The Discovery of Sri Lanka

When I started thinking about blogging about my trip to Sri Lanka, I was overwhelmed with how much I have to talk about! There wasn't a second of the trip that isn't blog worthy, so I've decided to break it up. I'll probably cover about a half of a day or a day for each blog, but for now I'll just give a basic outline.


Sri Lanka is located off the southeast coast of India and about 75% of the population consists of Sinhalese. I hadn't ever heard of them or their language but apparently Sri Lanka is one of the most literate countries in Asia. When we first saw the writing of the language, Andrea coined the term "Curly Cue" so we stuck with that until we gained further knowledge. Although the island is fairly small, it takes forever to travel anywhere. They have no highways - only somewhat two-lane roads that run through village after village. Road signs don't exist and maps are pretty much useless. Even our driver who is a native of Sri Lanka stopped every now and then to make sure we were heading in the right direction. Most of the transportation consists of tuc-tucs and scooters, and when passing someone, it doesn't even matter if there's on-coming traffic. The trip was a never-ending game of chicken. The beaches and mountains are beautiful, and so are the people! 


Here's a little roadmap of our travels:

Colombo --> Hikkaduwa --> Ratnapura --> Polonaruwa --> Sigriya --> Kandy --> Colombo

Day 1:

Arrived in Colombo

Drove to Hikkaduwa

Beach time

Party at Mambo's (hotel down the beach) with the locals

                               

The waves were great for surfing, but the undertow was pretty strong. I didn't get a chance to try to surf. This is the beach right outside Rita's where we stayed in Hikkaduwa

This is the beach at Mambo's where we went the first night we were there. There were a ton of locals, Australians, British and a few Germans there...and then of course about 20 Kuwait teachers!

Day 2:

Shopped for souvenirs around Hikkaduwa

Took a tuc-tuc to a lagoon, temple, and fed sea turtles

Hung out at Mambos with more ACA teachers until 5am

This is at the lagoon the tuc-tuc driver took us to. They had several different plants. This one was cinnamon.

This is the catamaran we rode in around the lagoon. It can fit up to 7 people.

This is the sea turtle we fed on a beach down the street from our hotel. Once I fed him, he kept following me. I thought he was going to bite my toes off!

Day 3:

Andrea, Kristina and I branched off from the group. We decided not to do a guided tour. Our tuc-tuc driver was so awesome so we asked him to be our driver for the week. He ended up getting his brother in law to take us because his van was broken. We had a vague idea of what we wanted to do, but we made up our trip as we went. We jumped in the van at 6am and headed to Ratnapura.

Saw a waterfall

Picked up a local

Dug for gems

Went to a temple

This is where the workers dig for gems. It's definitely different from digging for gems in Arkansas!

This is the waterfall we went to before we dug for gems. It's used as a bathing place for the locals.

After we went to the gem fields, we went to a man's house we met on the fields. He was trying to sell us gems, so we went and checked them out. Let's just say that when you buy gems from the miners, the prices are a lot more reasonable.

He showed us how he cut the gems. It flew off the holder a few times and almost hit me in the face!

This is the man we met at the gem fields. When we got to his house, it started pouring, so we had King Coconut milk (he's cutting the coconut here), and we also had tea.

Day 4:
Drove to Polonura
Saw the ancient city and several statues
Went to a woodshop
Drove to Sigrya

Here is one picture of a temple in the ancient city. 

I'm not sure what he's carving here, but they said it'll take about 2 months to finish.

We weren't allowed to take pictures with the statues, so we tried to be sneaky...

And then we found out that we can take pictures, but we can't stand with our backs toward the statues. There were bats flying all around this one!

Day 5:
Climbed Lion's Rock
Drove to Kandy
Went to Ceylon Tea Plantation
Saw Sri Lankan Dancers
Drove to Colombo

 

Lions Rock! What a climb...

About halfway up about 1000 stairs later, we started taking a ton of goofy pictures to keep our mind off the climbing.

We finally made it! We decided nobody ever actually tried to talk to the king if it took that much effort to do it. 

These are some tea pluckers that were finishing up their day. We took a picture with them and gave them about $10 USD to share. They thought they won the lottery. 

The whole 3 km up the mountain to the tea factory was full of tea bushes. It's definitely not what I expected...way more awesome.

