Monday 9th December: as our next destination was only 46 miles / 74kms up the coast we spent the morning wandering around the Fort area, staying mainly on the ramparts to benefit from the breeze and enjoy the views. At midday Diya arrived to take us to the Avina Hotel at Kalutara up the coast. We stayed on the coast road rather than taking the Southern Expressway, a motorway that links Colombo with Galle, in order to enjoy the views. The area through which we travelled had been hard hit by the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, including where a train had been overwhelmed by the tidal wave: – “taken by the water” as Diya would say. Occasionally we would pass houses and shops that were derelict and looked fire damaged having been abandoned after the
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