One year off to travel with the boys

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On arrival in Bangkok, we got a taxi and went directly to the Legacy Suites on Soi 29 (Sukhumvit), nr. Phong Phrom Skytrain station. This turned out to be the most comfortable accommodation yet on the trip (until we reached Hua Hin), and included a kitchen in which we could make mac and cheese for the boys. An essential criterion for choosing accommodation in Bangkok is proximity to the Sky Train. I had forgotten just how bad the traffic is and mistakenly took for a taxi rather than walk the five minutes to Phong Phrom station; we ended up seeing pedestrians walk slowly into the distance. There doesn’t seem to be as much of a pollution problem in Bangkok this time, and quite a few cars and tuk tuks seem to be using Compressed Natural Gas.

While Carmen caught up on some clothes shopping at the MBK mall, I took the boys to Sathon Pier and caught the tourist boat up the Chao Phraya river to Phra Athit Pier and back. Ethan enjoyed the boat more while Toby enjoyed the Sky train ride back. We’ll wait until they’re a bit older to see the other sites up close (Grand Palace, reclining Buddha, Arun Wat); we took Toby a couple of years ago on the way to Phuket.

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Bangkok to Hua Hin

Our CNG taxi ride to Hua Hin took three hours and we were very happy to see an enormous swimming pool surrounding the entire Blue Lagoon complex. There are separate rooms for the boys as well -- what a strange concept after all these months of travel.

We’ve been here over two weeks now and it’s been good to take some time out from our travels, recuperate and plan logistics for the journey ahead. The nearby Sheraton hotel has a kid’s club which we have made full use off, allowing me and Carmen to take time to visit the gym or nearby shopping mall. Carmen also took a day long cooking class at a place nearby called Buchabun that has proven informative for our market shopping knowledge and taste buds: we now have a deeper understanding of Thai food, particularly Tom-Yham-Kung soup and green curry. Our tolerance for spice, especially coming from India and Sri Lanka, has increased significantly. We are not quite ready to eat a raw chili with our breakfast though, like some we know.

Catching up with Home-Schooling

Apart from swimming almost every day over the next couple of weeks, we tried to catch up with home-schooling. If we move to the UK and enter the boys in school September, they may need to be one year ahead of the US system for their age group. Both would also go from being the youngest in class to the oldest. With the help of an application for the iPhone, Toby is learning his three and four times tables and working on reading comprehension and other books by a company called Home Workbooks. Carmen bought these before we left and we have been carrying around ever since. Our hope is that he finishes these by the time we leave, which should take ten or twenty pounds off our luggage load. Since he is left-handed, we are focusing on correct positioning for writing. Luckily there is a lot of information about this on the internet, but it is difficult to break old habits, especially since he does a lot of drawing using the same ‘incorrect’ hand position.

Ethan requires less schooling as he would be entering reception year, or Kindergarten, at about the same age as Toby. He is practicing “join the dots” to learn his numbers better and practice holding a pencil. We are also trying to color inside the lines (conformists we are). We started him on a phonics book for preschoolers (from India) as the UK seems to place more emphasis on reading in reception than the US. He sort of understands the need to sound out letters to make words now, but sometimes confuses ‘b’ with ‘d’ and ‘y’ with ‘g’. Starfall (.com) was useful for Toby in learning to read, but Ethan sat alongside him, enjoying it, but didn’t absorb any of the lessons. Unfortunately, now that Ethan is ready to learn from the website, he is tired of it.

Since we started this trip, we haven’t been reading to them every night as before, partly because we didn’t have the diversity of reading material from the bookshelf or library, but mostly because we’re tired from spending all day with them and need a break. We’ll have to get back on track with this soon, maybe in Hong Kong where there may be help with looking after them during the day.

Posted by chris at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Our flight from the very modern Sri Lanka airport was 1:30 a.m., so the boys were tired when we got on the plane and went to sleep right away. The flight was almost four hours, with Singapore time two hours ahead. Local time on arrival was a reasonable 7:30 a.m., except that it was really 5:30 a.m. for us. They were not at all happy about getting off the plane.

