Independence Day

Getting back to Hikkaduwa from Mirissa was straight forward; flag down a bus outside the hotel and change at the Galle bus station. Two hours later we were in the Coral Sands pool bar at midday exactly only to find a notice saying "Public holiday. No alcohol"! Seems like Sri Lanka is very much like Thailand. Mike C would understand this: every time the politicians announce a public holiday or an election they ban the sale of alcohol to stop the locals getting drunk and falling over. Except it never stops the locals and only disrupts the tourist trade. Our friendly barman told us to sit round the corner away from the bar and brought a couple of bottles of beer anyway. He explained that most restaurants take the chance and would rather get fined than lose the custom.

Of course, being their 66th anniversary of independence from the British, the beach was packed with celebrating Sri Lankans. It usually is busy in the water over the weekends but this time there wasn't a white tourist body to be seen. The locals seem to enjoy the simple pleasures with enthusiasm, leaping about the sea, burying their children in the sand and playing some lethal ad hoc games of cricket on the beach ('ware flying cricket bats!). Being the only white face in the multitude it wasn't long before one young lad came up and asked me where I was from. As soon as it became apparent that I was harmless I was holding court with seven or eight smiling lads who wanted to know how cold it was in England and whether I wanted to join them in their cricket match. Cue much pantomiming and falling about to get around the language barrier. It was a lot of fun.

At Mamas a few hours later, there was a similar palaver. We had to have our drinks pre-poured into nondescript receptacles but I noticed a group of local lads at the next table had empty bottles of Grants whisky and Bacardi and were well pissed. One guy went for a sunset swim but was quite incapable of getting out of the water. So much for the alcohol ban. Mind you, by the end of the evening I wasn't much better!

And there it was, all over. A couple more days of cold beers, jumbo prawns in garlic, and alcoholic soulful sunsets that now has us at the point where we are organising a 0200 hours alarm call so that our local rep can drive us back to the airport tomorrow (hopefully). Thanks for reading and thanks for all the comments. See you in a miserable bar in England sometime . . .

Oh yes, an one final montage of images (not for you but to keep me depressed in the coming months) . . .

Mirissa (again)

I've mentioned the north-south coastal road. There's also a north-south coastal railway, so we hopped on a train. You can picture it: 50p each for 2nd class seats (there is no 1st) in a boxy carriage so beloved of all the films about India (at least these days no one is hanging off the roofs from 3rd). Our destination was Mirissa because, although we had reached the harbour to visit the bloody whales, there was also a beach I wanted to check out. Unfortunately, after a worrying wait followed by a reversal back towards Hikkaduwa at the Galle station (we learned later it was just to circumvent Galle town), the train terminated in the south of Sri-Lanka at a very busy town called Matara, which was way past Mirsissa. But Matara had an old Dutch fort complete with a marching band made up of school kids all dressed in their best whites and a curiously over-designed suspension bridge leading to a Buddhist temple on an island (on closer inspection over the bridge we saw the remains of an old concrete pathway, possibly the victim of the tsunami -- Buddhist temples get a priority in tax-dollar recovery efforts here).

Luckily, Matara had a bus station so we hopped on a bus claiming to be heading back westwards to Mirissa. It was more like a Turkish dolmus in that it was stuffed, getting on and getting a seat was easy; getting up and getting off was impossible. There were so many women standing the aisle that getting two Westerners and a backpack through to the doors was like wading through treacle. Luckily, the driver had another near miss on the road, braked while overtaking on a hazardous bend, and the deceleration slithered me through five rows of standing passengers where there was just another few minutes of grunting and "sorries" before I could fall out the door. A few minutes later the bus spat out a red and dishevelled Linda. It was a good thing my tablet was tracking my location by GPS otherwise I'd have never had known when to make a break for the exit in the first place.

We had found somewhere to stay the night via Agoda.com so that wasn't a problem. Then it was two steps on to Mirissa Beach to see what we had arrived to. Here's a picture rom a little island on the corner of the bay to give an idea. I fell in love with the place immediately.

Mirissa Beach is a must if you fancy visiting Sri-Lanka. The best way of describing it is that it is an almost exact clone of Koh Samet in Thailand, but only Mike & Carolyn would understand that. Picture the above bay where, looking out to sea, the sun rises to the left, stays all day and sets to the right. All the bars and restaurants and guest houses are concentrated at the height of maximum tide, so much so that when the tide wins and your sunbed or table (and shoes) are frequently swamped.

Not a beach you can easily swin in, 'though ...

