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.