Nothin' at all to do with China or Sri Lanka

It was Daffid's birthday - a nice quiet conservative Welshman, who was about to have his world rocked by Kerry.

Coming Up: 

a lovely high-brow post about the ancient sites and beautiful Buddhas of Sri Lanka.

I'll just pull myself together first....

Karen

Off I Flew

I booked a plane ticket and one night at a hotel and got through the final days and nights until the holiday - unusual for me, I did no background reading or planning.  I travelled light - only a tiny carry-on bag;  I landed in the evening at Colombo airport and paid a driver to get me to the small town on the southern coast, to my hotel.  This is what I woke up to in the morning:

                                           ....these 2 bay ends with lots of just plain waves and sand in between....

Sri Lanka – OMG – I landed on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world and spent a good deal of time frolicking in the buffeting waves.  The sand!  Oh, the heat and the sun!

That's me in green, above, and that is my toe, below

The biggies come in mornings to be fed, but catching the teensie ones scampering from their eggs to the sea was amazing good luck! 

On Day 2I was wandering around the old Dutch fort (a walled town) in the city of Galle when got caught up in the madness that was Kerry and James, two happy lads from Ireland.  And I mean very happy – carefree-like, in a Pricilla Queen of the Desert kind of a way. (I leave you to make up the title on this:)

Here they are signing YMCA outside the Young Men's Buddhist Association – locals not quite sure what to make of it. 

We did not realize until later that it was YMBA - personally, I would have loved to see them try to contort themselves into a B.... They made me laugh constantly: Their outfits were changed frequently;   in a brief, snippy mood Kerry sneered at me – “And you’ve worn that dress 3 times!!”  Also in their thrall were Julia and Daffidd, from Wales (he was husband #3, but now they are just happy divorcees who do a bit of travelling together) and the brother and sister team of Eugene and Tony (hard-cores, late 60s,  who sucked roll-yr-own cigarellos as the whiled away hours in the local public houses of Asia).   Kerry, James, Julia and I became 2 Poufs and 2 Post-Menapausal Woman as we shopped and generally hung around together.  You can see that James and I were the quieter of the quartet:

Day 3 we wanted to go to another beach - Marissa - where the famous stilt fishermen hung out on poles. James was the least keen of us and throught the morning I had been the voice of reason to him, as he  kept threatening  to jump onto trains going opposite us.... Older and wiser Karen:  “No, James, no one except actors in movies jump from trains!”  But when he disembarked at a stop Kerry and I looked at each other,  faces aghast.  The train began to lumber forard.  “What do we do?!”  squeaked Kerry, as he watched his fiancé walking off the platform.  “Jump!” I shouted.  Now, I am not quite sure why I thought it was so important to us keep up with James, or me to keep up with the lads – really, I was a woman travelling alone, and I could very easily have resumed my solitude for that jaunt.  But no, madness overcame me.  As three railway men tended my wounds, with James hissing, “why would you DO that?!” Kerry and I fell into hysterical nervous fits of laughter.  The rubbing alcohol on my scrapes brought me up short only temporarily. I was actually so damn pleased not to have re-injured my thumb and wrist that anything else was a relief...Once we got back to our little town of HIkaduwa, we heard from locals that not only were the stilt fishermen NOT in Marissa but that they now did not really fish at all, but instead sat on their poles asking for money to pose for pictures – with fake fish glued onto their poles!  Ha! 

 There were many tears when the boys left and their departure forced me to reluctantl pull away from the beach to go to around the ancient sites. I knew that Hikaduwa was just not going to be the same without them.

Lots more later....K