Again we hadn’t booked a hotel; we’d stayed in Singapore before and this time found rates on the internet 200 to 300 percent more than previous, probably due to the air show. We wanted to avoid having to pay an extra night for checking in at 9 a.m. which we would have by booking over the internet. The hope was to locate a hotel driving around in the taxi, stopping at each of our short-listed hotels. After stopping at a couple of sold out places full of mainland Chinese, we saw the YWCA on the map, and this proved our salvation. Not only did they allow us to check in immediately, we found later they have an excellent pool on the roof, and for Carmen in the fitness center, a “bhangra aerobicz” class.

After forty winks, we jumped on the bus to take us to Newton’s Hawker Center La, which we’d never been to before but somehow imagined we had. They had a variety of Singaporean hawker food and it wasn’t bad, but the place we were really looking for was Wismira Atria on the corner of Scott and Orchard. It’s much fancier, slightly more expensive but more variety. There we found an array of delicacies from different parts of the world. Singapore likes to think of itself as the food capital in Asia, and with food courts like these it’s not hard to see why. Carmen and I think more favourably of Hong Kong in this regard, although HK seems to lack good Indian food. Still, we were very happy to arrive in Singapore after the relative food desert of Sri Lanka, and see the boys stuffing themselves again. Afterwards, we wandered along Orchard road with its wide sidewalks fenced off from the road, allowing the boys to run around in all directions. We got a little lost on the way back and had to cross the road in some non-pedestrian sections of the road. Luckily no-one saw us and we didn’t have to receive fifty lashes of the cat o’ nine tails. When we finally made it back to the Y, we went for a late night swim on the roof pool with a nice view of the neon-lit buildings.

Next morning we went to a nearby mall that specializes in school books, to try and locate some home schooling math’s books for Toby. Singapore is supposed to have the best math’s learning system in the world, and we were a bit shocked when we looked through the books. They expect a high degree of literacy and understanding problems and place a large emphasis on repetition of similar types of problems. They were also very heavy so we ended up not purchasing any. The Singapore and Kumon math books you can buy in the States seem better suited for the boys needs.

We took the bus to the airport. Fortunately we had a lot of time on our hands as it took a bit longer than expected, and we checked in for our departure to Bangkok with only two and half hours to spare. Thanks to Singaporean efficiency, we checked in and got through customs so quickly that we still had two hours and fifteen minutes to eat and shop.

Posted by chris at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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After climbing Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, our plan had been to sleep a few hours in the morning, then take off for Negombo Beach near the airport. Despite getting up at 2 a.m. and walking through the night, neither of us felt tired, so we packed up our bags instead and got into our taxi van. Somay (the driver) said it was a three hour drive but it turned out to be about six and we hadn’t booked a hotel. Luckily Carmen’s netbook was stuffed full of movies, so the boys were content watching Polar Express and the Bee Movie for the hundredth time.

Our driver wanted to drop us at a hotel closer the airport since he said there was nothing to see in Negombo. Since we were staying three nights, we insisted on the more competitive hotel market of Negombo where there would also be shops. On arrival in Negombo we located an internet café and created a short-list of favourite hotels. The first one was Paradise Beach Resort but they were booked solid the following night. Luckily they had a cancellation the following day and we didn’t have to move.

We rented a moped for three days and soon found our driver was right: there’s not much to see in Negombo. Ethan and I did come across upon about 30 fishermen hauling an enormous fishing net onto the beach. They had obviously been at it for several hours. By the time the net was on the beach, with several shouts of “Hoy – aa”, they had a massive haul of tiny fish (and garbage) to distribute and sell the rest at the nearby roadside stall.

We went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner that night and there were a surprising number of mosquitoes, so I popped across the road to buy some citronella. When I came back, there was a large tea pot on the table and a couple of tea cups. Since I hadn’t ordered tea, I was a bit confused but the waiter was nowhere around. I poured the ‘tea’ and found it to be a thick dark liquid that tasted like beer, and in fact was beer. I know now that on Poya days in Sri Lanka it’s not legal to serve beer at the table, so they serve it in tea pots instead to disguise it. The beer in the teapot, “Sinha stout”, turned out to be one of the strongest I’d had for a while, and it was several hours before my head stopped reeling; I also woke up with a hangover. Beer seems to have an enhanced effect in the tropics.

