I dislike mosquitoes intensely. On one memorable night I awoke and counted 12 bites on my left hand, the rest of my body had a similar bite population density. My body does not cope well with bites and decides the best thing to do is swell up into massive itchy welts, giving me the resulting visual appearance of someone suffering from a rare strain of leprosy and polio. It may stop people approaching me so often on the street however; every cloud... One enterprising little biting-bastard thought he would break the mould and decided to bite me in the eyeball (actually the eyelid if you're wondering, I said eyeball for comic effect); my eye felt a tad strange so I went to have a look in the mirror and was presented with a ginger-haired Rocky-Balboa after his champion bout.  What's that you say? What about mozzie repellent and mosquito nets and all that malarky? Well if I was an X-man (a rather crap one) my power would be being 100% resilient to all forms of bug repellent. The best strategy I have found is sleeping in trousers, tucked into socks, with a shirt buttoned all the way up to the collar and also buttoned at the sleeves, then dipping my head in a concoction of repellent. I only sustained bites to my hands and face when I did this, which was a vast improvement. Tonight there will be an extra pair of socks on my hands and perhaps a pillow case for the head. Of course air-con is vital for this plan to work, otherwise I risk drowning in sweat. 

Right, blog; Heather left us off at Galle, and this, my loyal three readers, is where I will continue from.

We packed our bags and said cheerio to the nice family hosting us at their Galle guest house, they remarked  on our light packing, on hindsight I think I would have packed even lighter and forgone the clothes. We were originally going to get on a bus to our next destination, Dalawela but on discovering it was only 7km away we got a tuk-tuk, which are surprisingly comfortable to travel in due to the nice breeze that is created. Old hats now at checking into guest houses we entered our room, no A/C but amazing view of the beach, a beach which we then set off to swim at.  Although a scattering of westerners existed on this beach it was relatively un-touristy, and a few locals seemed to be swimming also in the natural swimming pool created by the reefs. We shunned this natural swimming pool and decided we wanted waves and so set of further down the beach. A spittoon of rocks which seemed to effectively dissuade most tourists from going further divided populated beach from unpopulated beach. The waves here were impressive and very close in to the shore. Some locals were waving at us, I signed to them whether or not it was ok to swim here, and they replied in english, "try further down". We found an idyllic spot all to ourselves and went into the sea. Lovely, we amused ourselves in the waves. Upon getting out a local friendly man came running up to us and told us that is was very dangerous where we were swimming and that his brother had been attacked by  big fish in that spot. I think by "big fish" he meant sea monster; we are such rebels.

Palm tree avec twat.

Later that evening we had dinner at the guest-house we were staying at. Fresh caught lobster no less. The evening was ruined slightly though by some prat deciding that everyone eating would like to be bathed in his music collection from his laptop he had kindly bought to dinner. Afterwards we had a nice evening stroll along the beach, admiring the fishermen-less stick-fisher sticks stuck all along the coast.

We only stayed one night in Dalawela and the next morning we headed off towards Mirissa, a slightly more famous, more popular south coast beach. This time we traveled both by tuk-tuk and bus, the latter was surprisingly bareable; I had images of people crammed in and hanging off the roof but we got a seat and the breeze through the windows made everything pleasant. We arrived at Mirissa about an hour later. We had to get another tuk-tuk to the place we were staying as the map was lieing again - once we were there we saw we had a cabana (a wooden hut) down a little path from the beach. It looked lovely from the outside, unfortunately on the inside it looked a bit unfinished and grubby, with a large gap around the top to the outside where the conicular roof sat on rafters; this did not bode well for mosquitoes and that first night the bite record was set and the mozzie-suit invented.  Our main reason for visiting Mirissa was not really the beach however, but for whale watching, and February is a good time to catch the pod of blue whales migrating. We had our session booked for the following day at 1pm and spent the rest of the day on the beach swimming and reading.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrawr!

All the beach-side eateries offered western food and more often than not you had to ask if you wanted something local. The pace of life here was slow, and it was common to wait up to an hour for your food to come.

The next morning we set out to Mirissa Watersports, the company who we would be seeing whales with. I informed Heather we should take a right and walk to the main road where we take a left, we did this and then caught a tuk-tuk which promptly did a u-turn and headed back the way we came and about 200m past the point we started to our destination. Unsurprisingly Mirissa Watersports was full of tourists all wanting to spot a whale, we took our seats and waited our turn.

