Jamesons and rain

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On first impressions Hikkaduwa was nice, we walked into a bavarian style bar with people enjoying jugs of beer, a huge, fat black German Shepard greeted us vigorously, like old friends and we were shown to our room which was the cabana nearest the sea. It all seemed wonderful, we were possibly high on nitrogen or something from diving because we walked round our basic room that was kitted out with appliances from the 1970's in awe, proclaiming how nice it was. We had dinner in the hotel, the night got even better from there as I was STARVING and on the menu was mixed grill with steak, chicken, egg, sausage and BACON!! granted it wasn't the best bacon but it was bacon nonetheless! I shared the scraps with the beach dogs and then we went on the hunt for some wifi so we could let our parents know we had arrived safely. The free wifi in the hotel was “broken” so we went to a nearby pizza restaurant to use theirs. The next day the hotel owner claimed he was having problems getting the hotel wifi fixed but he logged us in on his personal account to check our emails as Planty was expecting one. He asked us not to use it for very long as he gets charged for it, the fishy thing was the wifi name was wifi and password was the name of the hotel, not what I would have for my personal account! We used it as much as we could discretely and made a huge point of eating out so we can use the wifi in other places. Planty will probably paint a much more vivid picture of the hotel owner then I can, however I must say he made Hans look like a pussy cat! And he was smelly.....



The next day we stepped out of our door into paradise, the sun was shining, and from our patio we could watch the surfers going for a morning dip. We proceeded to the beach front where we were served breakfast by a Sri Lankan girl on her first day. Obviously i'm not going to complain because her English is far better then my Sinhalise but ordering the style of eggs on the set menu took about 10 minutes! Breakfast done we wandered round checking out Hikkaduwa. Its much bigger than Unawatuna, from our hotel we turned left to the main surf beach which was a big wide expanse of sand fringed with bars and surf schools and then went right to the main diving beach. I had read the snorkelling wasn't great, there is a national park here but the coral is mostly dead and damaged. I was further put off by the volume of people in the water. Areas were sectioned off and there were “dive puppies” doing their confined and loads snorkelling. This part of the beach has also been ruined by the governments new war on illegal beach huts. Obviously if a bar is building a structure straight onto the public beach, hindering access and ruining the aesthetics it should be delt with, however the governments way of dealing with it is to send in bulldozers to tear the structure down then move on, leaving the beach ruined by rubble, rubbish and wire. We couldn’t walk on parts for rubbish, it was all in the sea and the rockpools in places and the whole time we were there people were trying to tidy up the beaches, but the same thing happened in Unawatuna last year and parts are still not recovered. Its such a shame, this region was devastated by the 2004 tsunami, managed to rebuild their lives while the government was distracted in the north and then they turned their attentions to improving Sri Lanka's tourism prospects and devastated some peoples lives and the beaches in the process!



From our stroll I decided I wasn't too keen on Hikkaduwa. It had none of Unawatunas charm and it was big and dirty. However we had five days and I was determined to make the most of them. For lunch we went to a bar next door to use their wifi (which was broken) we sat down and began to look around. It was a surfers bar and full of the most obvious looking surfers I have ever seen, they were all blond highlights and if you weren’t wearing quicksilver, or billabong you were the odd ones out. The bar began filling slightly and we recognised some as speaking Hebrew. When they began bringing in the bottles of Jamesons my initial thought was “how the hell is this happening again!?!?” we had managed to crash another Jamesons party, however this one was at lunchtime and there was freeflowing Jamesons. We kept getting given shots of it, we did a couple out of politeness but then had to refuse. By the way Jamesons chased with Lion beer has a really coconutty taste, incase you were wondering! We made our excuses and escaped. The weather had just started to turn and this was the pattern it was to follow for the next couple of days. We didn’t do very much in the end, the weather was far too unpredictable and it rained most afternoons. We saw some pretty intense storms with forked lightning and the loudest thunder, but most of the time we spent sat in bars or on our patio. We did some shopping for presents and basically chilled out. The second to last day was blazing sunshine that lasted until about 4 pm. The surfers were out in force and people were learning all down the beach, I wanted to have a go but Planty wasn't too keen. He didn’t want to be taught by the people next door and said he preferred to wait until aus. I pointed out that aus would be extortionate but by this time it was late and the next day the weather wasn’t great again, so I guess i'll have to wait!



