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?