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Published: August 6th 2010
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Roped In
Sunday, July 25th
It is monsoon season in Sri Lanka so this year as part of our fifteen pound backpacking allotment we included ponchos, rain coats and umbrellas. Up till now we’ve been fabulously lucky with the weather. But we woke up at 4:30am before we were about to start our big hike to the first rain we’d seen the whole trip. Regardless, in our rain gear we trudged out to the mini bus and fell asleep promptly until we arrived at the starting point. Luckily it stopped raining though it was freezing cold. To get our bodies warmed up we started our trek on our way to the end of the world. World’s End was just one of the stops along the way where we were able to look to our left and see thousands of meters down. Lover’s Leap was one point we decided to avoid, too tempting...
Sri Lanka was occupied by the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British. When the Portuguese first arrived they thought their neighbors were barbarians because they seemed to spit blood (in reality their mouths were red from chewing beetle nut). The Singhalese thought
the Portuguese were cannibals because they seemed to drink blood (in fact they were drinking wine). The Portuguese asked the King very humbly for a bit of land, no more than the space that two buffalo skins would occupy. Later the King heard that the Portuguese had taken over a large area of land so he went to investigate. When the King confronted the settlers they explained that all they had done was make the skins into rope and thus marked the perimeter. This began their 136 year rule.
Balancing on the Beam, Hearing the Scream & Some Smut
Monday, July 26th
Belihuloya Today we set out for an even longer hike to
Bambarakanda falls - the highest in Sri Lanka. We meandered through the countryside and sometimes we pretended we were gymnasts on a balance beam but really we were walking along the rice fields calculating which was the best side to fall - to the right was the neatly planted rice fields and the left was a muddy ditch filled with leeches. Luckily no one fell and no one was bitten by a leech. The latter might have
something to do with the concoction Adjith had us rub on our sneakers; a mixture of bleach, salt and tobacco. We ate lunch with a local family but had to be shoed inside because of the sudden fierce winds.
Sri Lanka has two flags; one is the Buddhist flag: a striped pattern of red, blue, yellow, white and orange and the other has the Singhalese lion with a sword.
Presently we are in one of the new groovy cyber cafes with video chatting. The guy next to us keeps trying to whisper into his mike, “without clothes please.” I just looked over at him and raised my eyebrows, he laughed. He just said “I need to seeeeee…”This must be the evolution of the black umbrellas.
Tuesday, July 27th
Tanamalwila The screech of the hungry elephant babies linger in our ears, it’s a troubling sound to hear them desperately crying for their bottle. Our first stop is at the Elephant Transit Home designed to introduce orphaned baby elephants back into their natural habitats. They get fed 5 liters of milk through a funnel and a tube which gets stuffed down their throats.
They decorously line up in pairs waiting for their turn.
That night we finally broke away from our comfortable hotels and camped out in tents among the peacocks, tortoises, and elephants. While walking around our new back yard mom found her own tooth relic thanks to a dead buffalo (and some help from Michael). That night we also officially decided we would never eat rice and curry again. We fell asleep secure in the knowledge we were protected from the elephants by a electrical fence which was not turned on.
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Lama
non-member comment
Love it!
Hi guys (or I should say the Goodfriend girls); Thank you very Sasha, I felt I was there with you guys. So I assume the elephants were fooled by the non-functioning electric fence. They have very smart elephants in Sri Lanka. What did you cook Sasha? Any good recepes to share? A friend of mine just returned from Sri Lanka and it seems that it is a favored destination among Jordanians (I cant say the same about Kuwait, especially in the summer). So, inshallah, we'll hook up in NY this fall. By the way, other similar words are: Bukra, which means tomorrow; and Malesh, which means: it's ok. Therefore we give the three words the acronym: IBM.