Our last day we spent in a tuk tuk running round Hikkaduwa to post a parcel home. It was a nightmare! The post office staff were unhelpful and rude at best. We had to get boxes, tape and paper, nowhere had paper so that was a pain and we ended up using someone’s tatty secondhand scraps, the post office staff had to check what was inside then we had to wrap it etc. when we finally got to send it we were fed up. And it was extortionate! It was also the same price for 5 days airmail and 3 months by sea, which I couldn’t understand. I wished we had posted it in India as planned. When we got back I was hot and dizzy. Obviously then the weather turned and it rained for the rest of the day.



The highlight of Hikkaduwa was the beach dogs, they were friendly and adorable. They would follow us round and come, dig a hole and lie in the sand with us. I fell completely head over heels for a juvenile mongrel, I could have taken her home. But it was an older one with chewed up ears that adopted us. On our last night we had planned an early wake up, unfortunately our adopted pooch decided it was a good idea to sit on the beach and howl at random increments throughout the night. Planty went out and gave him a telling off a couple of times but by the time we were supposed to be up we had both had a pretty rubbish nights sleep! It was lucky in a way though, as the hotel forgot our wakeup call....



We checked out just before 7. I received a really pleasant grunt off the owner as I handed the key back, but our new tuk tuk driver that had taken us round Hikkaduwa the day previous turned up on time and raring to go! We made the short trip to the station by tuk tuk and then the not so short trip to Colombo by train. The train was already packed so we spent the journey stood by the doors again. Part way through a little Sri Lankan woman fell into me, she apologised and I smiled. I noticed she was examining us curiously and eventually she plucked up the courage to ask where we were from. From there it just got plain bizzare. She was a Sri Lankan living in Singapore (our next destination) she has a hostel in Singapore and a nursery school in Sri Lanka and was over bringing provisions to the nursery. It was her first time on the train in Sri Lanka as she had always been too scared previously as it was a terrorist target for the Tamil tigers and she gave us contact details for a good place to buy a phone in Singapore. We discussed Sri Lankan politics, Singapore schooling and many points inbetween, I think she was relieved to have someone to talk to on the journey and made the most of it. We had decided to get a tuk tuk from the station to the airport for ease but she pointed us to an a/c bus at a tenth of the price. she also gave us her son's contact details in Singapore if we needed anything whilst we were over there. She was a great find and an example of Sri Lankan hospitality. When she left us all I could say was what were the chances of that!



From there our journey takes us to Singapore. Nothing more very notable happened, we got a tuk tuk, spent our last rupees then boarded the plane. I spent my rupees on some new flip flops as mine had broken and I had been wearing a particularly hideous pair of bright turquoise ones I had bought. My new ones were dog print and the proceeds went towards helping the street dogs of Sri Lanka. I was absolutely made up with them and what they stood for and the offensive pair went in the bin immediately.



