982)
- the Golden Temple of Dambulla (1991)
- the old town of Galle and its fortifications (1988)
- the sacred city of Anuradhapura (1982)
- the sacred city of Kandy (1988)
- Sinharaja Forest Reserve (1988)
- Central Highlands of Sri Lanka (2010)

We have the awesome opportunity of seeing a good chunk of those eight sites. On the schedule today (that should have been tomorrow! More on that later) were Sigiriya and Dambulla.
We'd arranged with the driver that picked us up at the train station to take us for the day. So who shows up this morning? His brother, Raja. You know, the kind of brother with different last names. We weren't initially happy with the bait and switch - we try and pick personalities that will suit our group if we're doing a day trip. I went outside and had a chat with him, checked his van out and had a look at his insurance (our hotel owner gave me that tip). He seemed good and his English was decent.
We left Kandy at about 8:15, and slowly made our way out of the city. The drive was pretty nice: there was plenty to look at, including some stunning countryside views. Raja was a nice source of knowledge and I could tell he'd done this "tour" quite a lot.
Everyone is on the take in the tourism industry in Sri Lanka. Now, that could resemble the Vietnam way where there is a list price for something and people hustle for the commission of selling it to you. There's also the other way - encouraging you to go to a certain restaurant/hotel/shop that they would have a prearranged commission deal with. You can either let this bother you, or you can roll with it. On average, it bothers us. Usually because the places they try and take you are second rate, or have expensive crappy food or whatever. So far on the trip, we have avoided this "tout" culture by taking short, private transportation trips. Sri Lanka might be different....
Sigiriya is an incredible piece of engineering and imagination. I have to start out by showing an aerial view I copied from the Internet took from the from the private helicopter we rented. It is really amazing.

When we arrived at the gate, Raja gave us the low down - we would be asked by many guides if we wanted to hire them. He then opened the window, engaged one guy and asked us in front of him in slow, loud English "would you like to hire a guide?" "No thanks" "O. K.", then he told the guy that sorry, he tried to sell us on using a guide but that we were not interested. That was nice.

It was very hot outside - the sun was pounding down. We made our way from shady spot to shady spot, remembering the strategy that Siya used in Angkor.

One of the impressive things you see while walking up the many steps to get up to the top of the ancient Fort are very old frescoes painted on the walls.

When we got halfway up, we reached a plateau where there were two huge lion paws that acted as sentries guarding the the main stairway.

The top was windy, but really hot in the sun. There was very little shade. The view was quite spectacular - three hundred sixty degrees you could see twenty or more kilometers in the distance. On the one hand, it would have been a pretty surreal place for the King and his family to live, on the other hand it really would have been a pain in the ass to come and go, not to mention how hard it would be to supply the place with fresh water and food.

Most of the buildings of the palace and surrounding buildings were built out of wood (thus, long gone) but just walking around the foundation walls, avoiding falling in the many pools that seemed to have been interspersed among the buildings, I really got a sense for just how big the place was.

We sat under a tree and enjoyed the breeze for a while. That was nice.

We met Raja at the tourist parking lot after avoiding a bunch of vendors along the pathway back. Lunch was a bit of challenge - we didn't finish at Sigiriya until about 1:30, and the first place Raja took us was not acceptable. He tried another couple of local places which we nixed. I told Raja just to drive right to the city of Dambulla so we could find some other place.

We were all hungry. You know, our expectations (that we try to communicate to people) are clean, busy restaurants that locals eat at. However, for the local guide, he or she has many conflicting thoughts: they couldn't possibly want to eat at a local place?! They probably want to eat at a tourist hotel that has local food! I don't make any commission at local places I don't know!!! In general, the biggest thing we do not like is to be "forced" to eat at some tourist trap.

Eventually, we found a place at some tourist hotel (lol!) that had good food and beer(!), which I hadn't tried yet in Sri Lanka...

We weren't far from the main site to see in Dambulla: the Dambulla Cave Temple. At the base of the cave complex is a large, golden statue of Buddha that is pretty nice, though he had a small growth of hornets nest under his divine chin.

The cave temples are a series of five temples built into the side of mountain what felt like a bijillion steps up In the heat right after lunch. There were hundreds of monkeys all around the stairs, and tourists in varying degrees of proximity to acquiring rabies or some other monkey born disease while posing with the animals.

