Hill Country & South of Sri Lanka

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Hello,

My third week in Sri Lanka seems to have gone very quickly!

Last Sunday we took a long train journey through the beautiful Hill Country, arriving in Bandarawela - 7 hours by train but the fantastic views made it seem shorter. In the evening we went round to the house of a local family (friends of our tour guide) for some traditional Sri Lankan cooking (my contriubtion was chopping a few spring onions!). They gave us tips on managing the traditional eating with our hands (we all went straight back to cutlery the next night!).

We then had a fabulous two days walking in the mountains (about 30km split over two days), walking through remote tea plantations and villages. From schoolchildren to tea-pluckers, everyone was posing for photographs and curious to see their digital image (our tour guide also gave them hard copy photos from previous people on the trip, and their sheet excitement at receiving these was incredible!). We finished in Haputale, the small town our guide was from, and he showed us his "little palace". The lack of materialism and simlpicity in which local people live is humbling. We also visited the local church to see the children's English and sewing lessons - a taste of what's to come in Malaysia!

That was followed by two days at the beach in Mirissa, a quiet little village in a sandy bay. Most of that was spent out of the sun having a lazy time drinking local tea and ginger tea in the shade.

Finally the tour round Sri Lanka ended with a brief trip to the town of Galle - where the enclosed old town within the Fort still very much shows the signs of the portuguese, dutch and british colonial period - and a shopping trip round the capital Colombo. Just after we arrived by train in Colombo, another bomb went off on a bus on the outskirts, fortunately we remained rather sheltered from all of that.

I was planning on staying a couple of days in a wildlife lodge by Yala National Park this week which they cancelled (apparently there is terrorist activity in that area), so I decided to change my plans and today I got a very early flight out of Sri Lanka, about a week early. I'm spending the night in KL tonight and making plans for the rest of the week!

So here are a few facts I learned about Sri Lanka.........
- unemployment is running at 33%
- inflation is running at 20%
- tourist numbers are down to about 200,000 compared to previous estimates of 500,000
- locals attribute the war to the mistake of the government in 1972 in declaring there would be only the majority language as the country's official language, to be effective within 24 hours. They say the war is continuing because it suits the government due to the high numbers employed in the army who could not get another job in this economic climate.
- although some of the old traditions are disappearing, in many communities men will still expect a sizeable dowry in order to marry a woman!

Bye for now,
Jennifer

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