Day 11 Monday

Day 11 Monday

Our last day and I have decided to fritter it away by the pool. One is freeform and has a shallow end and is lovely and warm according to other guests. We can see this one from our room.

The view from our room

The other pool is larger, rectangular and deep all the way round but it is surrounded by lush lawns and gardens, a cafe and the beach.

The view from the big pool

All the luxury details like  sunbeds with mattresses and towels, huge parasols, waiters gliding by offering drinks, snacks ( with chilli in them I expect). White egrets were drinking at the pool in the morning and monitor lizards came by to drink in the afternoon. I wandered on to the beach and it was just the most beautiful sight, just like a picture postcard. There were so many different corals and shells and the sea is a lovely shade of blue green.

The beach in front of the hotel. Me paddling in the warm Indian Ocean

The corals

At lunchtime Ronnie returned from his trip. He had left at 5.15 am for a whale watching excursion. He saw about 20 blue whales, dolphins and other species and luckily he managed to get an iconic photo of the whale's tail fin disappearing into the waves. 

In no time at all it was dinner time. We have been very lucky with our fellow travellers. We are all in roughly in the same age band and keen on travel. No one was late or forgot to turn up or lost anything. Everyone was good company and it was a pleasure to share a large table in the evening to chat about the day's events but tonight was another early night as our luggage had to be outside our room by 6.45am 😱

Day 10 Sunday

We had a very interesting 3 part excursion today,  Firstly a boat ride along the Madu River then a visit to a cinnamon growing island and finally a visit to a turtle hatchery. We boarded the boat after we had put on our life jackets. It was scorchio again today so it was nice to have a nylon covered life jacket sticking to our backs.

 The breeze was lovely as we sped along. We saw lots of birds, jellyfish, water monitors which looked like land monitors to me but the difference is that you can eat land monitors but water monitors are deadly poisonous. My advice would be, don’t eat either. We also saw some purple faced monkeys. Actually their faces are grey/black but when they were first spotted, stuffed and sent back to the England for identifying and categorising the poor things’ faces had turned purple.   Our boat driver said he liked English people but he didn’t like “China people” because they drink from plastic bottles and then throw them into the river.  I must say the Sri Lankan’s are very recycling conscious eg the toilet paper is made from waste wheat husks.
We got off the boat at an island and walked up through the jungle a little way to a clearing where we were given a demonstration of how cinnamon is collected. The cinnamon tree grows new lumps of stems from the roots every year. The stems are cut down, and the top layer of bark is stripped off. The  stem is then rubbed with a brass rod to heat the next layer of bark which is green. This makes it easier to remove. It curls naturally and is rolled inside the outer bark again and hung up to dry 

The leaves of the tree are boiled up to extract cinnamon oil which costs more than gold!  The bark is 

used in cooking and the oil for massage.

Back on the boat for a ride through the mangroves and photo opportunities

The mangrove swamps

Hot but happy

This area of the river is actually a semi lagoon linking the river with the Indian Ocean and is a

mixture of salt and fresh waters
On the way back we passed a 200 year old Hindu temple built on a tiny island. Not very convenient on a Sunday morning in your best clothes

Little temple

And a sail up juice bar!

 Back on dry land and off again to the turtle hatchery. It is run by a man who lost everything in the Tsunami. But in spite of the devastation of his own life, he realised that the area’s wildlife also needed also needed rebuilding and protecting.  There are 5 species of turtles in Sri Lanka, the 

loggerhead, the flatback, the Olive Ridley and I forget the other 2. Anyway turtles lay 110 to120 eggs in nests in the sand. Now here’s a interesting thing - the temperature of the sand affects the sex of the hatchlings. The warmer the sand, the more females are produced the cooler tbe sand the more males. Approximately 60% of the hatchlings are female. In nature a large number of eggs are eaten by predators. In fact only 2 to 5%. Make it to the sea, hence the need for conservation.  At the hatchery local fishermen bring in the eggs when they spot a female laying. The eggs are buried In sand in a fenced off area, labelled with the species