Accommodation was basic and relatively expensive but that's the cost of staying on the beach itself. Food and drink were relatively cheap and the place, like Koh Samet, is full of interesting characters of all nationalities. If (when) we come back to Sri-Lanka we'll stay here for longer.

Weather update

Its actually been a bit overcast since our trip to Galle culminating last night in a terrific lightning storm from over the mountains behind us (from Mamas, naturally) and also over the seaward horizon. No thunder, unlike the night before when a loud clap overhead woke us all up and turned off all the power in the hotel for a few minutes. No sign of any rain, though, and this morning we're back to blisteringly hot sun so we've taken shelter at the pool bar. Its a bit worrying as our barman just brings us our "usual" without having to order. Definitely settling in . . .

Eating here continues to be a lot of fun. Usually, we adopt the practice that became a habit in Texas with Gary and Sarah. Find a bar, in this case one right next door to the sea, have a couple of drinks and order a plate of randomly cooked seafood to share as the need takes us. Makes for a very lazy, laid back evening whose only downside is that we're usually in bed by eight! A couple of nights back we tried to wait a bit and have a "proper" meal, picking a restaurant we'd scouted out virtually (TripAdvisor) and in reality (bar crawl) earlier in the week. A small seafood platter, the menu said. Lobster, crab, prawns, oysters, calamari, octopus, two types of fish and an interesting spicy sauce arrived. We started off in a civilised manner using the various tools provided but soon devolved to an earlier form of proto-hominid, ripping and rending carapaces with our fingers and crunching and slurping the meaty goodness out. Sri-Lankan food has a tendency to force this kind of reversion so I've learned not to fight it. The meal ended in a sort of carnivore's wasteland, wrist-deep in chilli sauce and exoskeleton splinters. The ever-courteous waiters produced two scented washing-up bowls for us so we could clean up so as to reach our wallets to pay: £25 including the drinks and bloody lovely it was.

Otherwise, our little adventure seems to have regressed into a holiday, I'm ashamed to say. Breakfast, swim in the sea, lunchtime beer at the pool bar, afternoon lounging about, and sunset drink and supper. Welcome to the land of the lotus eaters. The trouble is, it's so damned difficult to fight! I tried to break the pattern the other night when I found an interesting bar south of here called Funky de Bar. "Well", thinks I, "something called that just has to be investigated", and very interesting it was too. Travelling across S E Asia I have developed a theory that there will be a Reggae Bar! And there is here, too.; complete with posters and flags depicting the Great Marley. There seems to be a number of beaches off the road south of Hikkaduwa and this one belongs to the surfing dudes. And beach bunnies. A very wide and mostly empty bay of sand and surf with almost an almost unhealthy number of bars.

Cue the incredibly popular slideshow moment. It contains a random boring sequence of beach pictures starting at the surfing beach and ending with "guess where?".  OK, got to admit this boys: whilst Steve's mystery machine can take pictures of ladybirds on the moon, Dave's tablet cannot zoom onto a babe on the beach! As usual, the males will be very disappointed.

We have arranged a mini- adventure for Monday and Tuesday. More postcards if we survive it.

Day trip to Galle

I may have mentioned that the Coral Sands sits on the main Colombo - Galle coast road. A narrow strip of road stuffed full of lorries, u-turning tuk tuks, and howling buses. The buses roar past every few minutes on their way somewhere so we thought, as it was an otherwise cloudy Monday, that we'd hop on one. Our destination was Galle, a few miles south of Hikkaduwa and more or less a capital city for this part of Sri Lanka. We boarded a big, clumsy old Leyland that had probably been transporting these peoples' grandmothers about in earlier days and waited for the conductor to come down the aisle and purchase a handwritten (with a carbon papered copy!) bus ticket. I waved a handful of 100 Rupee notes at him in ignorance (100 R = 50p). He gingerly extracted one , gave me 20 Rupees change and patted me on the shoulder as if to say, "Bless!". So that was 20p each for what turned to be an hour's bus ride.

