Adventures in Sri Lanka Part 1 – Colombo to Galle

In this series of posts I will recount the various trials and tribulations that we encountered during our 20 days in Sri Lanka.

Day 1 – Colombo

Arriving in Colombo from Delhi was much more of a dramatic change than I was expecting. We hailed an Uber X to take us to our hotel in Colombo, which is quite a way from the airport. Our Uber vehicle was a Prius, as were the majority of the taxis at the airport. It would appear that Sri Lanka is where elderly Japanese Priuses go to die. It was early evening when we arrived, and the air was clear and warm, just right in fact. As the taxi entered the slip road to the super dual carriageway toll road, I thought to myself wow!, we will be able to relax here after the chaos of India. Turns out that traveling around Sri Lanka is not quite as straightforward as our first Uber trip into Colombo was… 

This first lesson that we learned is not to put too much faith in reviews of hotels and guest houses. Less than 10-20 reviews and you can’t really get an idea of whether the place is any good or not. People seem willing to blatantly make up stuff in the reviews in order to not offend, or perhaps the place is a shithole but the owner is really nice so you don’t want to say anything negative…

Our first night in Colombo we stayed in the grandiose-sounding (this will be a recurring theme!) Ocean View Apartments, which was located down an alleyway, up some rickety stairs. To be fair, you could actually see the ocean if you went out onto the small balcony, so can’t fault them for that. We had a 2 bedroom “suite”, with a kitchen and living room between the bedrooms. There was a fridge and a gas hob, connected to a huge propane cylinder sitting in the middle of the kitchen! Needless to say, we didn’t touch that. One of the bedrooms had no AC – it was broken, so that room was baking hot (the kids got the short straw on that room…). The AC unit was functioning in the other bedroom, but the unit was located right above the bed and was venting cold air directly onto us as we lay there under a thin sheet (all there was). In the middle of the night we were both frozen, so I tried to turn off the AC, but could not find the remote, and there was no off switch on the unit. After quite a few minutes of futile hunting in the dark for the remote, I decided the only solution was to switch off the breaker, but I could only find the main breaker, which shut off everything, including the fridge (and we had milk for breakfast in there), and the wall outlets where our various devices were charging. So, I had to give up on that plan and we just had to snuggle together to keep warm until morning.

DAY 2 – GALLE

We were up early in the morning (not much sleep was had), and the next fun and games was that we had to eat our cereal in shifts – there were only 2 bowls, and even better, Sophie & I had to drink our tea in shifts – there was only 1 teacup!

After breakfast we did not feel like chillin’ out there, so we packed and left to catch a bus to Galle, out next port of call. Uber came to the rescue and whisked us away in air-conditioned comfort to the bus station just on the outskirts of Colombo, near the motorway. We found our way onto a nice AC bus, but unfortunately, the only free seats were right at the back, so that’s where we sat. Eventually, all the other single seats were taken, and the only seat left was next to me. Then this little guy appears and takes the seat. He smelled like he had been on an all-night bender. Jackpot! The bus starts it’s 2 hour journey and before long we are on the motorway, bombing along at a good clip. The guy next to me puts his head on his rucksack in his lap, and promptly falls asleep. It was not long before his head began to wobble, and then the battle began, pretty much to the end of the trip, between me and the guy sitting on the far side of the drunk. It went like this: drunk falls into my lap – I push him to the other side – he falls into the other guy’s lap – other guy pushes him back to my side, and so on, like a game of ping-pong for the next 2 hours. At one point, I just moved right over, and his head almost hit the floor of the bus before he jerked awake, only to fall asleep again the next minute. Sophie and the kids found this all terribly amusing of course. Needless to say, for me this was a very LONG 2-hr bus ride.

Not too soon for my liking, the bus arrives at Galle bus station, located just outside the old walls of the fort. Our guest house was, according to Google Maps, a mere 950 m from where we stood, so we decided to walk there instead of getting two tuk-tuks (too much baggage to get all 4 of us plus our bags into one). How bad could it be? We had decided long ago that we didn’t want rucksacks for the trip, so we are traveling with conventional suitcases on wheels. Mine is an old Samsonite fabric bag with two large wheels, whose outer rubber “tires” have long since disappeared, leaving only small, hard plastic wheels that make a bit of a racket if you are going over cobbled streets, or cracks. We get about half way to the guest house and we are inside the fort walls, with lots of tourists everywhere, and also lots of locals. It’s afternoon and the hot sun is getting to us by now. Then we get to a bit of cobbled street, where no vehicles are allowed, and I thought to myself, how civilized, a pedestrian street! and we proceed to roll our cases down it. Lots of people are crowded around the entrance to a building on our right. “Must be a cricket match on”, I think to myself. We carry on walking. My case is making a huge din over the cobblestones of the old fort. People are staring at us now, and not in a friendly way. Then a cop stops me and says “The court is in session, must be silent!” I then understood what all the people were watching – some important verdict was being read out in the courtroom, which had no doors and evidently no AC, since all the windows were wide open too. Sophie and the kids had carried on walking and are out of the cobbled bit now. The cop then motions to me to carry my case all the way to the end of the street, which was not all that far, but by this time, after the bus ride and the heat, I had had enough. I flatly refused to carry my case, and instead, just slowed my pace down to a crawl. The cop just looked at me with an expression that said “You ignorant tourist scum!”. I didn’t give a rat’s ass. Just kept on walking. Not long afterwards, we found our guest house,  the Inn 64, with some relief. Needless to say, on the return journey we took two tuk-tuks like normal tourists 🙂

Galle is a nice quiet place, but its charm is somewhat spoiled by the hordes of tourists everywhere. But I can see why they come by the busload – lots of relatively quiet streets to wander around, as well as the walls of the fort, still largely intact, that you can walk around with lovely views of the sea in most directions. Even the street hawkers are fairly docile, apart from the lady near the lighthouse that sells cotton bracelets that we had to buy in order to get rid of her. After lunch, we went for a dip in the Indian ocean – a first for Sophie and the kids. The water was like a bath!

In the evening, we went for the classic stroll along the walls, along with the million other tourists. But the walls are big enough that you don’t feel too claustrophobic. We jealously eyed groups of young backpacker types along the walls who had managed to find a beer store and bring a few cold ones to drink while watching the sunset. The walled-in part of Galle is mainly Muslim, so the drinking of alcohol is not encouraged, to say the least. Many restaurants have signs: No pork, No beef, No beer. I was tempted to add another line: No fun.

Our night at the Inn 64 was comfortable, we had the luxury of a separate room with bunk beds for the kids. The owner was extremely friendly and helpful. He asked us where we were from, and Sophie replied. He then said “Ah, Canada! Our neighbor was Canadian. He died a few days ago.”, to which she replied “Ummm…” That day I had started to play a game with the kids, where each time we were asked “Where from?”, we would have to say a different country, without being to blatant. Sophie, however, did not want to play because she wanted to get the story of the Canadian who died, which she did get a few more times that day.

I wish I could say that we slept well though, but there always seems to be some damn thing preventing it. This time it was…. monkeys on the roof! Yes, at god only knows what time in the morning, a bunch of monkeys decided to have a party on our roof, which was a single layer of corrugated material, so we could hear every bloody step they took. They had half-time around 4 am, and then started up again a short while later. Then, just before sunrise, we had the muezzin over the loudspeaker, calling the faithful to prayer. We had sort of gotten used to this ritual by now from our time in Qatar and India, but this time it was most unwelcome (but quite melodic at the same time).

Well, I had better end this post here. Check back soon for more Adventures in Sri Lanka!