The Boat
Beaches, Beaches and more Beaches
Decided that I’m spending the rest of my time here in Sri Lanka on the beach but am going to cut my time here short a couple days in favor of Singapore. I know I’m insane for changing my itinerary but 10 days of doing nothing, even in a beach-side town and especially when you’re travelling alone is too much for me and there’s not too much else I want to see in the country. That and I’m not much of a beach person. Plus I need some amenities that I thoroughly miss such as:
Laundry service: the going rate here in $2-3 per piece of clothing. PER PIECE OF CLOTHING! $15 to do your underwear and a pair of socks? I’ll wash them in the sink like I have been thank you very much.
A novel to read: I could just sit on the beach reading and chilling out but there is a complete void of English books in the this country, which is kind of odd for two reasons; 1) there’s English signage everywhere and the majority of people seem to be English literate. 2) Everywhere you go in Southeast Asia from Thailand to Indonesia to India you can buy photocopied and knocked off books in the streets for a few dollars. You can find just about any book you wish, new or old, meanwhile here such a market/system does not exist so I am stuck reading a Star Wars fan fiction novel I found in a guesthouse.
Coffee: enough said.
Green vegetables: chopped up, in a bowl with salt, pepper, oil and some hardboiled eggs or chicken.
A stable internet connection: I’m a slave to the interweb
Mosquitoes
One downside to the beaches are the mosquitoes and evidently they like me. I assume (and hope) it was mosquitoes that got inside my mosquito net and completely my neck, shoulder and upper back. They are covered in red welt bug bites at this point and needless to say I’m very itchy. Bug spray before bed I suppose…
But enough ranting…
Turtles
Near Tengalla is a beach where large sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. I had a local guy take me out at around 8:30 at night to a distant, protected beach to potentially get a glimpse of this if I was lucky. It’s a long piece of beach stretching about 4 km. We had to march quite away along the beach looking for the guys running the show; my driver called 3 times before we could see their signal light off in the distance to where they were. The beach itself was amazing at nighttime, far away from any lights and there was no moon or clouds making the stars look amazing; the Milky Way was clearly visible. We went walking along a good 2-3 km before we came up to where a number of other people were settled down on the beach with the turtle project-manager guy telling us we had to remain there until they started laying their eggs; they`ll leave if they sense danger but once they start laying they don`t stop or move away. Laying their eggs is also the only time they come ashore.
I guess I was pretty fortunate this night as there were two different turtles ashore laying their eggs. The first a Olive Riddle that we watched lay it`s eggs, bury them and then pat down the sand, quite violently mind you, before crawling off and disappearing back into the sea. The second was a huge green turtle that was probably about a meter long. It too laid it`s eggs and buried them but didn`t smack down the earth like the other – probably too big. I took off before I could see the green turtle go back to the sea; the animal was exhausted and I`m sure it was going to take it another hour to get back to the water. On the way back to the tuk tuk we stumbled upon another green turtle crawling up onto the beach getting ready to lay it`s eggs. This one hadn`t started digging yet and quickly hid in its shell so we left it as be to do its business. All in all this was an amazing experience, everything from the complexity of the stars above me to the simplicity of these amazing animals coming ashore to fulfil their part in the cycle of life. Definitely the highlight thus far here in Sri Lanka.
Whales
I also went whale watching while in Mirissa, which was still good but not as amazing as seeing the turtles. I saw a couple blue whales and a pod of dolphins but they’re really elusive animals and you can only get brief views of them. I think I enjoyed just riding around in the boat, seeing the Sri Lankan fishing boats and just being on the ocean as much as I liked seeing the whales and dolphins.
More Buses and Highways
Another thing that adds to the craziness of busses in Sri Lanka is the highways or lack thereof. All the major roads go through the small towns and villages along the way but the busses still treat these road ways like they are highways, flying through town at +80km/h, blaring on the horn. It makes these nice little villages and towns along the beach and countryside noisy death traps. Today I think I had the worse driver yet; I swear the guy couldn’t see more than 20 meters in front of him. He’d floor the peddle for about 5 seconds before realizing that there was oncoming traffic or there was a bus stop 30 meters away and then slam on the breaks coming to a stop. Insane.
Tags: Australia
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