The caves were very nice, particularly the biggest one that had a full stuppa surrounded by hundreds of stone Buddhas. There were beautiful frescos all over the walls and ceilings which added to the mystique. I was really surprised at how good of shape everything was in. Although it all looked very old, I suspect there have been many repairs and replacements over the years.

Abby captured this pic of prayer flags, which reminded me of our upcoming trip to Nepal, where you often see colourful Buddhist prayer flags.

Another Abby pic - lotus flowers. Nice one!

In front of the temple area, there was a huge golden stupa, though there was no indication whose remains may have been buried there.

We headed back on the road to Kandy, making a stop for a coconut for Robin, Raja and I. At the stop was one of the many musical, red "bread" trucks that we'd seen in and around Kandy. The repetitive, loud musical tune that it plays does attract a lot of attention, but the drivers of these things must really feel like they're going nuts at the end of the day.

And there it is.....

Razic and Nasli, the elderly couple that own our hotel, invited us to dinner. "Hell yes!" we all thought to ourselves. A home cooked dinner, neither cooked by us nor in our home, was something we are all craving. I figure we've had about 320 meals at restaurants, guest houses and hotels (shout out to Abby who has cooked our few "homemade" meals in K.K., L.P. and Kyoto!) and a home cooked meal sounded fantastic.

It was. Saffron rice, curried chicken, curried potatoes, lentils, curried pineapple/tomato/date chutney, soup, chopped vegetable salad.... Wow. No beer (they are Muslim) but oh well :-). It was so nice to have been invited and we had some really nice conversations. I'm not sure if they just felt like we would be nice company (of course, right! Right?) or if it had something to do with their son trying to get an accounting job in Canada, but it was truly a nice evening.

Day 110: Exploring Kandy

Sleep in day! We are loving the view out our back porch - it's a great way to wake up and a nice place to have breakfast.

We grabbed second breakfast again at the Garden Cafe and walked around the lake. We got tickets for a show later on in the afternoon and we wanted to check the venue out. A Tuk Tuk driver stopped us in the street and we made a deal with him to take us to a few places.

We'd heard that the botanical gardens was pretty interesting. It wasn't far from the downtown area, so we headed over there. As usual, the foreigner entry fee was pretty expensive - $30 for adults, $15 for kids. The place has a lot of historical significance and was established a long time ago. The grounds are stunning.

There was a huge variety of trees, orchids, flowers and other flora there. The orchid greenhouse alone had hundreds of different species. Normally I'm not an "orchid guy", but it was impressive. Abby couldn't get her head around, much less her arms, just how big some of the trees were - they almost resembled smaller cousins to the redwoods in Northern California.

Of course you can't go to many places in Sri Lanka without getting adopted by some random family. By the way, you'll notice they don't really smile in pictures - I think that is the only cure for the always smiling Sri Lankan people!

Another Abby pic...

There were some gigantic (maybe 50-60 meters tall) bamboo groves that were very nice.

I glanced up and saw where the fruit bats from last night nested - they were all over the place and they were huge! Their big, black sinewy wings were in stark contrast to the furry, light brown undersides. They were close to two feet tall when hanging upside down in the trees.

I saw a bunch of monkeys on the path ahead and told a Robin. She asked where they were as she was scanning the tops of the trees. I told her to look on the path, and she said "ummm, daddy!" - there was a big snake crossing our path about ten feet away from us. It was pretty long - between 2.5 and 3 meters (yes, I realize we interchange imperial and metric systems... We Canadians are so capable! (Europeans find it strange)).

There were a ton of monkeys, and a very high percentage of newborns and babies. Look closely at this pic and you'll see a baby that can't be more than a week or two old.

We ended up getting lunch at the cafe in the gardens - we stayed longer than we would have thought. It was a nice way to spend a few hours. We got back into our Tuk Tuk - man they never stop trying to convince you to go somewhere (friend's shops are popular) or trying to become your personal driver for the rest of your trip to Sri Lanka.

We got off on the wrong side of the lake on purpose - we wanted another walk before heading over to the cultural performance show. Quite often around the lake, we spotted monitor lizards like this guy hanging out in a tree.

