Stranded in Hikkaduwa

All photos of India and World’s End have been posted at www.rtsla.blogspot.com

Did I mention that last night while we were dining at the hotel there were three musicians singing gospel music with a calypso beat? Fact is stranger than fiction…

Today we checked out of the hotel and were waiting for our driver and van when we got a call saying there was a ‘small technical problem’. HA! I don’t know about you but a small technical problem can mean you aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Ten minutes later I suggested the team take the staff member’s car and head out. I would wait for the van to be repaired and bring the luggage. They squeezed into Kumar’s car and took off. I got a call regarding the car repair, saying they would need to go to a town about 40 minutes away for a part so I headed to town to get a plastic container for some tea I had bought for a friend. This is very special and very expensive tea and I wanted to protect it so it wouldn’t get crushed. I would end up with tea dust instead of whole leaf tea. As life would have it I managed to pick up a local who ‘wanted to help’. He took me to a store with plastic containers and after we got out of the store he asked if I could help him. He is a fisherman and the weather has prevented him from fishing for days (rain), his wife has Dengue and cannot nurse the baby so he wanted milk, not money. I bought him two containers of baby milk formula. I rarely give money away here but am willing to help in a situation where he wasn’t asking for money.

Next I headed for the Internet café to check email. As for the bombing in Colombo yesterday, they were targeting the Pakistani High Commissioner. Apparently the LTTE is angry because Pakistan has offered to help SL combat terrorism. The commissioner is unharmed but nine people are dead and 15 are injured. The LTTE planted claymore mines in a parked trishaw and set them off with remote control. Since this happened near where Mr. Kularathna, the trishaw driver I use, is stationed I sent him a text message on my cell phone, inquiring if he was okay. He called a bit later, astounded that I had expressed concern. Frankly I often think of him as my younger brother without knowing his age. He was safe as he had gone home early due to the rain. He lives about 15 kilometers out of Colombo.

Hambantota

I never got a chance to post the above blog. It is now Thursday and we are in Hambantota on the southern tip of SL. Tuesday we stayed in Welagama and our hotel room overlooked the bay that had numerous fishing boats anchored there in a colorful display. Taprobane is a tiny island off the coast here and there is a villa on it that you can rent for $1200 a night, complete with servants to address your every need. We didn’t stay there. Duh! I am going to finish this later as someone else needs the computer and I want to post what I have so far. Yesterday I saw an iguana that was three feet and a land monitor that was two and a half feet. Oy! They are so prehistoric looking!

To be continued….

I’m back. We left Welagama at 8:00 am and drove two hours. While the team was performing their assessment, I walked around town, found an Internet café and answered email. We drove another 1.5 hours (it was now about 1:30) and I sat in the van while they did a second assessment in a tiny town. As I was nodding off while reading (it was hot and I hadn’t slept well) I was invited in for hot, sweet milk tea, two cookies and a small banana. We left around 4:00 and walked across the street to a family run rice and curry shop and had, you guessed it, rice and curry lunch.

Two of the hotels we stayed in have had serious design flaws in the showers. I may have already written about this. Both had shower heads that point straight down onto a shelf that runs the width of the tub, causing the water to hit directly onto the shelf and consequently run all over the counter or floor. In both cases, it made bathing difficult because you couldn’t get directly under the water flow. What were those folks thinking when they installed those puppies???

Today is Thursday and I got up at 5:40 in order to leave the hotel at 6:00 and go to Bundala Bird Sanctuary. I was in heaven, having never gone to a bird sanctuary before. My driver was working on being a Bob Marley look alike. He was pretty darn cute in his attempt and wanted to make sure I knew what he was attempting to do. Once we got to Bundala we picked up a park guide who accompanied us throughout the park. In addition to seeing 23 birds I haven’t seen before, I saw four huge crocodiles, over 50 peahens and peacocks, oodles of monkeys (two kinds), two deer and two land monitors. There was lots of elephant dung but it is the end of the dry season so they have gone out of the park to find water. We also went to the edge of the park on the Indian Ocean and I saw five or six boats that fishermen use to catch lobster and the shacks they live in while fishing. As we were driving away I was wondering how they got their lobsters to market when two fishermen passed us on the motorcycles with a box mounted on the back to carry the lobsters.

The rest of my day has been spent in leisure: a morning nap, slow lunch, reading John Adams biography and now on the Internet at the hotel. One of the team consultants has the stomach flu and is out of commission for the day. We will end the day with another walk on the beautiful beach that is here. What a joy!

That’s it from paradise five degrees above the equator.