Sri Lanka: Part 3

Day 5:

On our last full day in Sri Lanka, we finally had the time to sleep in and have a slower morning. We had a good sleep but were up early enough to have breakfast and a coffee. We had breakfast included with the hotel, but we left after eating and packing up to find a nice coffee at one of the cafes in town. We found a popular spot down the road where we were able to enjoy our first flat whites since leaving Australia. They really hit the spot after the progressively worse pots of black coffee we had up to this point.

When we made it back to the hotel, we got our bags and checked out, and Shan was there to pick us up. It was raining harder this morning than the night before, so there was no morning swim, and we quickly made it out of Unawatuna to our first stop on the trip back to Colombo. This stop was Galle Fort and was only thirty minutes up the road from Unawatuna. It was an old Dutch then English fort used in the colonial era, and now had some shops, hotels and historical sights. Honestly, it wasn’t the most interesting thing to us, and with the rain, we mostly just drove through looking at the fort through the car windows. We stopped at one of the historical sites for about ten minutes where we walked up to where the canons used to be, and we had a good view out across the harbour. We did this during a break in the rain, but that didn’t last long, and we got back in the car to head up to our next stop.

We really hadn’t researched this part of the drive at all, so everything this day had been planned off Shan’s suggestions, which we discussed the day before. We drove the scenic route along the coast, watching the ocean pass by, and I was looking out for any waves that looked remotely surfable. I would have liked to stop every 2 kms for a swim/bodysurf, but we had come up with an itinerary that didn’t include stopping for a swim. The weather broke around midday, and this was very fortunate because our next stop was a boat ride through the mangroves. It was a basic fiberglass boat with an outboard motor and no cover, but the clouds provided shade while holding back from drenching us in rain.

The only photo where I could actually find the crocodile.

The trip into the mangroves left from a hotel and restaurant right on a large river. We took the boat across the river and under a low bridge that we had to duck to get under and we could see the small bats hiding in the cracks just centimeters from our faces. This was a bit too close for comfort and we preferred the larger bats up in the mangrove trees. We continued into the mangrove, and soon pulled into the trees on the right where the guide pointed out a ‘small’ crocodile hiding between the branches. We have no idea how he saw this thing, but it was about a two-meter crocodile and it was so well hidden that we couldn’t see anything until the boat was almost on top of it. I took a photo on my phone, and I cannot find the croc in the photo. We were learning that our guide had sharp eyes, and there were some even more impressive/impossible sightings to come.

We continued upstream stopping about every hundred meters to see something new. Most of these were water monitors that ranged from maybe fifty centimeters to two meters in length. They were very similar to the goannas that we are used to seeing out in the bush in Australia, other than the part where these ones swim. We also saw a couple of tree frogs hiding on the backs of the leaves of the mangrove trees. We’re not sure how the guide spotted these sitting on the backs of leaves completely hidden from view until we had passed the trees, but he did it a few times, proving it was more than just luck. He also spotted three more progressively smaller and more hidden crocodiles, the final being no more than a month old and maybe thirty to forty centimeters long.

This was another tour that we had not planned or known anything about when we entered Sri Lanka, but it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. We know these guides to take you to their friends, and I’m sure they will get some kind of commission for bringing the business, but we had no complaints. All the food and tours that he suggested were incredible, and he didn’t push too hard when we didn’t want to do something.

From here, we went up the road to get a local specialty for lunch, mud crab curry. We went into a nice hotel and restaurant with a huge courtyard that led out to the beach where they had more seating. It could probably seat two or three hundred people, and it was nearly entirely empty. We selected our crabs from the icy fish market stand at the front and took a seat to wait for our food. Shan had talked this up as the best food Sri Lanka has to offer, and while it was very good, it cost three times as much as anything else and wasn’t the best food we’d had in the last week.

The crabs came out in a bowl of the same yellow coconut curry as Millie had with prawns and fish the previous two nights, and we both agreed that the prawn curry in Ella had been the best. The crab legs were difficult to access this was not an easy meal to eat without making a mess. My first attempt with the cracking utensil ended with spraying crab and curry at Millie. She was upset that I had stained her shirt with curry until she went at a leg with the cracker less than a minute later and did the same thing. By the end of the meal, we were both covered in curry but well fed. When we did laundry about a week later, we learned that Millie had curry stains on another shirt as well, so this curry was just too good to contain within the limits of the table.

From lunch we drove inland back to the highway where we made a straight shot back to Colombo. We arrived in Colombo just after dark, and Shan made a last quick stop outside the lotus tower before dropping us off at our hotel. When we made it up to our room, it really hit how exhausted we were. We opted for a small meal from room service and spent the rest of the night repacking our bags to get ready for the trip to Maldives. We really enjoyed Sri Lanka. The food was great, the culture was interesting, and the national parks were beautiful with abundant wildlife, but we had hit a wall and were very much ready to slow it down on a small luxury island with no more car trips, itineraries or sites to see.

View of the Lotus Tower from our hotel room in Colombo