The town of Galle is totally dominated by the old fort to the south. First built by the Portuguese in the 16th century and drastically expanded by the conquering Dutch in the 17th, the whole fort houses a twee village of shops and cafes as well as a military barracks, police stations, courts and lawyers' houses and sundry other high level administrative buildings. Here's a picture I downloaded from the net to give you an aerial view:

After a couple of hours of walking the ramparts we had lunch at the Royal Dutch Cafe as recommended by our Rough Guide. Its name was slightly overblown as it was basically a tourist shop whose enterprising owner had placed four tables out in the front of a narrow side street. The menu was hand made and written in crayon with great enthusiasm. I ordered a prawn and mixed vegetable rotti, a local Muslim dish that's centred around a circle of thinly spread dough and topped with, rolled over around, or wrapped up in, well, whatever the chef fancies. As it was strictly a one-man show, the food and fruit juice was a while coming. The owner passed around a curious, well-worn photograph album to his guests: pictures taken of the 2004 tsunami. If you look at the green oval at the neck of land in the picture above; that is the (apparently) famous Galle cricket ground. The wave came in from the right and swamped that plus much of the southern part of the town above it. Someone had taken pictures just after the wave hit as there were still people leaning over balconies of the higher buildings looking at ripped-out seafront stores, overturned Leyland buses, smashed cars and people wading or standing around looking bewildered waist deep in water. Hard to believe wandering around the loud, thriving city of Galle today, ten years on.

It was a hot, sticky day though. By the time we took our 20p bus ride home it was definitely a case for "shower and change first; bar second".

I did take a couple of pictures with the tablet, though. And I think I've also discovered how to get the tablet to string a few together to make a slideshow complete with transitions (fade to you and me) and music. So, here goes . . . (OK, I know it's not Spielberg but I'm learning from scratch here!)

Ah, well, that little file took a half hour to upload using this hotel's bandwidth and I still can't read it on my tablet from the blogger website. At the risk of more abuse, did it work?

Food, drink and sunsets

Having appalled Silent Reader 2 yesterday with nautical tales of woe, I thought I'd revert to a more dignified report of life in Sri Lanka. Those of you who like their postcards more akin to a road crash report can look away now.

This is definitely one of the cheapest places in to world to bum around: a large beer will cost you around £1.50; a very large local g & t around £2.50; a plate of devilled (i.e. chillie sauced) tuna/calamari/prawns around £4. In fact, our first week here cost us about the same in food and drink as the bloody whale trip did; around £150. The only thing we have really spluged on is the hotel which comes to around £80 a night.

Our favourite watering hole remains the afore-reported Mamas Bar & Restaurant, a couple of buildings up the beach. The view from our table (which I think is made from a 1950's iron sign advertising Anchor butter) really says it all . . .

Last night our favourite table (think: "Sheldon's Spot") was under threat from a group of Russian luvvies who had the staff move the other three Anchor Butters together and set up a barbeque on the sand. The pressure was on us to move to give ours up but, of course, we resisted in the true Blitz spirit and sat back to watch the wannabe models and their mums cavourt and posture for photos in the orange glow of the sunset. Things started to get interesting when a local man walked by towing a Macaque monkey on a lead. Of course, he saw a money opportunity and the women saw a photo opportunity. Cue much squealing and tearing of hair and Linda muttering in the background, "Go on, pee on their heads". Once the furore was over the Russians lost interest in both man and monkey who were trying to extract the equivalent of £10 off them. The rest of the evening settled down when the Russians sat down to eat and a couple of talented local boys played the bongos for them (and the rest of us) for an hour while the sun disappeared. And just to put you in the mood, here's another obligatory sunset view from Lampen's Location . . .

Everybody say "Ahh!"

Bloody whales

We didn't actually spend a whole three days trying to get a crap video uploaded onto the internet. No, we went hunting for blue whales. Which, as it turned out wasn't as a romantic event as it sounds.

To be honest, having tried this sort of adventure out in New Zealand a few years ago, I should have had a better idea of what was involved. A bloody early start, for one. Up at 4 am for a two-hour ride along the coast road south to Mirissa. As the sun rose we ploughed our way through a lively fish market at Mirissa's large harbour to our whaler. Here it is, look, and note the sunrise just behind it

Note the life jackets on the people downstairs. We were warned not to sit downstairs so we plonked ourselves upstairs where our eternally cheerful guide gave us sea sickness tablets. Which brings me to the second thing I should have remembered. Bloody whales like bloody deep trenches to dive into. And deep trenches usually act as a confluence for conflicting tidal waves which in turn brings a lot of exaggerated peaks and troughs . . . Here we are on the top deck half-wearing our mandatory life jackets:

Sure enough, an hour into deeper waters and the crew started to dispense little red and white plastic bags to those people on the top deck who were looking a little green. From the subsequent sounds over the crash of the waves I gathered that a full third of our intrepid whalers were not enjoying themselves. And, according to my pocket guide, January is Sri Lanka's quietest month sea-turbulence-wise.

