Gone (to Sri Lanka) with the Wind...

I tried to connect at Almaty airport just as we were leaving and I managed to connect to their access point.... but that wasn't connected to the internet...

There was no wifi in Sharjah airport, butapart from that, the place is looking much better than it used to. For a couple of years it looked almost as bad as heathrow, with plywood partitions everywhere and temporary gates and corridors, big queues at the inadequate temporary security checks and one dodgy canteen. Now there's a food court with a neat Indian restaurant which does masala dosas and Bombay meals, and everything else is neat and new. It still smells a wee bit of feet, but....

First stop in Sri Lanka was Kandy. That's in the mountains and we had to go to Colombo first to catch the train up the hill. We landed at 5.30 am, and the train was at 3.30 in the afternoon, so we took the bus into town and got a room in a hotel for the afternoon to have a shower and grab a few hours kip. On the bus  into Colombo, the conductor went round all the passengers, except the three foreigners, and collected money. Sveta asked me why he was ignoring us, and I explained - something I had forgotten up until then - that he would approach us at the end and charge us maybe twice what the locals had paid. And sure enough that's what he tried to do, although he ended up accepting the correct fare from Sveta and I just to get rid of us. It's a widespread plractice in Sri Lanka to charge foreigners a lot more than locals for almost everything. There is an official double-pricing policy at all historic places, national parks, cultural events etc. which is usually somewhere in the order of prices being twenty times higher for tourists, but unofficially too, foreigners are often charged more - in cafes, on buses, in shops... it's not everywhere, and it's not everybody who does it, but as I say, it's an extremely wide-spread practice. 

But, anyway. That kind of thing can get you down if you let it. But we don't let it.... what did get us down a bit though was the hotel in Kandy. We booked it on the internet coz it was cheap and the site said they had wifi. The room was cheap, but if it had been any dearer it would have been a total rip off. It was damp,  stinky and the bed sheets were a funny grey colour. There was a TV as advertised, but none of the satelite channels were available (we only found that out after we went looking for an extension lead so we could plug the TV in). And there was no wifi either. The worst thing however, was the food. The hotel was about a kilometer from the nearest cafe ot shop so decided to eat in the hotel restaurant. BIG mistake! we had rubbish, overpriced curry and had to pay and extra 200 rupees for rice.... In town we could get the whole shebang, plus coconut sambol and chutney for under 200 rups.

So, name and shame time: We do not recommend the Kandy View Hotel, no we do not, not at all. There are lots of better, cheaper and friendlier places in Kandy to choose from.

So that's the negative stuff out the way; now for the positive. Hikkadowa! That's a positively good place. But the good stuff started on the journey down from Kandy. We took a bus instead of the train (the train has a fantastic viewing carriage for tourists, but if you can't book that in advance, you can't be sure of any seat as none of the others are reservable. The viewing carriage was booked out....). It was a fun trip and we comnnected easily with another bus in Colombo for the trip along the coast. We met a lot of good people who helped us out and our journey seemed to pass very quickly even though it involved six hours on buses. Hikkadowa is a beach town about 100 odd km from Colombo and we got off at the bus stand in the town centre and started walking south to where the guest houses are located. There are a lot of touts looking to make a bit by hooking you up to a guest house, of course, and that can be good if the place is busy, but there didn't seem to be many tourists about so we ignored themand kept walking. Then we met two guys who claimed they were not touting but just wanted to show us the guest house they were staying in because it was really nice. We went with them and sure enough, it was a really cool place on the beach and the owner gave us a great price as most of the rooms were empty. The couple were Rudolfo from Italy and Sylvia from Indonesia, but who now like in Nice in France. Rudolfo didn't speak any English and I don't speak any Italian but we adopted the approach of speaking loudly and slowly at each other in our own languages and guess waht? It worked. We didn't talk astrophysics or describe how to operate on people, but we managed to do the basic 'how long have you been travelling, where have you been, was it good where next kind of thing, without too much bother. I realised that with my 'italian restaurant' vocabulary and by knowledge of Spanish, I could pick up a lot of what Rudolfo was saying.

So, Hikkadowa was great - and one of the best things about it was the Sri Lankan curry at the Cool Spot cafe. We got a big plate of rice each and three bowls of vegetables: Green bananas cooked in thick coconut sauce, yellow dhal, and carrots in coconut gravy with curry leaves...MMMM delicious. And by the way, thehotel was the Apollo - highly recommended by the Macbeans.

Today we left Hikkadowa and jumped on the bus to Unawatuna beach. We just got on the bus and no more and I spent most of the trip hanging out the back door, which was a bit scary because the weight of my rucksack kept pulling me out when we went round corners... but at least it was cool. When I got inside the bus, after most of the people got out at Galle, it was so hot I wished I was back on the step again. 

We went exploring shortly afte we arrived but it started to rain while we were having lunch so we spent an hour in the cafe waiting for a break, but it didn't come. We trudged back to the hotel in what is possibly the heaviest rain I've ever experienced (though I always think that when it is unusually heavy rain). The rain is off now, it's dark and I'm sitting on the terrace blogging with the sound of crickets, frogs and cicadas in the background (and the mosquitoes are biting...).

That's it for now. Just a quick ramble with no spell checking....