There were still some goings on near the temple to wrap the Perahera festival up. Unfortunately, we saw a bunch of elephants coming home from their temple duties along some very busy streets. It reminded us of the graphic images Lek had shown us of elephants who had been hit by cars and trucks in Bangkok.

This large male was heavily chained and scarred. He is from Burma - that's a Burmese logging elephant brand on his back that was burned on to him.

The cultural show was nice. I liked the hand drummers who kept the show on track throughout - they really looked like they were enjoying themselves....I pictured them going home to their home recording studio after to work on the drum component for the next Crush Herman album (speaking of, when exactly is the next album coming out Crush?!).

The last performance of the show was the fire eater guy. He went through the stages of fire resistance.... Rolling a willow on fire all over his body, sticking it in his mouth and blowing fireballs.

Then he walked on some seriously hot coals. They say fire walkers go into a trance to be able to do this, but he was not in a trancelike state just minutes later when he passed around his own personal donation box.

Before finishing off our day with another awesome meal at Garden Cafe, we had to take just one more extended family photo. The girls were trying to guess how many people's Facebook pages they are on.... It's got to be a big number!

Day 109: Esala Perahera

By way of Tyndall luck, we'd arrived in Kandy the day before the most important, busiest night of the year in Kandy - the last night of Esala Perahera. Essentially, the Esala Perahera ("perahera" means procession or parade and can be loosely translated into common Canadiana as "watching paint dry") is a procession from the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, around the city past other temples, then back to the Temple of the Tooth. The whole celebration is to honour the tooth relic - the left canine tooth of the Buddha. On the positive side, we have landed here with a chance to see a very big deal in Sri Lanka. It has, however, made the city really busy and the traffic unbelievably congested.

Luckily, the main parts of Kandy are quite walkable. We are staying in a lovely location, up a small hill overlooking the valley where the city lies. A big part of the valley is filled with a man made lake, created by the King in 1807. He was a smart man, as it really adds a ton of character to the city, and ensures we have shade whenever we walk up and down either side of the lake.

We set out after breakfast, heading around the lake towards the temple. We did stop, of course, at the Garden Cafe to get "second breakfast" for the kids (prata and samosas). It wasn't long before we were asked to pose with a little family. In parts of Southeast Asia, people would take clandestine pictures, or fake selfies with the back camera taking pictures of us instead. Only occasionally would people ask to take our pictures. Here? It's happening all the time, and to be honest, it's pretty funny.

You'll see the girls above wearing their sarongs to cover up their legs. Luckily, they were also wearing white, which it turns out is the respectful and most fashionable colour during Perahera. We went through security (separate men's and ladies entrances - the girls were given a proper lesson on how to tie their sarongs by the security woman on their side) then proceeded towards the temple entrance. Most of the sights in Sri Lanka are either free or very nominal for Sri Lankans (or for people who look Sri Lankan for that matter), but actually fairly expensive for foreigners. We've seen this two tiered system before and we'd read review sites and message boards with loads of people complaining about it. I have zero problems with developing countries charging more for tourists - it lets the domestic residents see their own sites and after all, on a relative basis, every tourist coming to these countries is without a doubt "rich" (one little note though, could you do only one "free for locals" day per week like the Taj Mahal does so we know when the riffraff will be there? Just kidding :-)).

We had to take our shoes off and check them at a little booth before going in (Beth and Abby were not completely committed to that one!!). Then we joined the throngs. It was "hands guarding pockets, stay in single file with me at the front" mode. Most of the people seemed to be in little familial groups. We were squeezed up a staircase onto a landing, then up another staircase. Thank god it is not hot in Kandy, or we may have melted. When we got to the top, things started to get frantic and we had no idea why. This big, heavyset guy with a kind face was waving us towards him and creating a little pocket of space for us to squeeze into. He said "come quickly, they will close the temple very soon. You'll never see this again!". Not really knowing what he was talking about, we went with it.  He had one of his friends give each of us offering flowers, and we plotted through the narrow line following our new leader. Sure enough, when we got to the front of the line, we had a quick glance into an inner sanctum area that had an even smaller room on the inside, where a monk was attending a silver, gold and glass tiny looking stuppa that contained the tooth relic. It was kind of an Indiana Jones moment.