Once our boat was ready ( a converted fishing boat with comfortable seating for about 15 folk) we got on board and headed off out to sea. All the small fishing boats here are painted bright funky colours making the harbours really pretty, I think it only works in sunshine though. Heather and I had only had breakfast thinking we would get a late lunch so we were both feeling a little sea-sick with only water in our stomachs. An hour and half of motoring out looking out for whales became tiring, I spotted a couple of flying fish but was starting to think that we might not see any whales. I lay down and fell asleep ...

"Whale is come!  Whale is come!" shouted the man prodding me out of my slumber - I got up, remembered where I was and went to the front of the boat. In the distance I could see a small jet of water spray up from the surface. As we got closer we saw the back of a blue whale arching out of the water like a massive upturned black bathtub. "Diving! Diving! Tail! Tail!" shouted the guide, and the bathtub arched and submerged, sprouting a massive tail which crashed into the water just like in the movies. Awesome. About 10-15minutes later there was more pointing and shouting and we chased down another spray of water. All in all we saw 4 whales I think, or maybe the same whale 4 times. It was now about 4.30pm and we were both very hungry and sick feeling. Finally the boat turned and we started to head back. The sea got quite choppy and the only way I found of avoiding throwing up was to lie flat on my back and fall asleep. Sploosh!  A wave came over the boat and landed on me waking me up, I was suddenly cold, a sensation I hadn't expected to feel for another 2 weeks or so, soon I was too cold and went to see where Heather was. After panicking slightly when I couldn't find her on the small boat, I realised she had managed to get herself invited into the cabin where she was snuggled up under a towel in one of the berths. It seemed to take ages to get back, we finally arrived at the harbour around 7:30pm, having left at 1pm. We were both hungry and a bit queezy. I also had burnt my knees, a good achievement I thought.  We got some food and went to bed pretty early that night.

The next day after a good breakfast of curd, pancakes and omlettes on the beach we prepared ourselves for a 3 hour bus drive to our next destination, Tissamaharama, or Tissa for short. Tissa is further east along the south coast but a bit more inland. The bus driver showed us that we could stash our bags under the seats to free up room to breath and sold us our tickets to Tissa. There was plenty of eye-candy outside to while away some time including stick fishermen (actually that was maybe on the last bus journey) and pretty shacks etc. 3 hours of semi sleep and one numb buttock later we pulled in to Tissa.

We hopped into a tuk-tuk and were joined by a friendly conman claiming to work at our guest house. He kindly ignored our attempts to get rid of him and joined us down the sandy track to Vikum Lodge. Upon arriving and confirming our guest did not work here we went to our room. Ahhhhhhhhh, air conditioning, and toilet that kind of flushes (I forgot to mention that in the cabana the toilet didn't enjoy flushing). We settled in. Tissa is close to a national park called Bundala which we planned to visit in the morning. We knew (Heather knew) that we needed to hire a jeep and a driver in order to get into the park; we thought we would walk into town to make some enquiries. When we left the room we were delighted to find our little friendly conman still waiting for us trying to get us to take his jeep, informing us that another English boy from another hotel (in the tuk-tuk on the way over the English boy was staying at our hotel) was wanting to come as well so it would all be cheaper. We finally managed to shake him off by taking his phone number. Heather informs me that it is considered extremely rude to lose face here, and I have never seen anyone getting angry and have never felt at danger, I just find myself getting annoyed a lot as a fair few people will lie through their teeth to try and get something out of you.

There are lots of stray dogs here, there were lots in Mirissa too on the beach, but the ones here seem to be a bit more hostile, it definitely makes you feel on edge passing packs of dogs lying in the road. After an hour of looking around for jeeps and getting some prices we headed back to the guest house to ask the receptionist as he had a good grasp of English and seemed pretty trustworthy. It is very hot here, I think it is the hottest place we have been so far.

Once we had our national park tour booked for 5:30 the next morning (wooo) we chilled a bit, grabbed some food at  fancy looking hotel nearby and got an early night.

The alarm awoke us and we picked up our packed breakfasts and headed out to the jeep and driver waiting on us. The journey to the park was fun. We were sitting in the back an open topped jeep driving through the cool night. The sun was rising when we arrived at the park, we picked up a mandatory paid guide before driving through Jurrasic-Park-esque gates which marked the entrance. Bundala National Park is famous mainly for its bird life although there are  few elephants wondering around also so we hoped to spy one. We rolled back the canvas cover on top of the jeep and stood up for the full 360 degree safari experience. Weird and wonderful birds were in abundance alongside an awful lot of peacocks. I've seen plenty of peacocks before but I have never seen them perched in trees or flying around making noises like cats.  

