Happy Belated Valentine’s Day!
Well, I hope everyone had a fantastic Valentine’s day. No, John and I didn’t do anything special for the day… we aren’t tight like that.
We are in Sri Lanka now. Getting here was pretty uneventful… our flights were actually on time and we arrived late at night on the 13th.
Sri Lanka has been a pleasant surprise… it is MUCH nicer than the places we went in India. The beaches are beautiful, the people are very friendly (and not in a “trying-to-sell-you-something” kind of way), the streets are much cleaner, people don’t pee in public… etc. It’s exactly what I needed to pick up the spirits. A good friend of mine has family out here and they helped set us up at a beautiful beach resort with tours.
So, we spent Valentine’s Day touring Colombo… we went to a few Buddist Temples (one of which was on a magnificent lake), then we went to a huge museum, and then to the zoo. It’s kind of funny seeing animals that we saw in the wild in Africa, behind bars in a zoo in Sri Lanka. It’s just not the same… but the zoo was actually really fun… I can’t remember the last time I was at a zoo.
Then today, we woke up early to make the drive to Pinnawala. This is where there is a huge elephant orphanage. There are about 80 elephants at the orphanage and we got to watch them all go down to the river to bath and play…it was wicked. We spent quite a bit of time at the orphanage watching these incredible animals. Then, we even got to ride bareback on one in the jungle… that was sweeeeet. She was really big… and we got to bath her. Man, I can’t wait to post pictures. After the elephant ride and bath, we went to a HUGE botanical garden place in Kandy. Wow, the plants here are so lush, colorful, and beautiful. If it wasn’t like 30-some degrees out, I could have spent all day there… but it’s hot here… and us Canadians melt here.
Now we are at a CRAZY nice hotel in Kandy… it’s up on a mountain kind of and we can see a HUGE Buddha statue a little ways away… like, the statue is bigger than this hotel. I think we are going to go see that tomorrow… at least, I hope we are.
Anyway, I’m glad to report that our spirits are rejuvenated… and we look forward to our last couple days here before going to Hong Kong for Chinese New Year!
Tags: Sri Lanka
cheng.ev