Posted by chris at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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We were unsure about attempting to climb Adam’s Peak. I had asked a few people who had done it, and some that hadn’t. All said it was unlikely that Toby or Ethan would be able to get to the summit (2,243 meters, 7,359 ft). Part of the uncertainty was what elevation we would start at and how cold it would be at the top – people said it would be very cold and the guide book said that there could be leeches (preventable by rubbing tiger balm on your legs). Added to this, Ethan’s shoes (Keens) had a strap broken, and Carmen had no walking shoes; although she had seven other different types. Still, there are plenty of shoe fixers who could fix the strap, and we heard it might be possible to have someone carry Ethan to the top. Carmen could buy some walking shoes in Kandy. In the end however, we decided that only Toby and I should go, based on the difficulty that certain members of the family have in getting up early.

We had mentioned to Toby the possibility of climbing Adam’s Peak some days previous and he had at once seemed very keen. From then on, we used it as bait to keep him well behaved, saying “Ok, no Adam’s Peak for you”, and he always responded well. We ended up pushing the trip to Adam’s Peak back by two or three days so by the time we got to base camp in Dalhousie, he was chomping at the bit.

It took longer than expected to get from Kandy to Dalhousie – a very windy road, but beautiful tea plantations along the way. We stopped at a place called Zesta on the way there and the way back, just before Hatton, which served excellent lunch and tea.

Our driver “Somay” stopped at one hotel in Dalhousie, but we declined it in favour of being closer to down town which is also the starting point for Adam’s Peak. We regretted it soon after, when a few minutes after check in, the town speakers began blaring prayers and music continuously until around 10 p.m. Nevertheless, we all managed to get to sleep well before that, setting the alarm for a 2 a.m. start.

I woke about 1:45 a.m. from some noisy neighbors shouting and packed the items I had set aside for our trip. Although there were stalls along the route, I was unsure how far up the mountain they went, so had packed six packs of Milo (chocolate milk), five marmite sandwiches, chocolate, and windy/wet weather gear. Additionally, I had bought a fleece hat and two pairs of gloves from the local market, which was well stocked with cold weather gear.

It wasn’t difficult to wake Toby and get him going for the climb, although I had anticipated some resistance. He still seemed keen, even at this hour. Soon we were outside the door, heading up the mountain with a carton of chocolate milk each. The market outside still had some shops open, but there didn’t seem to be too many people heading up and I wondered if we had started too early. Eventually a school group formed and we trailed behind them. They stopped at the first Buddhist temple and we kept going slowly up the trail. Stalls on each side lined the trail and some of the shops were just opening, and some shop owners were sleeping in chairs outside. After a quick stop at a Samahan (ayurvedic tea) stall, a Dutch man caught up to us and told us about his application to VSO, a British voluntary organization. Eventually he walked on ahead and we began to meet some more locals going up, many of them in bare feet and some carrying newly born babies. There were many pilgrims coming down the mountain, some of them slowly, or sitting to rest or sleep, and some flying down at full pelt. The trail was very well lit and we didn’t need a head torch or flashlight at any time on our journey. There didn’t seem to be any kids that were Toby’s age (6) on the trail.

We walked quite slowly, and about every half hour I gave Toby something to drink or eat. We tried not to rest for too long at any point, as that makes moving again more difficult. The trail became steeper and eventually I needed to use the rails to help pull me up. The trail was easy to follow and there was never a danger of getting lost. Toby was enthusiastic the entire time, encouraging me to walk faster and telling me that I could do it. Although it was dark, the views got steadily better as we climbed, but surprisingly it didn’t get much colder until just before the top. We passed a lot of people who had earlier sped past us and then taken rests, prompting me to recount the story of the “Tortoise and the Hare”. There were old people in their seventies making their way and I wondered if they would ever make it when the going got steeper. I had planned for us to get there by sunrise, but we arrived an hour early at 5 a.m., so had to find a place among the throngs of people at the summit temple to sit and wait. It looked as if some people had spent the entire night sleeping at the top. Luckily there was plenty of shelter from the wind. Toby and I put on our wind proof gear and sat down, but he still complained about the cold, so I gave him the iTouch to distract him. This proved effective. About 45 minutes later, we moved to a higher spot near the summit and watched the sunrise with two Buddhist monks, and a policeman who told me to keep my camera pointed away from the temple. Toby was elated with having reached the summit.