When we broke free of the crowd and took some big breaths, we thanked the man profusely. We looked back and sure enough they had closed the tooth relic area. What a nice guy, but he is not the exception here - everyone seems nice!

We explored the temple area and beyond. There was a huge room and just as Lek had described - it was full of giant ivory tusks, which she obviously had a problem with. She had even asked the head monk why they still displayed something that was illegal to buy, sell or trade... I don't think his answer was satisfactory. If you think Thailand is associated with elephants, compared to Sri Lanka it doesn't even come close. There are so many elephant images, statues, carvings and the real thing here.

We made our way back out the front gate of the main temple structure, over to the grounds. There we saw the evidence of mistreatment of the elephants in person - lots of scars on the legs from chains, many swollen contusions on the legs, ears and head, lots of scar tissue on the front legs from being poked with the end of their combo spear and hook. I know none of us have gotten our elephant whisperer designation yet, nor do we have EESP (elephant esp?) but they did not look like a happy bunch.

From a distance, we could see more elephants chained up. They were mostly doing the backwards forwards shuffle that we'd learned was their way of showing stress. Most of them had a front and the opposite back leg chained up so that they couldn't really move those two legs. Very sad.

Most of the mahouts carried the hooked spear shown here as well as a knife tucked into their waist bands. It was kind of like seeing an accident on the highway - we knew it was bad, but we couldn't look away. The girls were pretty upset.

Eventually we left the temple grounds and explored the city centre of Kandy a bit. It was the biggest night of the procession so there were offering flowers being prepared and sold almost everywhere.

Have I mentioned we are loving the food so far? Another nice lunch - this time a curry set.

We chilled out back at he hotel after lunch. I had a feeling we were in for a long night, and a little R and R was a good idea. The girls are now thoroughly addicted to the Walking Dead, but luckily the WiFi is spotty at times and we can't binge watch it.... Because that is a very slippery slope! We returned to the Garden Cafe for dinner. Abby was quite happy with her ginormous bowl of rice and curry....

...while the rest of us had Kottu. This dish is so good!

The walk around the lake was beautiful and strangely peaceful, as we knew just a kilometer away there would be hundreds of thousands of people lining up to watch the procession. I'm trying not to call it a parade because we are not parade people. It's weird - the whole family is much more into "going to see/do" rather than "sitting and watching". Movies would be the exception of course!

There were thousands of giant fruit bats flying around above the lake - I guess it's a nightly ritual. It was very cool - Abby snapped this pic...

During the day, we'd already been accosted by people trying to sell us reserved seats for the par...procession. We'd talked to one nice American family from New York who'd been the night before. They'd bargained hard from the list price of $100 per person, down to $30. Still... $120 for a family of four to watch a par...procession.... gulp. They also said that when you'd seen twenty minutes, you'd seen the whole thing, as it was pretty repetitive (they stayed for the whole thing, and as he was describing it I think I saw their teenage daughter roll her eyes.... Double gulp).

Still, going to see the par...procession was a "must do" (whatever!) - we were caught by our own internal peer pressure - we've come all this way, and we're not going to see the par....procession?

When we got to the city centre, all of the streets were blocked off and people were lined up twenty deep. We started the process of entertaining offers from the dozen or so touts trying to sell space in front of their shop, on top of their shop, on top of their friends shop.... You get the picture! We eventually followed a guy who was offering $30/person (down from $100). He took us through a circuitous route around the par...procession boundaries. We crossed a main street, then into progressively smaller and darker streets, until we were walking through a very dark street that was really a glorified alleyway. I could sense the tension behind me, and to be honest, I was questioning it a little, but I had a good idea of where we were (behind one of the par....procession streets) and there were other people (well, men) around. When we got to the sketchiest section, I saw two police officers.... I really can't say if that made me feel better or worse, what with the rampant police (albeit minor) corruption in Asia.

