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Lazy Monday afternoon got no time to worry, close my eyes and drift away”The sea is warm and the sand is soft, this is a much better place to be than… most places. Well at least for a few days until I get bored.

Mirissa is a sandy beach backed by the main road from Matara to Galle which is lined with accommodation of various grades. We are in the Peacock Wing, at the budget end of the scale. Our bed here is built of concrete, with a very comfortable mattress on top, so Is the bedside “table”. I suppose it ain’t gonna break! Our logic for staying here is that if we spend less on the room, we have more to spend on delicious consumables. The Jamaican Mule cocktail I drank last night was particularly good, with plenty of rum in it.

By the Peace Bar there is a natural swimming pool which is protected from the surf by a reef. It is lovely to wallow in, and Julie actually took a dip! I enjoyed a bit of body surfing further down the beach. Just beyond the Peace Bar is a stretch of very good surf where the serious surfers gather. Two lady surfers were being photographed by several camera operator on the beach and in the water. I think they were probably professional surfers modelling swim wear, they were very good at riding those waves!

We have decided to stay a couple more days in Mirissa, it’s the sort of place that you can easily while away a few days.

Sri Lanka is a lovely place, but it is spoiled by all the litter that lines the roads. Plastic bottles, bags, coconut husks, waste food, cans – all sort of small rubbish that gets tossed aside. It’s a great pity because there is so much natural beauty that is tainted by casual disregard. Another minus point is the lack of street lights and footpaths. Walking down the road at night you have to keep in to the edge of the road, watching for buses charging along at forty miles an hour, and making sure you don’t step in a drain. Local cyclists calmly go down the road at night without lights on their bikes, with tuk tuks overtaking them and big trucks coming the other way. It isn’t all tropical paradise here.

After breakfast we walked out of Mirissa down Udupila Road. The first quarter mile is lined with guest houses and small shops selling fruit, vegetables and fish. Then the paddy fields begin, vivid green and punctuated by white egrets hunting for morsels to eat. The fields and surrounding woodland are alive with life and noises. A big kingfisher sits on telephone wires, and isn’t the least perturbed by our noisy presence. In the distance monkeys feed in the trees, and peacocks call loudly across the paddy. A small thrush-sized bid hops on a branch, but it is bright yellow and black. In a dirty river a reptile several feet long swims slowly. I wasn’t sure if it was a small crocodile or a big monitor, but it turns out to be a turtle of some sort.

We returned to the beach, because it’s the main attraction here (apart from whale spotting). Watching people on the beach and playing in th surf is a very relaxing way to spend time. I have also been reading another sci fi book, the Medusa Chronicle by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds on the Kindle  app on my iPad. It’s not a great way to read on the beach because the bright sunlight makes it hard to read the screen. But it is very convenient, I have several books I can chose from.  I can also listen to podcasts that I download when I get good wifi. I forgot my headphones so have to listen with the iPad speaker next to my ear. It looks daft, but it works.

I went for a swim around some rock with my goggles on, but only saw a few striped fish, nothing very interesting. But I did eat a big steak of Sail Fish at lunch. The Sail Fish is the Ferrari of the oceans, it is almost a shame to eat it. But it had already been caught, and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.

There are plenty of dogs in Sri Lanka, and I haven’t seen anyone walking a dog o a lead. Most appear to be feral, but they are all friendly. I don’t know much about dogs, they mostly look like Homer Simpson’s dog, Santa’s Little Helper.

I have just been for another swim, some of the breakers are really big, it’s like bing tumbled around in a washing machine . Probably  30 degree delicates wash.

Last night was a hot one, the fan was whizzing around all night to move the warm air about. At 5.45 am the alarm on my phone went off to wake us up to got whale watching. Mirissa is close to the migration route of several whale species, so the whale watching tours are a big draw to the town.A tuk tuk delivered us to our boat, which we boarded at 6.10, we were the first on board. Gradually the boat filled up with other whale watchers on two levels, and set off at 7.20. The seats were a size more suited to children, and we all wore buoyancy aids. About a dozen other boats emerged from the harbour to travel out to close by the shipping lane to find cetaceans.

There was lots of excitement when we saw a group of small dolphins curving over the waves. A few times we saw a spout from the blow hole of a whale, and the whole armada of spotting boats charged in that direction. We briefly saw the back and fin of a whale (a Blue, according to a crew member), but no more than that. After a few hours at sea we returned to the harbour, disappointed but sanguine.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

We ate lunch at the cheap and cheerful Rotty Hut on Galle Road, and then went down to the lovely long curved beach. The weather was a bit overcast, but it wasn’t a problem. At the far end of the beach we found the Peace Bar, and settled in. The surf literally washes the front of the bar, and a hundred metres out to sea surfers test their skills on the waves. They have an excellent choice of old classic tunes (Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers) and chill out music. Sitting with a beer watching the surfers is a great way to relax. We got there at about 4pm and as I write at 7 I’m still here. There has been helluva thunderstorm, so we just had to stay and have more beers. Now it’s Happy Hour, and it would just be rude to go.