The third thing I should have remembered is the state of the toilets on small tourist boats. Not brilliant for someone having an unexpected gastric attack. By this time the entire port side of the boat downstairs had been rendered uninhabitable due to the spray. I slipped on the wet steps trying to get downstairs in the surge and was hanging in mid air with my hands on the railings, life racket open and flapping in the breeze. The toilet (OK, Head) couldn't be closed properly as the catch had snapped off, replaced as it was by a short twist of wire and threatening to blast open at any moment revealing me in my glory or slamming an unsuspecting guest off the boat. Worse, the back clips off my life belt were dangling unbeknownst to me in the very place you don't want them to dangle whilst enduring explosive decompression. The resultant cleanup operation then involved a very soggy cylinder of papier-mache that used to be a toilet roll while lurching around a confined space whose exit threatened to explode outwards. Sweating and swearing, I finally lurched out of hell into a very horrified woman who had been patiently waiting for her turn on the merryl-go-round. Now that event has been faithfully reported, let us never speak of it again!

And Linda? Oh, she was having a whale of a time (sorry!). Happy as Larry! You see, she actually likes boats! Incroyable! We even saw a blue whale after the first hour, although to my freshly minted blurred vision it looked suspiciously like another Disney animatronic. After another three hours there was a mutiny in the French and German ranks to go home. The naysayers, led by Linda (natch!), wanted to sail on to find more whales. The trouble is, while the New Zealanders have it easy with state of the art whale hunting sonar, the Sri Lankans merely have tens of enthusiastic crew hanging off the railings waiting to pronounce, "There she blows!". Linda was rewarded with a couple more sightings before we were allowed to return to Terra firma. She says she won't take me on a boat again.

Video test

Wasn't going to post today as we haven't done much in addition to the pre-reported stuff. Although I do note during my morning paddle to see the turtles that they appear right outside a huge hotel that' s probably run by a German Combine or the Chechnyan mafiosa. Since they patiently put up with the continual petting from the hotel guests and look none the worse from any random mammalian bacteria I am starting to wonder if we are not being fooled by some form of 21Cen Disney animatronics.

Anyway, the real reason I'm setting up this post is that we've booked a trip tomorrow and I've just realised that this tablet does video. So, since we're back in the bar for a lunchtime drink and I'm bored, I thought I'd give it a go. Soooo . . .

J

OK, it's now three days later and it has taken me this long to get it to work.Google operating systems are anything but intuitive. Now to test it by publishing this post, viewing it on another browser and see if the video works. It's a view from the hotel bar if anyone really cares.

Ah, OK, one last update. The page posted but my Android tablet says "this plug in is not supported". Can anyone play the video on a proper Windows PC?

Still here . . .

. . . and still online, it would appear. I figure that as long as I don't log out from my Google account on this tablet, I can still access Blogger. Anyways, not much to report as we seem to have sunk with alarming haste into a mindless routine so typical of the average Brit on holiday. Up at the sound of 10,000 birds squawking in the palm trees surrounding the hotel heralding a new dawn and the pool boys laying out the sunbed towels. Out quickly to decorate the two sunbeds outside our room with yesterday's unwashed swimwear, seeing off two fat old Russian women who were about to claim them with handbags (picture Lampwick cavorting theatrically, shouting, "Get orf moi land!!). Leaving said sunbeds completely unused, as evey other moron does for hours on end, to grab everything that'll fit on a plate from the breakfast buffet (Hey, I've paid for that!"). Then wandering off to the beach for a morning swim by the reef while Linda sits in the shade on our petite garden balcony reading her Kindle and standing guard over our still as-yet unused sunbeds. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?

OK, maybe we'll stop the psychopathic behaviour (yeah, when every other fucker does!) and behave. The Coral Sands is actually a nice hotel. The staff are well geared up to looking after the customer and very lively on the Tripadvisor forums. I was quite impressed with the manager's insistence on answering every complaint with withering efficiency. In fact, this was why I picked the place. It's right on the beach with a security guarded border to stop the beggars and hawkers from hassling the guests. The whole beach is surrounded by a reef (no coral, alas, that having been wiped out by tourists and the tourist industry aeons ago) so the water is clear in the mornings and there are plenty of tiny fish to see while snorkeling.

The other side of the hotel sits on the main Colombo - Galle coast road and the small town of Hikkaduwa. Well, town might be a bit grand as it sits on a junction of one road eastwards on which also sits a bus and railway station. This makes traversing the road a bit hectic as it constitutes a chaotic navigation of overcrowded buses, u- turning tuk-tuks badly parked delivery lorries and thousands of over-revved motor bikes the owners of all driving with a blithe disregard for anyone else o the road, with or without a metal chassis. Still, Hikka Junction demands exploration as there are a number of shops, art galleries, pharmacies and restaurants that need investigating.