Our guy beckoned us to come through a swinging metal door cut out of a sheet metal wall. Umm... Hmmm... I had to go with my gut in this one. I had the girls stay at the doorway while I checked out the inner yard. It was strewn with garbage and bags of "stuff". The guy was pointing up a dodgy little metal stairway that rose about twenty steps to the top of a flat roofed building. I said "I'm going to pass buddy" but he said "there are lots of other tourists up there.... trust me!". There was something honest is his face, and to be honest we have not felt one ounce of aggression or attitude so far so..... I climbed the stairway. When I got to the top, I saw the back of what looks like a makeshift, wooden set of stands at the front of the roof of the building. The roof itself was covered in patches of water, dirt and tar. I made my way, weaving around the puddles, to the "bandstand". I climbed a couple of steps up and saw a hilarious site - there were about 80 or so mostly foreigners packed into the stands. When I say packed, it was packed!! Shoulder to shoulder, knee to back. The stands were overlooking the par....procession street, so.... I guess we were a go. It was 7:30pm and the par...procession was due to start at around 8:00pm from the nearby temple.

I collected the girls - they were extremely happy to walk up the rickety stairs (yes, I'm being extremely sarcastic). When the "attendants" (note: all professional sounding terms regarding the viewing area for this par....procession should be read using virtual double quotes) squeezed them into their seats, they seemed to settle down a bit. The calming nature of the ushers (yes, you should have added double quotes to that) really set our minds at ease. We were in the 6th row of 7. The Aussie and Mexican sitting next to Beth (he wasn't an Aussie/Mexican, there were two guys... anyway) had been sitting there since 6:30. I'm guessing the people in the front row had been there since mid afternoon. The concession stand ("!"!) was non existent, as were the lavatories. We never made it to the snack bar, perhaps it was the fact that if we did, there was a 60% chance we'd fall off the edge of the roof looking for one.

So.... We waited.... And we waited.... I give credit to Robin, she beat the 7:52 over/under time Abby had set for her to say "Can we go now" by a good 45 minutes. But honestly, by that time, the little voice in my head was also saying "Can we go now? Can we? Can we? Can we? Let's go!!!". Alas, we were committed to seeing the, and here's the superlative, "most important night of the most important festival in Kandy, in Sri Lanka, in the World". We just couldn't leave.

And we waited. It was now 9:20.....

By 9:30, I swear to you I was going to call the "usher" to talk to the "chief coordinator" to convince the "manager" to call the "par...procession manager" to hurry the f$@& up! Good god. That's when we heard what sounded like fire crackers. So we got ready for the show. The fire crackers were guys smacking the street with whips. People would throw coins on the street and they would pick them up and move on.

I won't lie. The par...procession was amazing. Sorry, I said I wouldn't lie, it was just ok. You know, if you wait for 12 hours on the Champs Élysées to watch 10 circuits and the final sprint on the final day of the Tour de France, you know you're going to see something special (I can't wait until some future third week of July!!!!), but these stands were no Champs Élysées, and this par...procession was no Tour de France. It certainly wasn't even close to as quick either.

We saw guys doing acrobatics with flaming pots - actually this guy made it look like there was a ball of fire zooming around his head, until I figured out the string was attached around his neck:

The music was kind of cool - a typically Indian sound that I kept humming on the way home.

We saw the poor elephants dressed and chained, walking the streets with one, two or three guys on their backs.

After about 40 minutes of pretty repetitive par...processioning, we were ready to pack it in. Beth and I made eye contact, nodded and that was it... For us, the..... Ok, it was a parade... A PARADE! I hate parades.... The parade was over for us. We crept down the stairs, snuck through the alleyway and found a sober Tuk Tuk driver to whisk us home. That will be the last parade of my life. I have formally put my foot down! :-)

Sri Lanka so far

When we arrived about 6:30pm yesterday we had just got off at the train station because we toke a train to kandy, Sri Lanka and that was about 3 hours long. We got to our hotel and the cab dropped us of at the owners house and soon we were checked in. The owner  looked to be about 60-70 years old or something like that. He was so friendly and he and his wife made and brought another bed in for is because there were only 3 beds at the time. Him and his wife were so kind. 

