It’s a great time of year to visit Sri Lanka, it’s off season so very few tourists and the weather so far has been great, assuming you don’t want scorching hot sun all day. It’s hot but not too hot with clouds passing overhead for maybe 50% of the day. It’s monsoon season still but whether I’ve just been lucky or not I don’t know but there’s been virtually no rain since I’ve been on the island until this afternoon.
Oli and I started the day by climbing up Sigiriya Rock which is 200 metres high and amazing, it’s one of the highlights not only of Sri Lanka but the trip so far. It’s both amazing as a natural feature and the fact that Sri Lankans managed to use it as a fort.
We headed south on ‘scooter safari’ to Kandy, en route we wanted lunch so we stopped where we thought there was a restaurant and a Sri Lankan man, Kandy Sugar (yes, that’s his name) told us he could show us a good restaurant, what transpired was that he brought some take away food and asked us to follow him to his house. I had a feeling something wasn’t quite right but I didn’t feel in danger. After driving down a dirt track we came to a house that wasn’t quite finished being built and were introduced to an elderly Danish lady (maybe 80 years old) who’s house it was. The following hour was possibly the craziest lunch I’ve ever had, it transpired that Kandy Sugar was 61 with a drink problem a wife that has stabbed him and beats him up and he is ‘taking care’ of this old Danish lady who I think had given him all her money having only met him 18 months ago.
Kandy Sugar might have been drunk, and was acting in the most peculiar way, implying he was a ‘well known’ man and that he had money (the Danish ladies money I assume) showing me a small cloth bag of precious stones and a ring, when the Danish lady saw the ring she grabbed it off Kandy Sugar saying it was her Grand Mothers!
I asked the Danish lady more than once if she was happy with the situation and she said yes so after lunch we said our goodbyes and left.
About an hour from Kandy the monsoon arrived so Oli went off and brought the coolest ponchos ever and we continued to Kandy dry.
Scooter Safari had a good day today, we saw monkeys and my first elephant in Sri Lanka.
