1415 – en route to Galle
I woke up wonderfully late, all of 7am, and lay in bed for an hour or so, writing. I can’t believe how long it took me to write up yesterday’s trip. I’ve been writing off and on all day, and only just finished. It was an awesome day, yesterday.
Anyway. This morning I wanted to try an authentic Sri Lankan breakfast, with string hoppers (a sort of rice pancake) and curry, but it had to be ordered last night. Piffle. So more eggs and toast for us.
We were the first people on the Tissa-Matara bus, namely because we just missed the 9:30 bus. It filled up quickly enough, though. We left Tissa with two seats to a person, but that didn’t last long. Lots of people were headed to Matara.
Much of the drive was along the coast, but other than the ocean there wasn’t much of a view. A lot of people live along the water, which is why the tsunami was so devastating. It’s certainly a different climate to what we’ve been used to on this inland trip.
There was a big salt-production
area along the way; big shallow ponds of sea water, just evaporating and leaving
salt on the mud. How do they get the salt off the mud effectively? Scrape it all
up and filter it? Rinse it? Who knows.
1600 – on Ocelot!
Matara was well wiped out by the tsunami, and while they’ve rebuilt a fair amount, it’s still fairly obvious there was damage. The road is new. There are spaces in the waterfront buildings where people didn’t have enough time or money or will to rebuild.
The bus station is right by the water, a big open structure with big signs with place names. The signs even matched the buses! It was easy to find Galle, but actually the Colombo buses mostly stop there too.
Recon done, we went out to find lunch. Lonely Planet only had one place listed, faaar away. So we did the Hacking thing and went looking for something else.
All we found in the food area were little local dives. Dark little rooms. Fly infestations. Not a word of English, spoken or written. Everyone looked at us really strangely when we stuck our heads in.
We finally found a place with a sign in English: Rice and chicken, Rs 90. Excellent. The place obviously catered to the bus crowd. Each meal was already in a Styrofoam box, ready to take. They had to scramble for plates and spoons for the foreigners who don’t know how to eat with their fingers. It was quite a good meal, actually. We splurged and went for a fruit salad with ice cream. The whole thing still only came to $8.
We splurged again for the bus. Instead of 50-odd rupees for a normal bus, we took an air-conditioned minibus for (gasp!) Rs 195 each. So expensive – and yet so much more comfortable.
It was interesting to see the coast we had sailed past from the shore. Of course we didn’t drive through little fishing villages, but that is mostly what we saw from the boat.
Most of the time we were in sight of the ocean. It was blowing like stink from the southeast and waves were pounding the beach pretty hard. I can’t imagine what it was like during the tsunami. Somehow it feels like it was more serious here than in places that got completely wiped out like Phi Phi Don in Thailand. When you live on or visit a small, isolated island you have to be prepared for the ocean to do wild things. But the people here… most of them don’t even involve the ocean in their lives. It’s there, yes, but Sri Lanka’s so solid it’s difficult to imagine it washing away. But it did. It’s absolutely terrible to imagine.
The bus dropped us off right at Galle Harbor and here we are – home sweet home! No relaxing allowed, however. We may have just finished a trip, but tomorrow we have to go Colombo to drop Chris off at the airport. Another full day of travel, and another after that to get back. Sigh.
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