This is our only full day in Ella, and we weren’t sure what to do. There is a hike to the top of Ella Rock, the peak which is across Ella Gap from Little Adams Peak. Researching on travel blogs it says you have to walk several kilometres down the railway line from Ella station and then head cross country on an unmarked path. Everyone either took a guide or found a friendly farmer along the way to guide them. Then there was also a slight problem with leeches, yuk! So we decided to go up Little Adams Peak again, and hope that the air was clearer than yesterday giving us a better view.

The walk was just as beautiful as yesterday, and every visitor to Ella was on the way up or down. But it isn’t crowded like Sigirya, and what’s more it’s free! At the top the view was the same as yesterday, murky in the distance, but still the best view we have seen in Sri Lanka. 

On the way down we diverted slightly to a resort called 93 Acres. It’s is made of of bungalows on a ridge in a tea plantation, with great views of the hills. The cafe is very rustic chic, and the decking is made from recycled old bits of wood, it looks good but is quite uneven. We ordered ginger beer and iced ginger tea, and soaked in the luxury of the place. If you ever take the same walk, you must visit 93 Acres and mix with the rich folk. I know they are rich folk, because it has its own helipad.

Descending back into Ella we went Chill Cafe for lunch, which is a very cool place and very popular. It has lovely wooden furniture, and was packed with travellers drinking beer. Because I don’t want to get too fat, I’m saving my beer ration for tonight, and we had water with our very fine rice and curry. The veg curries are sooo good, and included snake gourd, beetroot and jack fruit.Jackfruit are big knobbly fruits that grow on short stalks out of the trunks of trees, each one must weigh several kilos. The curried flesh looks like a piece of tuna, but tastes vaguely like artichoke.

After lunch I bought some Lemon Puff biscuits for pudding, they are heavenly. We got tea at the guest house, read our books and scoffed biscuits, what more could you want?

Our sleep last night was disturbed by our son Tommy pocket-dialing us at 11.30, and then again at 5am. When I answered the phone, he couldn’t hear me. My sleep disturbed, but it was his phone bill that suffered!  We ate string hoppers, dhal, coconut chutney and an omelette for breakfast this morning, it was a very moving experience. 

The Richmond Inn was one of the better places we have stayed in, and the staff were friendly and helpful. But we had exhausted what there was to do in Nuwara Eliya, so it was time to hitch up th wagon again.There were no train tickets available to Ella today, so we took a bus . Our red Lanka Ashock Leyland bus was packed, but we got a seat together next to the open door. It was chilly because the town is at over 1800 metres, but we got a great view of the beautiful mountain countryside. The mountains are very high and steep, and the bus hangs onto the side, constantly going round bends and gradually losing altitude. Vegetables are the main crop here, and the hillsides are terraced to increase growing space. There are terraces of onions, red beet and stuff I don’t recognise. At every village passengers get on and off, and the conductor moves up and down the bus collecting fares.

The views were spectacular, and I think we got a better feel for real Sri Lanka than being on the train. I’m warming to the pop music played loudly and constantly though the journey. It was about 50p each for the first stage to Bandarawela, we we changed buses and went for a wee, phew. The next leg to Ella only took twenty minutes. I passed some of the journey listening to podcasts of BBC Radio 4 programmes. I’m a big Radio 4 fan, and very pleased that I can take it on holiday with me.

Arriving in Ella, Juli spotted a cafe advertising Lavazza coffee, so we headed straight in and ordered a flat white. The coffee cost more than a three hour bus trip from Nuwara Eliya, because we are daft Westerners with a taste for posh coffee. Ella looks like the type of tourist destination we are more used to in Thailand, Vietnamese and Indonesia, with more facilities for Western tastes. 

After checking in at the Ella Guest Inn we went for lunch in the village. We bumped into a couple we met yesterday. He was from Martock in Somerset and looked like Marlborough cowboy, tall with a big grey moustache, partner was an elegant lady from Bilbao in Spain. They are travelling round Sri Lanka in a hired tuk tuk, clearly fearless. I had kototu again with mango lassi, fabulous food. 
At information desk we met Bernard the taxi driver who offered to take us to Mirrrisa in 2 days time for 6,000 rupees. It’s a long way and five hours on a bus with no toilet, so a taxi is a better option.