This is the first step in the factory. There's a huge fan that takes the moisture out of the leaves here.

Day 6:
Flew back to Kuwait


Here's a few pictures more from in between each stop!

Along the way we would stop at these little shacks to eat. The food was good, but SO spicy so I didn't eat much. My driver told me to eat sugar. It worked miracles! I'll definitely be using that trick again.

This is the Curly cue language I was talking about. I've never seen it in my life. 

When we saw someone bathing an elephant on the side of the road, we stopped. The monks stopped to help as well. Apparently monks never get in the river or bathe elephants, so we were lucky to see them do both!

This is a tuc-tuc. three people can fit in the back and the driver sits up front. You steer with handle bars, not a steering wheel. I heard they are priced at about $3,500 USD. For a lot of Sri Lankans, this is their business in tourist cities.

This is another elephant we saw on in a river. He seemed pretty sad when his owner tried to get him to lay down.

Here's a wild elephant. We also had a night when we were driving when an elephant was stopping traffic by walking in the middle of the road. They apparently are known for hitting cars and breaking windows as they walk by. We didn't experience this, thankfully.

He was a nice elephant. They had him chained up by his ankles to make sure he stayed put. I felt sorry for him! I wish they could all just run free.

 Next time, I'll tell you all about day 1! It was probably the most uneventful of the trip, but we all needed on day of a little R&R.

I've been having entirely too much fun to find time to update!

I don't even know where to start! I've been the worst updater ever. I really wish I had the discipline to post no matter how tired I am before bed. Part of it is the fact that my internet is worthless at home, but I'm sure I would still find an excuse if it was fabulous. Remember that whole expectation I had of being able to sit in my apartment and be productive in the evenings because I have no car and I really wouldn't have a life here? Yeah that didn't happen. We find ways to entertain ourselves every single day. If we aren't doing anything right when we get off work, I desperately take those few hours to recharge my batteries. There's always someone (normally Meghan) who is willing to cook, we tend to find ourselves wandering down Bin Khaldun or some other random street in Hawally. We've really had some great networking opportunities the past few weeks. To sum it up, here are a few of the things that have been going on:

1. Canadian Thanksgiving (yes...it's been that long since I've posted)
2. Rugby Ball
3. Desert camping/paintballing on the Saudi Border
4. Bahrain
5. Up next - Sri Lanka!

I would love to break this post up into a few different posts and go into major detail of all of my different adventures, but I have a feeling I'd never get through all of them if I do that. I'm still really enjoying it here. I miss Dallas like crazy, but its definitely a fair trade-off.

School's still completely amazing. I really wish we started later than 7:30am, but the 2:30pm finish is a good compromise. Andrea, one of my floor mates who has turned out to be one of my closer friends has gotten me to start walking to school, which is about 2 miles. In order to get there before 6:30, we leave around 5:45, so it makes for an early morning! Very rarely do I get to go to sleep before 11pm. By the time the weekend hits, im completely exhausted, but we just have so much planned that I have to push through and keep going! You can sleep when you die, right? My grandpa Wagner used to tell me that. It's become a very common phrase here in Kuwait for us fellow adventurists!

The students are still great! They do everything I ask and are still serious abou their grades. I can't say the same about my one class of seniors. They've already starting checking out. Today was the last day before the holiday not one of them showed up for my class. I was so confused and went and told my principal. She wasn't even phased by it...so I didn't worry. Some of us are really starting to think about staying next year. After we get back from the Eid holiday, we'll be halfway done with November. They offer contracts in January. December is packed with several weekend get-aways, so we pretty much have to really start thinking about it! Kristina and I have pretty much made a pact that we are staying here.  We just have to decide if it's going to be for 1 or 2 years. The traveling is such a major perk. I'm going to really expand my list of countries seen while I'm here. Before the end of February, I'll have Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and possible Lebanon, Petra, and Oman. That's so crazy!! I love it!

Alright...so for the adventure updates...

Canadian Thanksgiving:
This was definitely an experience! There are so many Canadians here so we all had a huge potluck dinner for Thanksgiving. There were about 30 of us so Ali had the brilliant idea of setting up cushions and tablers in the hallway. It was a little bit of a mess for serving food, but once we all got situated, it was such an awesome idea! We sat and ate and really got to enjoy everyones company. These people are my Kuwait family and its times like these that make the greatest memories. Every Thanksgiving, I'm sure we will all think back to that day where we all hardly knew each other and came together for a nice meal...kind of like the Pilgrams and Indians! :)

That's a great looking group of people! :) We are doing an American Thanksgiving on the Friday after Thanksgiving and my Uncle David is going to fry a couple of Turkeys and get us a ham! We're pretty excited about that.

