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!
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