Things start to unwind – SL#26.

Greetings to everybody and welcome to another post in my ever-growing collection about my trip to Sri Lanka in the early part of 2014 which you can read about from the beginning here.

With that all out of the way, please feel free to read on.

13th February, 2014.

As I said in the previous post, there is not really a whole lot to do in Tangalle except go to the beach and that is what I did most of the day. Well, I say I went to the beach but I should perhaps more properly say that I spent the day sitting in several beachfront bars looking at the beach, and very pleasant it was too.

I had throughly enjoyed my meal the previous evening the Little Pumpkin restaurant near my hotel and so I decided to return there for another meal. Here is what I wrote about it.

“So impressed was I that I returned the next night and had a smaller but equally delightful dish of sweet and sour prawns with rice, which you can see in one of the images as I was not overly hungry. That again was excellently done and the sauce not as cloyingly sweet as it can sometimes be”.

A couple of beers and it was off to bed reasonably early as I was going to travel the next day.

14th February, 2014.

I should start this day with an explanation. Thus far on the trip I have been basing my posts on notes that I had saved from the Virtual Tourist website for which they were originally written.

The salvage process was only possible due to the efforts of the CEO and former CTO and founder of the site (G and Tillman respectively) and it was certainly no thanks to the company that bought over VT with the intention of destroying it to remove some of the competition. It was a very useful salvage operation but by no means foolproof and the upshot is that from now on I have got no notes for many days and am “flying blind” to a great extent.

I must warn you that the next several posts will be a little vague and very much lacking in detail. I’ll do my best from memory and a bit of online sleuthing to try to match images to memory but it was a long time ago. Also, my recent spate of productivity will undoubtedly slow down considerably as it is going to be a bit of work. Sorry about that but I hope I can still give you some idea of what I saw and did.

I made my way to the bus stand and had no problem getting a bus to Kateragama which I had decided was going to be my next port of call. As long as you stick to the main Coast Road, buses are never a problem as they are frequent and inexpensive. It is when you try to go inland that things get a little trickier.

I got to Kateragama with no problems but this is where my problems begin. I had booked a room ahead as I know I did not just go walkabout looking for somewhere and I remember walking up to it, I remember chatting to the very friendly guy on the desk, I remember being somewhat surprised when he showed me to a room with six bedspaces in it although he assured me I would be moved to a smaller room in the morning. I remember the room being clean and the bed comfortable, I remember just about everything.

The one thing I canot remember is the name of the damned place and it is really annoying me. I have pored over all my images for clues and just spent over an hour trudging round the streets of Kateragama virtually on Google maps but to no avail. I can see that this lack of notes is going to be time-consuming and very frustrating but there is nothing I can do about it.

Later in the evening I thought I would take a walk into town which was very lively and I spent a bit of time wandering round a sizeable night market which is an activity I never tire of. You will notice that, remarkably, beer has not featured in the account for the day and there is a reason for that which I shall explain in the next post. I am such a tease!

I bought a few snacks, finished my look round the market and even saw an elephant with gold-tipped tusks! After that I took a slow walk home where I decided which of the three beds I would sleep in and then proceeded to sleep very well.

In the next post I shall tell you all about Kateragama, including it’s lack of beer and then go elsewhere to find one so stay tuned and spread the word.