Walking down the main drag we saw a sign for Little Adams Peak. The walk up the mountain was one of the highlights of our holiday, amazing views of the Ella Gap which is a pass between two mountains. At the top of the you can see for a very long long way over the plains to the south, a wonderful memorable view.

In the evening we had dinner at Cafe 360 on the Main Street. There is a great selection of places to eat here, and great contrast to Nuwara Eliya which has a very poor choice. I had Devilled Chicken, which is a sort of of  chicken stir fry with chillies and onions, really good. The power failed, plunging the town into darkness, but our place had a generator and the lights soon came back. We walked home carefully down dark streets, I will take my torch out with me tonight!

Every day on this holiday so far I have eaten two eggs for breakfast so that’s thirty two so far, I’ll start to cluck soon. We are promised a Sri Lankan breakfast tomorrow, so maybe string hoppers or roti. After breakfast we booked our next hotel in Ella. It’s always a pain in the arse to booking hotels. You find somewhere that looks good, then find out it’s miles out of town or that the place is noisy, or the showers don’t work. The reviews on hotels are always mixed, so if you are going for cheap hotels, it’s a stab in the dark. 

We took a walk up Single Tree Hill, which is right behind our hotel. It is a winding road up through tea plantations and has stunning views over the town, the race course and Gregory Lake. Nuwara Elisa is being transformed from a colonial hill station backwater, to a bigger scale resort. There are several tall multi story new hotels going up, so the character of the place is sure to change. All the old colonial buildings are single story with green corrugated iron roofs and chimneys, it can get cold here. The prettiest hotel  is the Ceyrest Hotel, a former Government Rest House. In colonial times these were accommation for civil servants, and were sixteen miles apart.

Half way up the hill we met two men pruning tea bushes with very sharp sickles, so we had a chat. Everyone here says hello, they are very friendly and want to know where you are from. Most haven’t heard of London, but do know England. At the top of the hill are a collection of Lanka Bell telecoms masts covered with microwave transmitters. 

Back in town we ate lunch in Restaurant Two, a  restaurant made from a converted container on the back of a big truck. We ate kotutu, a dish made of chopped up spicy roti with vegetables. To add a bit of protein we had Devilled Chicken, a sort of stir fry with chicken, onions, tomatoes and chillis. It was bloody lovely, especially since we washed it down with Lion Lager. 

After that I was ready for a kip in Victoria Park. I got very comfy reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari when the sun went in and it actually turned chilly! So we went to a cafe for over priced coffee and cake and I wrapped a sarong round me to keep warm. Jesse (from the Fast Show) says “this year I will mostly be wearing sarongs”.

This evening we didn’t go out because we were still full from our late lunch. So i sat in bed and watched old YouTube videos of Comic Relief while Julie found us somewhere to stay in Mirissa. I did get peckish so I ordered chips on room service and ate them in bed, pure luxury.

Breakfast at the Sunny Hills was a little different this morning, we got freshly made roti instead of the usual white toast. The food was great, but the elderly proprietor stood and watched us eat our breakfast. That meant we couldn’t fart and burp as usual and say what we really thought of his crappy guest house.
After much research we found that the train to Nuwara Elya left at 8.45, it takes four hours and (very importantly) it has toilets. So we went to the station and bought two unreserved, the reserved tickets having long sold out. There was a scramble among the many tourists when the train arrived, and all the seats were rapidly taken. Standing up for four hours is worse than even Southern Trains, so we wrote off the 350 rupees we spent on the train tickets and got a taxi. A sissy solution I know, but it was £40 very well spent.

Our driver was very good on the windy mountain roads as we wound up to the highest town in Sri Lanka. We stopped off at the Blue Fields tea factory, a ninety five year old corrugated iron building painted blue. Much of the equipment in original including a generator made by Ruston in Lincoln! A young lady gave us a tour and described the process of wilting, crushing and rolling, fermenting, drying and sieving the tea. Its is then sold at auctions in Colombo and gets blended to suit different tastes.

At the factory they make black tea (the sort we like) green tea (which is unfermented and less oxidised) and white tea. White tea is made from the best shoots and is used for medicinal purposes. At the end of the tour we were given a lovely cup of Orange Pekoe tea.

  

Nuwara Elya is an old British hill station where people colonials would come to escape the summer heat. It has a golf course, a race track and even a choice of pubs! My kinda town. We are staying at the Richmond hotel, which is much nicer looking than those we have stayed in so far. With a telly that gets BBC World News.

After settling in we walked in the lovely Victoria Park in the centre of the town, another colonial legacy still being enjoyed today.  The town has a more suburban feel than other Sri Lankan towns, and has is surrounded by mountains. The guide books says it feels like England, but that isn’t true.

