East Coast Road Trip

I've just got back to Kandy after a 4-day road trip with Maria to the east coast as I managed to get Wednesday off, which meant that I had a 5-day break because of the Vesak holiday.

Unfortunately the trip didn't quite go according to plan as halfway to Batticaloa the passenger window wouldn't go back up and then the a/c started playing up, so we ended up wasting a lot of time waiting around for the car to be fixed. Sometimes I really wish I had a newer model car, but cars are so expensive here and I'm reluctant to spend so much money on a car - especially as I still haven't decided what I'm going to do at the end of the year.

In many ways Batticaloa is pretty much like any other Sri Lankan town, although the location on a series of lagoons is spectacular and gives the town a very languid feel. Culturally though, it's very different from a lot of places I've been to because of the large Tamil and Muslim population. Unfortunately, there's still a sizeable police and military presence and although the town itself seems fairly prosperous, there's still lots of evidence of the long conflict - particularly outside of Batticaloa. Everyone I spoke to has very little faith in the current goverment and a lot of people want to emigrate to other countries, which is very sad.

From Batticaloa we drove north along the coast to a place called Paskudah. I'd heard lots of good things about Paskudah, so Maria and I were disappointed to find that the beaches weren't that great and that it was very difficult to access a lot of the coast because of the military presence. Facilities are still very basic there as well and none of the guesthouses are actually on the beach, so we only ended up staying one night.

The original plan was to visit Dhanushka's family on the way back to Kandy, but I realised that it wasn't such a great idea to drag Maria along with me - so in the end we decided to spend a night at a more upmarket place in Habarana and come back to Kandy for Vesak. Maria wanted to visit Minneriya National Park to see elephants, but when we asked about renting a jeep for the trip we were told that there aren't any elephants in Minneriya at the moment because of the heavy rain recently.

We got back to Kandy late yesterday afternoon and in the evening went to see all the lanterns in the town. I actually thought there'd be a lot more lanterns this year, but there didn't seem to be any more than last year. It is amazing though to see all the lanterns outside of people's homes.

Back to work tomorrow...