We spotted a giant sea eagle soar past and then in the water a crocodile who obligingly crossed the road for us. Monkeys were also everywhere and got very excited at the sight of us and started leaping and bouncing around the trees manically, some of the older more wise monkeys just chilled and observed us.  

Still no elephant sitings but our driver spied recent droppings and we headed of the track to explore, unfortunately no elephants, but we spied some wild boar and a few land monitors and also a rare spotting of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Our guest house owner had made us packed breakfasts consisting, to Heather's delight, of cheese sandwiches; I ate both hers and mine and then felt a little sick for the drive back.  We are still determined to see some elephants in the wild so plan on visiting another national park further north where there are hundreds of them as oposed to the 10 or so in Bundala.

Back to Tissa and an afternoon of doing as little as possible, read a couple more chapters of my book (Dumbeldore and Harry have just entered the cave) and wallowed in the air conditioning.

Towards 5pm we walked down the dirt path from our guest house and attempted to hail a bus. We were off to Kataragama, a place held sacred by Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike. I first flagged down a school bus, which obligingly stopped but only so everyone on board could point and laugh at us before driving off tooting. The second bus ignored my feeble wave and drove straight past but the third bus stopped and let us on.  We were standing most the way holding on to the ceiling bars to prevent death. People sitting down on a crowded bus hold the stuff of people standing up which is nice.  About 30 minutes later we pulled into the dusty looking town of Kataragama and started hunting for the sacred land, basically a big park consisting of three main temples, one for each religion I mentioned previously.  To get to the park we walked through rows of stands selling arranged bowls of fruit, these were tempting but it soon transpired that these were offerings for the Buddhist temple. We crossed over a river with pilgrims bathing themselves (people come from far and wide to do this) and into a park. The park looked like a once lush European park hit by excessive global warming. We were ushered into the Muslim mosque and shown around kindly.  An enthusiastic man also showed us some photos that had been taken of him  in various yoga contortions by some previous tourists. It seemed he showed us them purely out of pride for them which was touching.  After the obligatory temple donation we headed off to the larger Buddhist part. We took off our sandals and entered the sandy expanse. This temple was primarily a shrine to Kataragama, symbolised by a trident. 

The temple was centered around the usual Bo tree surrounded by golden gating, which symolised the tree where Buddha became enlightened under. Around the tree was another small tree and some central buildings with monks a-wandering. The ground was all covered in sand and surrounded by tall walls supported by elephant statues and topped with models of peacocks (Kataragama had a penchance for peacocks and in days of yore they were regularly sacrificed to him).  In front of the central cluster of buildings were two flat stones on the ground with fencing around them. One had a sign of a spear and the other a trident. People would queue up in front of these stones holding a burning coconut, praying. They would then proceed to smash the coconut on the stone. If the coconut did not break then this was bad. It was entertaining to watch old women calmly prey and then suddenly go mental, smashing down the coconut with all their might.  Drums and bells were continuously sounding and there was a large crowd of people queuing up to donate their fruit.  We read that dancing was supposed to be happening later but we though we would try and grab something to eat and then come back.

Walking through the many stands selling everything from teddy bears to weird and wonderful food stuffs we stopped at a local sweet stand and bought some oil cake (a gelatinous brown coconut thing, which is tasty) and some ambiguous bright red stuff which looked like crispy fried beef from a British -Chinese takeaway, which we deduced was crystalised dried sugar. We spied a woman cooking hoppers (bowl shaped crispy pancakes) and wandered over to impose ourselves on her. She didn't speak a word of English but luckily a man and his family sitting down eating the hoppers spoke perfect english and invited us to join him. He lived in England for 7 years and we chatted about old computers and the whereabouts of the tea-plantation where Heather's Grandmother was born. After this friendly interlude we walked back to the Buddhist temple but things were dying down. We found the correct bus and climbed on board. An hour and a half of waiting later and the bus finally drove off for the half hour ride back. The bus went straight past the guest house and into the town itself, leaving us to navigate back in pitch darkness the 1.5km to bed. Luckily Heather, being her highly organised self, had bought a torch. A long day meant falling asleep was easy.

Wooof, that was a long blog, congratulations for reading this far. I forgive you if you only looked at the photos, that's what I would do.