Sri Lanka - a quick retrospective

Okay, I won't spend much time on this, I'm afraid, but I will say that Sri Lanka was amazing, absolutely amazing. I would put it on a fairly short list of really great places I have been in the world. The people there are so friendly and kind, the country is small enough that you can actually see quite a bit of it in a short time (even though the roads and buses are pretty poor), and what you get for what you spend is very good value. It is almost a mix of India and Thailand. It's great (except for the food, which we'll politely call repetitive).

This is roughly our route, missing all the little wobbles of the road in the hills (which take ages to get through, even though the buses go at break-neck speeds around hairpin turns). While the distance doens't look much (it appears to be only about 300 km North to South) it took ages to get anywhere, but what you got to see en-route was good and it was amazing to be at the beach, then 5 hrs later be in the hills, and the next day be in the arid North, surrounded by temples.

I'm not doing it justice by glossing over everything, but it was fabulous.

Our Photos At Last!

Okay, sorry for the delay but we have been busily traveling - which is the point of being here. We are currently back in Southern India in the touristy town of Mamallapuram which is a beach town that seems to largely disregard the beach. One of our two jobs for being here was to organise our photos and burn some DVDs and as the computers are excellent here, we also decided to add some of our own photos.

In chronological order...

These great guys formed a local town band which was busy playing for weddings when we were in Hampi. We wish we also had a tape recorder.

This is a picture of Galle (Sri Lanka) during the cricket - one of the few times it was not raining.

Taken during our walk through the Sinharaja National Park near Deniyaya (Sri Lanka), these kids were near the start of the walk playing in the tea plantation. The national park was amazing and our guide, Badulla, was excellent, spotting snakes and monkeys that were completely camouflaged. How he spotted a snake in the crook of a tree, 3 m up a hill in dense rain forest, I will never know. The only things we spotted were the land leeches crawling up our shoes.

This monk was at the Mihintale monastery, near Anurahadpura, about as far North as we got in Sri Lanka. We met Noreen, a cool English girl who was traveling on her own, and she and her driver were kind enough to give us a lift to the ruins and share their company.

These are some of the Buddha statues at Polonnaruwa, another set of ruins in the "cultural triangle" in Sri Lanka. I can't say I am that into my Buddha statues, but these were gorgeous and very peaceful.

After our circuit around the "cultural triangle", we headed back South to the hills where we managed to crawl up over 5200 steps to the top of Adam's Peak. To be able to see the sunrise, you have to start the walk around 2:30 am in the dark and the cold. All in all, it was lovely. Not so lovely that I'd love to do it again anytime soon, but the views were stunning and the monks we met (from Bangladesh) where great fun, piling down the stairs at top speed (pictured below).

This picture was taken at tiny little train station in Nuwara Eliya, in the hills of Sri Lanka. The views around that whole area were amazing and the train station itself was like stepping back in time.

This is one of our hundred pictures of hills covered in tea. The colours there were gorgeous, especially when there were a few very friendly and colourful tea pickers amongst the tea. We went to a tea factory tour in Haputale where we learned the art of making tea and were amazed at how friendly and good natured the workers there were.

Back in India...

We landed at Trivandrum and had to make our way back up North to the town of Kollam, one of the starting points for trips in the Keralan backwaters. Backwater tours are one of the "must do" items in Southern India (or so it seemed) and originally we'd planned to spend a few days lazily floating along the small waterways, but in the end decided to do just a morning's tour. It was lovely and so peaceful - we almost forgot we were back in India. Our guide, Ranjit, was good fun and very knowledgeable.

This was one of the many guys we got pictures of at the Sri Meenakshi temple in Madurai, a place that seemed to have a high number of "characters" you could photograph ... for a small fee of course.

This was also in Madurai, but free - a tuk tuk driver with the excellent local horn (almost inaudible for once).

Andrea on the stairs to the Rock Temple in Trichy - how we scoffed at how few stairs there were to this temple after our mammoth climb to Adam's Peak. Great wobbly stairs.

Finally, Andrea getting blessed by (another) temple elephant in Trichy - how they take the coins from your hand with their ultra dextrous trunk is great (the wet goo they leave on your fingers, however, is not).