Planty's Version


I felt sorry for our tuk tuk driver taking us to Hikkaduwa, as he had to sit and listen to me and Lotty ramble on about diving and other such crap, while we seemed to be high as kites on nitrogen that we had used for our dives. I was looking forward to staying here, it's supposed to be bigger than Unawatuna, and have a better beach, plus the hotel had e-mailed Lotty a food menu, which sounded amazing, and was stupidly cheap. We walked into the hotel feeling very good about life at that moment, probably again, due to the nitrogen in our body's, both smiling at the staff and saying that we had a booking. The Sri Lankan lady at reception, who we figured out was the German owners wife, simply sat there with a face like a slapped arse, didn't say hello, smile, ask how we were or anything like that, just simply plonked a form down for us to fill out and gave us our key, and off we went. By that point in the day, and after the successes of our dives, I wasn't really in the mood to be a sarcastic little sod and make witty remarks about her inability to crack even the slightest of smiles, but then again, if she's married to a German, there's not really anything to smile about. Our room, or should I say hut, was the closest one to the beach out of all the ones in the hotel, which was a bonus, the sea came in about 10 metres from our front door. We were assisted without bags by a short arse creepy local guy who barely spoke English, but seemed to smile at me with wide eyes a lot, very weird, and there was an awkward silence when he stood there waiting for a tip, but we had no small notes, and simply smiled, thanked him, and shut the door. After we quickly threw on some clean clothes, we were in serious need of feeding, we hadn't eaten for hours, and I never realised how tiring diving is, we were both shattered. So, dinner time, I couldn't wait, and quickly chose the fillet steak which cost around £4, but trying to place the order and specify how I would like my steak to be cooked was about as easy as dissecting a caterpillar while in the middle of a bungee jump, but we sort of got there in the end. About 20 minutes later our food arrived, and at first I thought they had forgotten to put the steak on the plate. Every fillet steak I've had before has been a generous chunk of meat that you could use as a door stop, but this was the thinnest slither of meat ever created, hardly a fillet. I shouldn't really moan because I only paid £4 for it, but surely that's classed as false advertising?! As our phones still hadn't recovered from their swimming lessons a few days earlier, we had arranged to Skype my parents, and the hotel had free WiFi.......allegedly. I asked one of the staff members if I needed a password to use the WiFi, and she went to ask the owner, the returned a short while later informing me that it was not working, but told me a pizza place further down the road has free WiFi, so we headed there. The pizza restaurant was closing before we were to Skype, so I messages my parents to let them know the problem, and we would try again the next night. The next morning, after another fun attempt of trying to order food for breakfast, I approached the manager and asked about then WiFi, to be told again that it wasn't working. After explaining my problem with our phones and that I need to contact my parents, he said he would log me on to his "personal" WiFi account, but asked me not to use it much because he gets charged. This seemed a fair enough point, although I don't think he realised I was watching when he typed in the user name and password, and i don't think 'wifi' as a username, and the hotels name as a password, is his personal one. From then I began to get the feeling that he didn't trust me, I saw a few older guests happily using the WiFi with no problems but I just played dumb to his crap story. The hotel bar shuts at 10:30pm (don't worry, I found bars that opened later), and all the staff finish for the night, so I logged back on to the "broken" WiFi and finally managed to get through to my parents. I really wished our hut was closer to reception (where the WiFi box was), so I could download so much stuff to our laptop, just to spite him, because I'm nice like that. The funny thing the next day, was I asked about the WiFi again, and still was told it was broken, little did they know, I'd been using it the night before, but that's enough about the Nazi owner and his minions, I should probably tell you about the town we stayed in. As I mentioned before, Hikkaduwa is supposed to be a better town than Unwatuna, with a better beach, better night life etc, but to put it plainly, it's a bit of a dump. The beach has its nice areas, but the government in Sri Lanka have been around in their bulldozers and pulled down parts of the beach bars and hotels that are 'illegal' but left all the rubble their. The place does have the potential to be something good, but its hard when people are having to rebuild their properties because of a corrupt government, suppose it could be worse, they could have David Cameron as their prime minister.... We spent our days in Hikkaduwa relaxing on the beach, drinking (a typical part of our days anyway) and me moaning that I wanted another tattoo, but the only tattoo place in the area was closed. We also seemed to acquire a few beach dogs, that seemed to be able to sense that we are both fond of dogs, and sat with us all day and even in the evenings on our balcony. One of the dogs in particular was really quite funny, as we would sit on the bean and see beach sellers making their way towards us, I'd simply