Rugby Ball:

I was a bit hesitant to participate in this one, but you know me. I'm addicted to social interaction so I couldn't say no. It was 25KD (almost $100) for the ticket, and we also kind of went all-out on it. We got pedis, our hair done, bought new accessories and shoes. It was a lot of hard work preparing for it! I am the least girly-girl ever so this was a lot of energy for me. It was fun getting all dressed up. We went with some firefighters from America. They live about 5 minutes from the Hilton where the ball was held, so we all went there and played xbox Kinect before. It was definitely worth all of the planning. It was one of the best nights in Kuwait so far!

This is all the girls before we left for the ball!

Desert Camping/Paintballing:

This was so much more fun than I ever imagined! A lot of my close group here didnt go. They aren't really campers. Kristina and I went and we are so happy we did! I was originally not going to paintball because they ran out of guns, but I ended up sharing with two guys we met, Olly and Chris. Chris is a former Marine and now trains Kuwaitis to fly helicopters, and Olly is from England and is a financial advisor here. It was at an old satelite post/communications post on the border of Saudi. It was bombed or something during the war and is now the perfect paintballing site. The buildings are all cement and have wires and metal rods hanging out everywhere. There are holes in the floor so if you're not careful where you're running, you could fall all the way down. The erosion of the sand has built up so much that you can climb up it and get on the roof of one of the buildings. We tried to catch the sunset, but we were literally  seconds too late. After the sun went down, we all cooked and the DJ set up a dance floor with lights. The built a fire and fireworks were set off. It was such a blast. Who would have thought things like this went on in Kuwait! I'm so ignorant to so many things in this world and I'm so blessed to get these opportunities! I tried sheep's heart and tossed a football around in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of Canadians.

This is the group before we left the apartments to head to the border.

This was actually taken during the day before the sun went down. We are all new teachers in this picture!

Chris is suiting me ups for the red team! Super excited.

We got a little anxious and set up the shade cover in the hallway. :)

Bahrain: 

I'm not sure if I'm ranking this one as the best overall because it actually was, or if its just the freshest on my mind, but either way, I've never had such a great time in my life! I have a feeling I'll be saying that a lot. First of all, it was nice to sit down at a table with my new friends and enjoy a real adult beverage. I haven't had one of those since I had a glass of wine with the person sitting next to me on the plane coming into Kuwait for the first time. I got to sit and watch sports and listen to some random Phillipino band that was actually quite nice! We met one of the most fun groups of people I've ever spent time with as well! We went to the "Castaway"...which is really the Causeway, but I liked Castaway better. Its a huge elevated sandbar bridge thing that connects Bahrain and Saudi. It was really just something that we all wanted to say we've seen. Other than that it wasn't too exciting. We went to a mall and then decided we really didn't feel like shopping. The last night we were there we ended up at a Texas bar....seriously, of all places? There were Indians (from India) dressed as cowboys. I couldn't get over it, but it was such a blast.

We can all thank Andrea for such an awesome weekend!

This is the group of girls who traveled to Bahrain for the weekend! What a fun time.

As always, I tried to upload several more pictures, but the internet wasn't having it. I can't wait to get to Sri Lanka tomorrow! We have a few things we really want to do. The rest of the time we are just going to get lost and find whatever we run into! I truly feel like I'm soaking up every second of life right now. I'm so blessed to get these opportunities. Before coming here, I took my time for granted. I never stopped to really embrace life. My routine was the same and I could guide myself anywhere I went with my eyes closed. Life was predictable and every corner was lit. When you're put in a situation where every experience is a new one and around every corner is a new experience, it really makes you stop and appreciate it. I am thankful every day for the newness of my life. It can get addicting. I'm afraid I'll never be satisfied with a repetitive rountine or a consistent life. I love being forced to embrace every minute of life. I'm not sure what made me decide to leave everything I knew to discover the life waiting for me here, but I'm glad I did.

As Master Oogway on Kung Fu Panda would say, "One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it."