About an hour west of Mirissa lies the city of Galle ("gal" in English or "ga-lay" as the locals call it). Galle has a UNESCO World Heritage protected area on the sea side of the city called Galle Fort - a fort first built by the Portuguese and later fortified by the Dutch. It has a funny superlative: "it is the largest remaining fortress in Asia built by European occupiers." Alrighty then. Well, given that it was so close and we'd actually heard and read nice things about it, we though we'd see it and take the opportunity to take the kids on a public bus to see how the locals travel.
The local bus system here reminds me of the bus system in Barbados. There seem to be two kinds of buses - red ones and white ones. The red are government owned and the white private, but both compete on the exact same routes. When I say compete, I'm just assuming they have an incentive plan for cramming passengers in and moving as fast as possible between stops (I'm also calling them "stops" but the bus rarely completely stops for a drop off or pickup, even for the elderly!). As in Barbados, a ticket guy works the bus, up and down, out the back door then back on again as he makes sure everyone has bought a ticket. The way the ticket guy and the driver interact, you just know they are hustling to make a living. This can lead to pretty fast speeds between stops.
Luckily as a foreigner, the ticket guy usually takes care of you. After all, there are only so many different places a tourist would get off or on the bus. Still, I'm not sure how easy it would have been with our full packs and day packs on the bus as a means of getting around the island. We see lots of singles and couples doing it, but that's when I'm proud to be old enough to say as an excuse "I used to do then when I was your age sonny!".
On the way to Galle, we got seats at the front of the bus right away, so that was nice. The bus didn't end up getting too crowded.
When we got to the outskirts of Galle, I realized that we hadn't really been in a decent sized town since way back in Kandy, which seemed like a long time ago. We got off just outside the fort walls and walked in through the lone road entrance. The walls of the Fort were huge - it was no wonder they had protected the inner city well during the Tsunami of 2004, while the rest of the city was hit hard.
We stopped for a drink to get our bearings - welcome back to the bloody frying sun Tyndall family! It was smoking hot outside the shade. We started walking around. The city inside the gates is a little different than many World Heritage sites, as it's still a working, active city. There are tons of hotels, restaurants and shops.... In particular (hey Gram) gem and precious stone shops. Most of the streets are made of smooth brick cobbles.
We took a quick frisbee break in a large, shade covered square, then continued on down towards the end of the Fort where the lighthouse stood in search of lunch.
We managed to pick a great place that had a rooftop patio for lunch. We feel like we haven't "eaten out" much in Sri Lanka, as in pretty much every guest house it has seemed like we were eating home cooked meals. The same is true at most restaurants here: the food you order is often served family style.
We played some cards after lunch on the roof. We were in no rush today. A couple of more visits to gem shops and we were ready to visit the well known "Dairy King" (trademarked, patent pending) of Galle. The older guy offers homemade ice cream in little frozen cups - which we would give a 2 out of 5, though there was not one gram of leftover ice cream when we were done.
We kept walking the perimeter of the Fort, sometimes popping up on top of the wall, then dropping back to street level. The view of the ocean outside the Fort was pretty nice.
We were getting close to expiry by late afternoon. It was a really nice place to walk ariund but it was time to bus it back. We grabbed a Tuk Tuk to the main bus station, and he made sure we were put on the correct bus. I don't know how these little bus operations make money. Our fare for the hour trip home was just 52 rupees, or about 50 cents Canadian. The bus was packed on the way home, with Robin and I separated but near the front of the bus and Beth and Abby jammed in the very back interacting with some locals.
It was a fun day, capped off with some more games, good food and waking dead. We plan on enjoying Mirissa a bit tomorrow morning before heading to Colombo in the afternoon for our last stop in Sri Lanka!
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