Chilling at Nilaveli Beach, Trincomalee

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Finally we were off to do the part of the trip I had been eagerly looking forward to - visiting my cousins ... well sort of. Sri Lanka consists of two people groups, the majority being the singhalese, and the minority being tamils. Tamils are squashed up in the north and east of Sri Lanka, and thus so far, the majority of our interactions had been with singhalese. Being of tamil descent, I was looking forward to getting into Tamil territory so I could try out my very rusty Tamil language skills.

Unfortunately Sri Lanka is just recovering from a 30 year civil war, during which large parts of the infrastructure of the Tamil parts had been completely descimated. The area we were heading to, Trincomalee, had been partly damaged and so the drive there was through a fairly sketchy one lane dirty road filled with more pot holes than actual solid road.

The tamil parts are indeed considerably more rustic, mainly from the many years of war, but also because of the different socio-economic levels. Though exciting to be amongst my own, it was also sad to see how my people live, and made me all the more wish for true unity in our country rather than the fairly shallow status-quo that exists today.

We arrived late afternoon at our home for the next two days, Chaaya Blu Resort on Nilaveli beach, a well known beach area north of Trincomalee. It was now time to settle down and actually have a restful holiday like normal travellers rather than the hectic mad runs we normally had done on previous runs. Thats what having kids does to you!

We spent the rest of the day lazing on the semi-whites sands of Nilaveli beach. Mid afternoon we had a short stroll through the local village and were treated to the sight of a coconut harvester. No cranes or other kinds of machinery are used to pick coconuts in Sri Lanka. Here instead its done monkey style. We saw a man who must have been in his late fifties throw a towel and his wiry legs around a coconut tree trunk. He then used the grip of the towel to pull himself up the thin tall tree. No fear. This guy was so fast, I'm sure he would have given any decent monkey a run for his money in scaling that tree. Human ingenuity is amazing.

A quick word about Chaaya Blu for those that are interested in reviews. For the money ... passable ... but given we paid the same to stay in the luxurious Kandalama hotel as well as later on in a gorgeous stately house in Nuwara Eliya, the price here felt steep. After all, its Trincomalee ... the rupee should stretch a lot further.

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Photos

Group net fishing
This is how they fish here. The basically throw out a massive net, then very slowly over a period of 1-2 hours, a line of 6 fisherman slowly in a rhythmic back-and-forth inch their way backwards up the beaching pulling up the net.