HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE, hope you all had a great new year and Christmas!
back from travelling now had an amazing time getting to see some more of Sri Lanka. it is really nice to be back and have people in the village recognise you and ask where we have been. start teaching again this week, excited to see all the kids again. also came back to a nice surprise to find lady (if i have not said before she is the school dog that we named and love) has had a wee puppy!!! he is so cute, still to think of a name. anyway pretty packed full holiday so will just put loads of photos and a rough idea of what we were up to.
emer with lady when she was pregnant just before we left:
emer and i left first and went to tangalle, tissa, monaragala then to Arugam bay where we met Tris and finn, lasted about a week until we met them.
so tangalle: we just chilled out on the beach and "learnt" how to play Karum (sri lankan board game - a bit like pool but smaller and using your hands). swam a bit although the waves were insane and splashed out the last night to stay in an amazing hotel right on the beach. drank ALOT of banana milkshakes!
tissa: ye took the bus from tangalle to tissa, through all the paddy fields further east and inland. first thing that happened when we arrived was the yala national park touts convinced us to get off the bus at what they said was tissa, but really wasn't. it even said in the book not to fall for these people but sadly we did...oopsies! so anyway we escaped them and ended up where we were planning on staying. the place we stayed had bikes so emer and i took them everywhere we went. Tissa was definitely one of my favourite places, it had a massive lake with "bird island" in the middle, wasn't too touristy and an amazing big market. we cycled up to the lake and ended up getting a free boat ride to see all the birds on the island, it was beautiful, pelicans on the top of trees that looked far to small for them! oh i also managed to pop the tyre on the bike we borrowed so emer and i did some sri lankan bike riding...both on one bike, i sat at the back and held on to my bike that needed fixed. we took it too some lovely man who shared some mango with us...
we arranged to go to yala national park at 5.30am one morning from tissa. hopped in our fairly old looking landy and headed for yala...fingers crossed our photo copies of our residents visas would work, after much persuading at the gate we manage to get in a local price yah. it was amazing! we saw 4 leopards! some in the distance but one was so close. our driver stopped under a tree and grabbed my camera from my hands, we looked up and this leopard looked straight back at me as if he would eat me...ahhh, he then ran away...we also saw some elephants, peacocks, crocodiles and loads of other birds. one of the best things though was getting our land rover well and truly stuck in the mud - i will just show you pictures for this as you probably wouldn't believe how stuck we were if i told you...we had to be pulled out and we very lucky as no one usually gets to get out of the trucks in yala (we did to help push...):
looked even worse from behind
monaragala was really just a stop off point before heading for arugam bay but we did go for a really nice walk up "peacock rock", covered in rubber trees!
Arugam bay: stayed in a palm leave hut on the beach! very basic and had a rat friend but loved the place to stay. we literally chilled out very majorly here and didn't do a lot - ate my first beef in 3 months...and it rained quite a bit.
our hut was on the left side
from there we heading via monaragala again to Badulla in the hill country. that was an amazing bus journey through all the tea plantations on cliff edges, exciting! Badulla was great too! we walked to Dunhinda falls and then further down the river to a place we were shown was good for swimming - it was gorgeous, small waterfall and pools, was some weird crab things in it but loved it all the same.
dunhinda waterfall
swimming spot...
from Badulla we took our first train ride and we were all like over excited kids on Christmas - we loved it! you can just hang out the windows and doors and it has the most amazing views ever as it travels fairly slow! we headed for Ella! here we all had some sickness times but recovered pretty past... we stayed in a really friendly guest house called rainbow inn and walked little Adams peak through more tea and ella rock! both had the most amazing views at the top over the Ella Gap.
view from little adams peak across to ella rock
we then took another train to hapatale which was amazing, felt like the highest place in sri lanka (which its not...) you could see for miles, the town was basically built on the top of a mountain. we met a lovely sri lanka girl walking along the railway who invited us all to her house on a tea estate for some tea, so we did and met all her friends and family. all the children took us to see there temple where we were blessed and then we played loads of games with them. they were all so sweet and invited us back the next day for lunch, so we did this too, the food was so yummy and the family so kind and welcoming, we played more games! was so nice to meet them!
we also climbed liptons seat from here - liptons tea - man from Glasgow! i know i keep saying everything was gorgeous and beautiful, this was too, one of the most beautiful but its true this country and amazing! after we climbed liptons seat we went to have a tour round the tea factory and then our driver took us to see this nursery school he sometimes goes along to, the kids were adorable but so squashed in to such a small classroom, there were 60 kids from babies to 5/6 years old and only 1 teacher.
liptons tea!
emer and some of the nursery school kids
we thought we would be adventurous from Haputale and ignore the book...so we hopped of at a random stop and hopped that there would be somewhere to stay.....there was nothing!! we left again...
Nuwara Elyia - coldest place we went to! was very strange turned up and it was fairly like home...they call it "little England". it was cold, everyone wore hats and big jumpers, there was a winter market, we could see our breathe, there were christmas lights all over the place, golf courses, strawberries, redish pavements, no mozies...all and all a very unsri lankan! it was amazing to be cold though. we met jo and alan here and had some lovely meals with them. we played tennis twice and a lot of pool, we also arrange to go to horton plains national park to "worlds end" - big cliff basically! once again amazing views and a really really lovely walk through the park!
"worlds end"
view from the top...
kitugala - we got the bus here via hatton. here we went white water rafting...just planning on doing it the one day and leaving but ended up loving it so much we stayed and arranged to do the harder longer route the next day! great fun! even stopped at the side of the river ditched out raft and then jumped in the rapids being thrown all over the place and swept down. it was just so nice seeing everything around us too, first big river i have seen in sri lanka and it was very very pretty....(if any of you know the film bridge over the river Kwai, well thats the river we rafted on...under that bride).
ok this is at the top of admas peak (read below...cant move these pictures very well...)
adams peak on the right
Dalhousie - we met jo and alan here to spend christmas with them! we had a really lovely christmas - up at 2am to climb adams peak, 5200 steps apparently, we got to the top at 5.30am and caught the sun rising!!!! stunning (new use of beautiful words...)! the top of the mountain was packed but it didnt matter! we arranged a secret santa for the top of adams peak, so after carrying our presents up there we all opened them and hopefully loved them, i love mine - a coconut knife with a hand painted by jo red handle, cant wait to use it! after we got back down about 9am i went for a swim in the river which was freeze but refreshing...then we all slept! for christmas dinner we had a BBQ mmmmmm!! played some games after dinner!
from dalhousie we were pretty indecisive on where to go next, ended up spending the day in Hatton and then catching the night train to Hikkaduwa via kandy and colombo....wow well we left at around 12.15 at night and arrived in to hikkaduwa around 9/10ish am... Emer and i stood for the first 4 hours as the train was so so so so so so packed people sleeping all over the place and unlucky for us we picked a very bad place next to the toilet which then decided to leek....nasty! it was an experience...haha, i am glad we did it though!
hikkaduwa - right on the beach, very touristy, lots of surfing, hot compared to the hill country we had been in...had a great time before and over new year. tried surfing once, no lesson just got a board and had no idea where to start just ended up body boarding on a surf board, made it on to my knees....was good fun though and realise we are not far from there at all so may go back and learn to do it properly...
now back and amazing to be here...even with all the washing we now have to do...
hope everyone had a great christmas and thank you to everyone who sent me presents and cards will write back to you all very soon! lots of love kirstin xxx