say to this dog "who's that?", to which the dog would quickly get up and run towards the beach seller, barking constantly until they passed on by. This became very useful, as I couldn't be bothered having to deal with people trying to sell me wooden statues that looked like a French pianist had carved them while trying to outrun a cheetah, and the dog got a bit of exercise and seemed to enjoy bullying the sellers away, win-win situation really. On one of our days, we went to a bar on the beach a couple of doors down from our hotel, which was decorated in Jamesons whiskey flags, posters and other stuff and as we sat having a beer and waited for our food, we noticed a group of guys walk in with literally, boxes of Jamesons. This was the same group of guys who'd had a Jamesons party a few days before in Unwatuna, and they started giving out free shots of the stuff to everyone inside and outside the bar. Normally when I've been in a bar and they give out free shots, it's cheap imitation shots that have about as much alcohol in them as my urine, the morning after a night out, so giving out shots of a premium whiskey seemed a bit bizarre to me, but not wanting to seem rude, we accepted their gifts to us. We didn't stay too long there however, as it was only midday, and if we stayed much longer, I would have had to be carried back to the hotel, but I don't think Lotty has the strength to carry my lard arse down the beach. That really sums it up for Hikkaduwa, there really wasn't a great deal to do, and it really didn't compare to Unwatuna. The night before we left, we'd arranged for the hotel to give us a wake up call at 6:30am and got an early night. I got woke up at around 2am by our favourite dog howling right outside our room, after 10 minutes of this I went out to see what was going on, and saw him sat there wagging his tail about 5 metres from our door. After doing the usual dog lover thing and asking him what's up, as if he's gonna start talking back to me and explaining the reasons for him howling at 2am, he lay back down, and I went back inside. By this point I was wide awake, and thoughts were racing through my head about all kinds of stuff, how my family were all doing back home, if we'd find any difficulties getting to the airport, and what on earth was I going to do in Singapore, when beers cost £4?! A few hours later, the dog started up again, so once again, I went out, and again asked him what's up. I didn't get a reply, but that's probably because he's a dog, and doesn't speak human, but as I went to go back inside, I told him to go back to sleep, and was quite surprised when he simply lay back down all curled up and closed his eyes. I was starting to think that maybe this dog did understand what I was saying to him, we'd said bye to him earlier that day, so is there a chance that he understood that we were going and he was getting upset? Or am I just thinking to deeply into things? I suppose for now, we'll never know, all I know is that was a really cool dog that seemed to warm to us as we did to him. I was still awake at the arranged time of our wake call, so we got up and got ready to go, but wondered where the wake up call was. We checked out at 7am, still not receiving our call, and handed our key to the German owner, who was too busy to ask about our stay, or even say thanks or smile, miserable sod. We were picked outside by a tuk tuk, that we had asked the day before to take us to the local train station, from there we caught a train to Colombo. We managed to get the earlier train than planned, and because it was early morning, by the time we got on, it was full, so we stood by the door and watched the world go by. At one of the stops a woman got on and started talking to Lotty, turns out she was Sri Lankan, but also lives in Singapore, and she buys electronic goods from a shop out there, then imports then to Sri Lanka. After we'd told her about the problems with our phones, she gave us the details of where to get a decent priced one from, very convenient indeed. From Colombo, we were going to get a tuk tuk a for a further hour to the airport, but this lady showed us where to get an air conditioned bus for a hell of a lot less than it would have cost via tuk tuk, as she was getting on it too. Halfway through the coach journey, she passed me her phone, it was her son, who lives in Singapore and would be more than happy to show us round if we needed, it was a really bizarre turn of events, but it really is a true reflection of hospitality in Sri Lanka, and other such countries. You certainly wouldn't see that sort of kindness everyday in the UK. We got off the coach just outside the airport, and got another, and our final Sri Lankan tuk tuk to take us the final part of our journey. We checked in without any problems and waited to board our Emirates flight to Singapore, we'd spent 35 days on the Indian subcontinent, and to put it simply, we absolutely loved every single minute of it. The madness and colourfulness of India really did exhaust us, Sri Lanka then relaxed us and made us feel like we where in paradise. The only thing I wish we had done differently in Sri Lanka, is stayed I Hikkaduwa first, and doing Unawatuna as our last stay. If you're thinking about staying in either of these places, don't bother with Hikkaduwa, but you must stay in Unawatuna, it's simple, it's beautiful and the people are always happy to see you. We left Sri Lanka looking forward to trying another culture, one that is slightly more westernised than what we'd been used to, but we certainly needed it.

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