Our evenings have been somewhat repetitive. On the first night we had a wander through the touristy end of the Junction but ended up back on the beach at Mamas bar and restaurant. We'd spotted it earlier as all the weekenders seemed to congregate there to get pissed and badly play bongo drums. Sure enough, we sat on a pair of rickety wooden chairs tilted over some sandbags that kept the waves from wetting your feet. Our metal table used to have a life as an advertising sign in a garage. We drank cheap beer and gin 'n tonic, eating snacks of garlic calamari and chilli pork watching the sun set through the silhouette of some dangerously leaning palm trees. Heaven!

Arrived!

Hmm. Not sure whether I can continue with this blog for much longer. Apparently, the Great God Google has determined that I am not where I usually am and has reset my password via my mobile phone. As most of you know, I don't use a mobile phone. Don't like 'em. Enables governments AIs, wives and corporate managers keep tags on you. So, when I log off on this post I may not be able to log back in to my Google account again.

Anyway, just reporting a safe journey without having to scrape my brains off the cabin ceiling. Reports of my TIA may well have been presumptuous. Could well be a cornea defect instead -- keratinocus, maybe. (Thanks for the driving ban, NHS!) In fact, the whole operation went quite smoothly. Taxi arrived @ 1600 GMT Totton precisely. Oman Air took us to Muscat and thence to Colombo in good haste (7 hours to Muscat; 2 hours transfer; 4 hours to Colombo -- all with a roomy 34 inch leg room and state-of-the-art entertainment system and probably the cheapest fares I could find on the Net!). A nice Sri Lankan gentleman was waiting for us at customs and drove us to our hotel along their brand new Expressway (only opened last month coincidentally in time for Prince Charles to preside over the Commonwealth Conference: it shaves an hour off the usual three and a half hour trip from the airport to Hikkaduwa). Door to door, it took around 24 hours which tends to explain why I left my debit card in the airport ATM after counting out my first batch of 20,000 Rupees.

Well, actually, 23-and-a-half hours as Sri Lanka has a strange English-like law that adds a half hour to the usual 1 hour International time zones. We plonked the bags in the room and proceeded in the tradional fashion to the hotel bar that was set in the garden next to the beach drinking £1.50 pint-bottles of Lion beer whilst listening to a couple of guys on a saxophone and Spanish guitar mutate "Hotel California" in a pleasant, laid-back, hippy sorta way.

In case the Google God forbids me access again, I'll record one last experience. Breakfast was a many and varied buffet that included the obligatory Sri Lankan curries after which we'd discovered the Germans had nicked the sunbeds from outside our door to the sea and put towels on them. War has been declared but that's another story. As there effectively was nowhere to sit in the hotel gardens by around 10 we explored the manor. A mere 100 metres down the beach we found two enormous turtles in the shallows merrily snatching up passing lime-green pieces of seaweed while being pictured by a handful of tourists ankle-deep in the reef waters. You'd have to pay a fortune for that to be staged at SeaWorld.

Now that's why we came, I realised!

" . . . Sure plays a mean pin ball"

. . . referring, of course to "that deaf, dumb and blind kid" as the song goes. Or, me, as it nearly was. It all started with a long-put-off decision to go to the optician the day after Boxing Day. I'd been seeing three full moons in the sky for years but over Christmas I could barely see anything out of my left eye at all. The opticians sent me to the eye hospital. The eye hospital sent me to the post-stroke clinic in Lymington. The clinic declared I had suffered a TIA (I had to look that up later) and banned me from driving for a month. Thanks very much! I only went in for a pair of glasses.

To pursue the Who's prophecy I also went deaf in one ear after New Year. A quick trip to the GP pronounced me with an ear infection and dire warnings about how dangerous it would be to fly if I couldn't repressurise. *Sigh* I was beginning to think that someone didn't want me to go on this trip.

So, thanks to amoxicillin, I'm not deaf; thanks to the fact that the spurious TIA diagnosis was not actually a stroke, I'm not dumb; and thanks to a new pair of glasses, I'm not completely blind. It looks as if we still can go to Sri Lanka after all. As for playing the eponymous pinball, I still retain the reflexes of a Giant Three-Toed Sloth with a hangover, so I guess that's out as well.

Long suffering Linda has been driving me around for the last couple of weeks so she deserves her adventure in the sun. As always, this test first post is only here to see how the overall blog design works. Hopefully, by the 18th January we'll have landed on a beach in Sri Lanka without my head having blown up en route and sending a jollier postcard to boot.