Sri Lanka travels

Sri Lanka

We saw some amazing things, fabulous animals, ruins and enjoyed meeting some great folks along the way, both innkeepers and travelers alike.   The first place we stayed was at the extreme southern end of the island, and the hotel was right on the beach - we could walk out at dawn and watch the sun rise over the water, and head back out at sunset and see it set again over the water… don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that it was possible to do that from exactly the same spot.

It was really sobering to be in a place that the SE Asian Tsunami hit so hard.  And we were there on the 10th Anniversary of it.  While there were and are tons of videos on YouTube and on the news from the Tsunami, I couldn’t really bring myself to watch them way back when - it was all a bit too morbid for me in that most all of them showed many people swept to their death…. and even if I watched only the lead in, where they show people walking down to the retreating water’s edge, you knew that those same people were goners.   However, after we visited the town of Galle, and learned of the damage there to the train station/bus terminal etc, all of which still stand in the same spots, I had a point of reference that made me willing to watch.  Being able to see the water in connection to places that I’d walked, and buildings that I’d been in made it a more real and somehow less a matter of disaster voyeurism to me.   One of the videos I found was shot from the upper level of the bus terminal, and the force of the water and the level it reached is still not really possible to process as I watched.  It is remarkable to see that much has returned to the state it was prior to the Tsunami… awaiting the next one I guess, but hopefully with a more informed populace.  I suppose there will always be folks who want to wander down to see why the water is going away, but hopefully there will be more who are hauling ass in the other direction, away and up as fast as they can.

In the video below you may be able to hear me making mention of showing this to creationists - it would be great for when they talk about how impossible it is to imagine aquatic creatures ever making the transition to land.... and I'm not talking about the crabs or shellfish here either... they're a bit hard to see, but look closely, you'll see fish, or extremely fish-like creatures very happily parked out of the water on the rocks between waves.

Dambulla Cave Buddhas

Dambulla Caves reclining Buddha

Early advertisement for a Breast Augmentation clinic located in the Sigiriya complex.

Behold some of our most majestic animals....in a garbage dump.  That was dispiriting.

Couldn't get a measuring tape on him, but this had to have been at least a 2 foot wingspan on this bat.

Bats in repose.

Chameleon

Fun with filters at sunset.

Guesthouse snake.  He was not amused by me taking photos.  I stopped.

Morning light over the tea plantations.

A really, really nice home away from home.

The view from the porch of home away from home.

This guy apparently shows up along this road around the same spot around the same time every day, given the vendor who was there selling corn on the cob for people to feed to him.  Not sure who trained who to be there, but this is right by the roadside.  Note the elephant electric fence in the lower right of the photo.

One of our regular canine escorts, dogs that live at the Imagine Guesthouse would jump up whenever they saw us heading for the beach to join in on our walks.  It was good fun having them along.  The beach at the hotel wasn't particularly great for swimming, but was incredibly peaceful and, as yet, mostly undeveloped, though probably not for long.

This guy was wandering across the lawn at the hotel.  Probably over a meter in the length total, and not at all the biggest one of this type of lizard that we saw on the trip, but one of the best photographs of any of them, so imagine this guy with a head the size of his belly, that was the next biggest one we saw, then imagine one with a head the size of the next belly up, and that's about the size of the biggest one we saw.

Sunrise

And sunset, from virtually the same spot as sunrise photo....

Beautiful Kingisher type bird.

Mostly un-restored Buddha from the Polonaruwa ruins complex.

Reclining Buddha

Seated Buddha near reclining Buddha above.

Yup, that's a real cobra, not sure if he's still got fangs, but I didn't want to check.

Too many feral dogs everywhere.

A super stupa in the Poloanaruwa ruins.

Sigiriya from afar.

The stairs to the top of Sigiriya/Lion Rock...the rest of the brick
 Lion is lost to the years and elements, but the feet were carved of stone so they survived.

The safari we went on was pretty dispiriting, it was like being stuck in traffic while you could watch the wilds around you being degraded as the muddy roads, and animal sightings caused the drivers to bash their own new roads through the brush.  Woudn't have gone if we'd had a clue what we were in for.

I know it's hard to imagine, but I stayed quiet.

Another view of Lion Rock paws and the start of the climb to the top.

Didn't see any, but didn't want to given the location.

A water monitor lizard, much bigger than the photo above.

Not the train mayhem you see in photos/video from India, but we were on some packed trains, and the nice ones are still pretty rustic.  The third class cars are usually packed.  It was fun to be able to stand in the open car door as the train lurched along the track, since I imagine that's a federal offense in the US at this point, I definitely took the opportunity whilst in Sri Lanka.

What a difference a year makes!

In November of 2013 I had a post crowing about how swell I did in a big, gnarly race up a giant mountain in the Taiwan KOM Challenge.   In the interest of fairness and accuracy, I feel it necessary to report on the 2014 edition of the race - I abandoned.  Let the excuses commence:  Though I’d had a great performance in a stage race in The Philippines a few weeks prior, my fitness fell apart immediately following that race.  So it was a triple whammy of that lack of fitness, the continuing lack of lung capacity from the cold that put the kibosh on said fitness, and the cold, heavy rain that lashed us from before the start.  While I actually had a very positive mental attitude on the start line, that quickly went to hell!  The air wasn’t too cold down at sea level, but the rain was cold and pouring down.  And as this race does nothing but climb into colder temps with elevation, it went from bad to worse.  This road up has a particularly demoralizing feature - a descent of a few kilometers in length and quite a few hundred meters of elevation, about 2/3 of the way up or so.   It’s a rather cruel twist after you’ve been working so hard to gain that elevation, you have to give some back.  And knowing how much colder I was going to get on the descent, and how badly I was shivering while still going up, I got off the bike and very fortunately into a van out of the rain a few kilometers before the descent.  Not how I’d planned for the day to go and definitely not one of my finer moments on a bike, but memorable to be sure.