They left us to get ready before we headed of to have some dinner. We had gone to the garden cafė for dinner. We ordered some quite delicious Kutto. Kutto is vegetables and chicken wrapped in a roti bread and then they chopped it all up nice and fine and we eat it and it was so goooooooooooooddd. After we got ready for bed back at our guesthouse and then we watched the walking dead. After that we brushed our teeth and soon went to bed. 😀

THE ELEPHANT NATURE PARK

A couple of days ago we went to the elephant nature park. As soon as we arrived there we would do the feeding of the elephants with our guide Tong. Tong was an okay guide he couldn't speak that great English, and he didn't exactly tell us much about the elephants or any of the park in general. After all the feeding was fun, you stick the piece of food near the elephants trunk and then the elephant takes the piece of food and scoops it up into its mouth. 

At about 3:30pm we switched guides so we got this super cool and nice guide named Apple, just like the fruit. Then we fed the grandma elephant. We had to make special rice and banana balls for her because she lost her teeth at about 65 years old. After that we had some dinner from a buffet with a great selection. That night I had a pretty good sleep myself and I woke up to the sounds of the elephants. The next day we experienced some great interactions with the elephants. I can't wait to come back to volunteer for a year there!

Day 108: Kandy, Sri Lanka

We are not in Kansas anymore ladies!

We had a longish travel day on tap today. It was our first day in "South Asia" - we will be in Sri Lanka until September 15th, India until the 29th, then Nepal until October 12th, so we, will have a good amount of exposure for the girls to South Asian / Indian food, culture and religion.

Sri Lanka, if you're looking on a map, looks like the "Madagascar" of the Indian subcontinent: it's a small island off the southeast coast of India that shares history and culture with India, but that has its own unique identity as well. The former kingdom of Ceylon, which changed its named to Sri Lanka in 1972 after breaking free of British rule, has 20 million people packed into the tiny island.

We were on the plane by 9:00am, which made it a really early morning.

The kids quickly rated the airline their 2nd favourite after JAL... Movies, food, pillows, blankets and.... Kids activity books!

We were seated three and one, with Beth in the row in front of Robin. That made doing Beth's absolute favourite departing plane tradition very difficult. There's nothing that makes Beth happier (ok, I'm exaggerating, but....) than doing the country budget reconciliation to see how we did on the budget of the country that we just left. Deloitte readers take note... she may be getting her CGA designation pretty soon! So, without asking, I went through the daily expenses on my iPad and sent the information forward....

The flight was three hours - thirty minutes quicker than scheduled. It seems so weird to gradually fly around the world in such short flight segments. It was immediately apparent to everyone when we got to the tiny Colombo International Airport arrival area that we were not in Southeast Asia anymore. Obviously the people looked different, but it was more the feel of everything. From first impressions, it felt most like Hanoi - a basic, up and coming place with people, vehicles and buildings that were all over the scale of prosperity and modernity (yes Barb, it's a word :-)). I have to say though, the people here are amazing!

Things are very organized at the airport - within 15 minutes of getting our bags, we'd picked up our preordered train tickets, gotten a SIM card and 5gb of data for 1,300LKR (Sri Lankan Rupees are worth 100 to $1 Canadian so that was a really cheap $13!), exchanged some money and arranged transportation to the Fort Colombo Train Station.

It was a fairly uneventful, though traffic packed ride. We were in no rush - our train for Kandy did not leave until 3:30 and we'd left the airport around 11:30. When we got closer to the city, it was really slow going, with lots of detours down small streets by our driver to try and beat the traffic. He informed us that the next two days were holidays and that was why the streets were packed. They were also pretty flooded - I guess they'd had quite a bit of rain the last few days and we would frequently have to drive through huge deposits of relatively deep water. It was a little frustrating having GPS and seeing us constantly change routes to what appeared to be slower (according to google). We were all pretty happy when we arrived at the station! When we emerged from the cab, it was a bit of sensory overload for everyone - the mass of people and vehicles and the fact that we were probably all due for lunch could have been a disaster in the making.... But I give our group total credit....we all just rolled with it. I think if this was our first stop on our trip, it all would have been too much. Instead, we grouped together and focused on our goals - find out about the train and the station, find a place to sit down, get food. The interactions with the people were starting to ramp up. A lot of big smiles, really friendly eye contact and lots of offers of help and questions - "where you come from?". We were all very impressed so far.