 When the eggs hatch, they follow a beam of light into a tank of water. Most are released into  the ocean the same night but some are kept for research and breeding. These are kept in tanks about 4 feet square and there are hundreds in each tank some one day old, some 2 days old in the next tank and 3 days old in the third tank. I don’t know what happens to them after that. But what upset me was the 3 albino turtles who were about 2feet long so a few years old. They too were kept in square tanks with no enrichment to stimulate them.  They could not be released into the wild as they would not survive. They would either be killed or suffer from the bright sunlight.   Bearing in mind a turtle can live for 100 years, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be better for them to be released and have a normal life

 however short that may be. They swam up to the side, poked their faces out of the water with their sad little eyes as if to say “Please get me out of here”

A face only a mother could love 

   Back  to the hotel to cool off in the gorgeous pool but we first stopped off at a Tsunami memorial. It was really just a 2 roomedshack at the side of the road set up by volunteers. It housed very moving photos and verbatim accounts of the Tsunami. 

What happened was, there was a small earthquake on a small island off Indonesia. This caused the tectonic plates to move by 500cms whichin turn caused a tidal wave at 9.20am. The water flooded the beach and a few buildings before receding. The people, having no experience of a tsunami thought it was over and went out to collect stranded fish but the wave retuned 30 minutes later at 9.50am with unheard of ferocity and  speed. It was 30 feet high and travelling so fast that no one could out run it, especially the children which made up a third of the death toll. It was very sobering to read the statements of the survivors but one has to admire the resilience of these people  who have  rebuilt their lives with such stoicism and still manages to smile so much 

A few hundred metres down the road we passed a statue to Buddha which had been erected to honour the dead. It is pure white, beautiful and 30 metres high, the same as the tsunami wave. Buddha’s hand is palm facing forward, the pose of reassurance. 

Day 9 Saturday

Today we journeyed on to Galle. Still on the south coast but a big town with afortdating from the Dutch colonial times. Need I say it was mad hot again today?this area was badly affected by the tsunami of 2004. At our last stop in Yala, our hotel had been flooded only even though it was on the edge of the beach. That’s because they kept the dunes in tact. In other hotels that had bulldozed the dunes to give the guests a better sea view. They were badly damaged and lives were lost.
The drive into Galle was very interesting. Fishing of corse is very important to the economy and fish is a staple food. The fish are still caught by traditional means with nets or lines and we did see the iconic stilt fishermansadly as it was weekend no one was was really fishing but a few old men with dentistry problems were happy to get on to the stilts and pose - for a fee of course.

Smile please. No on second thoughts don’t. 

The philosophy behind this type of fishing is that as they fish with a line just in the ocean so by drilling a hole in the coral and putting in a pole with a crossbar and perching, tbey avoid getting their legs lashed by the waves. 

On to the Fort which was built in 1640 by the Portuguese but ceded to the Dutch 40 yers later. They enlarged it and styled it like an existing military centre in Holland. I stopped listening after that. It had an old gate

which reminded me of those in the walls of the old city in Jerusalem and  ramparts encircling it and overlooking the ocean. At the far end was a very nice lighthouse

but that was about the extent of it being a fort. A large white colonial style building which had once been a hospital in Dutch times was now a parade of restaurants and bars (and yes we did have a Lion beer as it was absolutely frying hot). However, non of the restaurant or bars had a toilet.  You had to go to the municipal toilets at the end of the block and pay 30 rupees, about 18p but if you had bought a drink or food you could ask the bar owner for a token to get in free. So I did. I duly presented my token, completed my business and on

the way out was told now I must take the token back to the bar. Like I said, it was frying! 

So I gave my token to some bemused French girls. The rest of the town consisted of 

cobbled streets with touristy shops

apart from a museum which  had a couple of recreated rooms and a well dated 1763

 We didn’t see anything of Galle itself  except en passant  but it looked a big bustling town. What I did notice was a complete absence of McDonalds in any town, though Costa is everywhere.