We spent a very lazy morning by the pool today, our final day at the Amarantha Classic Resort. It isn’t very classic at all. The walls are like paper and I was woken this morning at 6.30 by the guy next door clearing his throat, lovely! So I read my current novel on the Kindle app on my phone. I’m reading The Long Cosmos by the late Terry Pritchett and Stephen Baxter. It’s the fifth book in the Long Earth series, a very entertaining science fiction novel. Having a phone is really handy, even if I don’t use it as a phone. I also listen to podcasts when I’m travelling. Lee Mack was being interviewed by Steve Wright (on th afternoon) and was very funny.

At about midday we packed up and got a tuk tuk to Dambulla town centre and jumped on the Kandy bus. That sounds like it ought to be pink and covered in licorice allsorts and wine gums, but it was just a regular Leyland Ashok Lanka bus. They bomb around everywhere at great speed and are very cheap, the bus journey to Kandy cost less than the tuk tuk ride into town! English bums are bigger than Sri Lankan bums, so the seats are a bit small.

Back in Kandy we went up to the Sunny Hills Residence, which is at the top of a big hill with wonderful views of the city. After unpacking we walked into town and ate in the food court of Kandy City Centre, which is a proper Western style shopping centre. 

We walked around a bit and found an actual pub, selling beer and cocktails, bloody marvellous.  It was full of tourists, the only locals were serving. Pub culture doesn’t exist at all here, and they are probably a lot healthier for it. Also no signs of rowing, skulling or skiffing.  I suppose the crocodiles put people off.

Last night we had dinner with two Danish ladies from Aarhus in the Amarantha restaurant. It has a small choice of mediocre food which is relatively expensive, but it is close!This morning our alarm went off at 6.15. Our noisy neighbours had gone, so we had got a good night sleep. Nihal picked us up at 7 to drive us to Polonnaruwa which was an hour and forty five minutes away. That’s a really long way in a tuk tuk. On the way he got pulled over by the police for overtaking on a double white line, he wasn’t happy.Polonnaruwa is a ruined city which was at its height in the twelfth century . It is a huge site that is too big to easily walk round, so tourists travel on bikes, buses or tuk tuks. There are remains of temples, a palace and library built mostly out of brick. Some of the other remains have been rebuilt, some remain ruinous. One temple had numbers painted on each stone, so it was completely re-erected And some of the stones clearly didn’t start off together.

When we emerged from one site to meet Nihal, he said that an elephant had tried to jump over a fence, and in doing so bashed it down and destroyed a table.

We spent about four hours looking around, there was lots to see. Some of the ruins are still sacred to Buddhists, so we had to take shoes and hats off to enter those. There were lots of monkeys around, sometimes it looked like a scene from The Jungle Book!

 On the way back the tuk tuk got a punctured rear wheel. Nihal got out his spare wheel and loosened the nuts. Then he asked a couple of blokes  walking down the road for help, and the pushed the vehicle over so he could take the punctured wheel off and put the spare on. The whole repair took five minutes.

Nihal dropped us off in Dambulla and we went to a local restaurant for curry and rice. It was very tasty, but very hot. I was almost a greasy puddle on the floor, but i amused the other diners. Two enormous meals and two mango juices cost 650 rupees, about £4. At our hotel a plate of seafood noodles costs 1000 rupees,  not such good value.

Back at the hotel we chilled by the pool and read books on the Kindle app on our phones.

Ah what a splendid day! We mostly did bugger-all, which is sometimes what a holiday is about. Our sleep last night was marred by paper thin walls and noisy people next door. Julie knocked on their door at 5am to ask the to please talk quietly, then it was just the traffic and bird noises to keep us awake. At some time they left, but didn’t switch off their electronic alarm clock, and that bugger woke us up again. So we wuz a bit grumpy at breakfast time.We spent the morning by the pool reading and figuring out how to get to our next destinations. At 12 our new friend Nihal came round in his tuk tuk and drove us to his home for lunch. We met his wife, two daughters, son in law and grand daughter. He had cooked us rice and curry, which was very tasty, and we washed it down with some beer that we had bought. Nihal had worked for a government owned hotel chain, but the government sold it off and he became a tuk tuk driver. He was clearly a very happily married man and content with his life.

After lunch we walked into Dambulla town. It is a bustling place with a huge fruit and veg market and a great variety of stalls and shops. There are very few shops as we would recognise them, but lots of commercial activity. We were looking for a nice air conditioned cafe where we could while away some time on the internet. No chance of that at all, so we settled for a cool courtyard and sipped a lovely ginger beer.

Back at the Amarantha we met a lovely Danish lady called Maria who works for Vestas, a big company that makes windmills.