We made our way to the station, produced our ticket for entrance, and looked for a base. We found a pretty good room, but it was the "women's waiting room" - there was a "men's waiting room" a little farther down. We dumped the bags with Beth and Robin, and Abby and I set out hunting for food. Abby was pretty pumped up saying how much she loved the people. They really are something! We walked for about two kilometers, up, across, and back down in a little grid pattern looking for a reststuant and we found what jibed with something Beth had read - there are not as many restaurants in Sri Lanka, compared to SE Asia. It was a bit surprising.

We did see this little fruit vendor who was making a design in his stall out of fruits and vegetables in his spare time....

Eventually we got back near the station and found a really busy local place. It reminded me of a place we had breakfast at in Little India in Singapore. I asked the guy at the front counter if he had a menu - "no" he chuckled. "Ok. What do you have?". He said they had thosai and rice. I also saw samosas and other fried things in the front display area. I asked if I could get the food to go, and he said "oh, no", chuckling. I told him I had two more people waiting at the train station and he said "we can do", smiling. Too funny. We placed our order and moved into a little niche to get out of the busy traffic area of the restaurant - there was a ton of activity, and every waiter bustling back and forth smiled and said hello, and pretty much every customer was looking at us and smiling. We struck up a stilted conversation with the front man. Abby was beaming - it was a pretty fun experience.

We got our huge bag of food (4 masala dosa, 4 samosas and 2 huge bags of rice for $8!?) and headed carefully across the busy street back to the train station. Abby had a little skip in her step - she was loving the little interactions we'd been having. We got to the waiting room, and Beth had a funny look on her face - she'd been having the same conversations with locals in the room I think. I dropped the food off and dug out two spoons I'd bought in Vietnam (no cutlery with takeout food, much less inside the little local restaurant) for the girls. I took my dosa and samosa over to the men's waiting room which was a lot less busy. I sat next to a little boy who kept glancing over and smiling at me as I ate my Dosa with my right hand (read this if you don't know why).

After lunch, I went back to the ladies' room. I bumped into a tiny family outside and struck up a conversation - they had two girls, 11 and 13 dressed in beautiful saris. The girls were tiny. When Abby and Robin came out of the room and introduced themselves, they towered over the diminutive girls and neither family could believe the other's ages. Beth said she thought she'd interacted with more people this morning than the entire time in Southeast Asia - a bit of an exaggeration but we were clearly enjoying this free flow of communication. She also reported that the toilet was a disaster, and that she'd seen two small rats in a garbage can - which were really entertaining for Robin, she loves rats.

We went over to the platform, and I asked one guy where the best washroom in the station was. He pointed me to one end of the platform, where we found a "foreigners' toilet" - a surprising yet welcome addition to the station for the three girls. It's not like the toilets were pristine, but they were a big upgrade from the public ones.

While waiting, we ran into an Irish couple travelling with their annoying little brat who screamed every time his mother opened her mouth three year old. They'd just come off a three hour train ride where they could barely get a seat and people were crawling all over them. I'm really glad I'd booked the reserved class tickets for our train to Kandy, especially after hearing that. The husband went looking for tickets on our train, and could only get third class - yikes.

The train was nice. We had reserved seats in the "observation car" which was the first car, check that, last car in the train (turns out we were to ride backwards!). It wasn't long before Abby was passed out in the bumpy, fast moving train.

It felt like we were uphill all the way. The terrain turned to farms and fields pretty quickly, then to jungle. Halfway through the trip, we crested the side of a valley and could see hundreds of meters down - there were terraced rice fields, small settlements, patches of jungle and water. It was stunning. It was not, however, a photographer's dream, as the train was bumping so much, you could barely get out of your seat without risking falling down, much less take a steady picture. Memory will have to suffice I guess!

We arrived in Kandy at about 6pm, hopped into a van and zipped to our hotel in about 10 minutes. The hotel is a bit of a homestay, which is quite common in Sri Lanka, and works for us as we get more people interaction than in a hotel. The couple who greeted us were very nice and they set us up in a large family room with a queen and two single beds packed tightly together.

We walked down the hill a few minutes to a really busy local restaurant and ordered the national dish called Kottu (Brian - spot on description!) - basically it's stir fried vegetables and meat of your choice and roti bread that's all chopped up in a dramatic show by the cooks. It was really delicious. The staff, as we've come to expect in Sri Lanka so far, were very nice and extremely helpful. We are liking this little country and looking forward to the next few weeks!