After sunrise and the obligatory photos of the mountain’s triangular shadow, the temperature began to rise quickly and leaving the summit became difficult as a large throng started to descend, and others just began to arrive. Soon we broke past the bottleneck, took our jackets off and descended more quickly. Surprisingly, it took us two hours to get back down -- it was especially jarring on the knees to go down the very steep stairs. I neglected to give Toby any drink or food toward the end and he started to flag, only to revive once he saw Carmen and Ethan coming up the trail toward us. We were both very happy to see them and Toby eagerly recounted our adventure.

If we were to do it again, I would probably leave at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. carrying less food and water, buying it on the trail instead; prices were a little higher, but not exorbitant. We carried the right amount of cold weather gear, but only needed it because we got there earlier. There didn’t seem to be any chance of rain and although it was cloudy in the evening, the sky was completely clear of cloud during the night. All in all an excellent experience though, especially for Toby, who is now keen to climb more mountains.

Posted by chris at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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On arrival in Kandy, we immediately went to the Peradeniya botanical garden to have lunch. While waiting for lunch to arrive we crossed the lawn to view an impressive Java Willow Tree . At various times during our numerous trips across the lawn to see it, the sun came out, it rained, or sometimes both. After lunch we took a long tour around the gardens and saw thousands of fruit bats hanging from the trees. We crossed a small suspension bridge built for pedestrians and sat under the protection of a large banyan tree while it rained and then became sunny again soon after.

We stayed at a place in Kandy recommended by the driver called Serene Garden Hotel. The price quoted initially was too high for our budget, but Ethan inadvertently left his bear “Plucker” at the hotel and when I went back to get him, the receptionist offered a more reasonable rate. We agreed on using this as a tactic for negotiating better hotel rates going forward. The hotel turned out to be one of the better ones we stayed in. It also had a troop of about 40 or 50 black-faced monkeys go over the building on the way to and from the nearby forest every morning, which was very interesting to watch during breakfast time. The waiters and guests were advised to keep windows closed so that they didn’t get into the building. The hotel consisted of two buildings each about seven stories high and the monkeys had had to climb and descend each one to get to and from the forest. While eating our breakfast, monkeys would appear outside the window then climb the drain pipe to the roof. One of the monkeys had a disabled hand but was still able to climb the overhanging drain pipe by balancing and grasping a little bit faster than the others.

We decided not to see the Palace of the Tooth as it was expensive to enter, and probably not something the kids would particularly enjoy or remember. If anything we would have returned to see the botanical gardens to see the parts we missed, but we needed to get to Dalhousie to climb Adam’s Peak that night…

Posted by chris at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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We were uncertain about how long we should spend in the hill country and when to leave. This was beneficial for our daily negotiations with the taxi drivers around Nor Lanka -- who lowered their price each day. At first our plan was to have a taxi driver drop us off in Ella, a journey of four hours and then proceed to Kandy by train, stopping at various stations and staying a night or two on the way. In light of the animosity between the two candidates for the national election on the 26th January, there was speculation of violence and possible imposition of curfews, depending on the outcome. We decided to leave on Monday, 25th January and keep the car hire for five days. This decision turned out favourably since no one felt like working Monday because of the national election, Tuesday was a national holiday because of the election, and on Wednesday people didn’t go to work because they were stewing on the outcome of the national election (the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa won). On these days, the streets were largely clear of traffic, making our journey much easier.

The trip to Ella took about four to five hours. We had an option for a detour through wild elephant country, but because the boys were acting up in the car, we decided to head there directly, as fast as possible. On the way, we passed through a very dry part of the country where the local specialty was curd served in a clay pot with coconut honey poured on top. Soon we reached the mountains and climbed slowly along windy roads to Ella, at about 3,000 feet. Our first choice hotel from TripAdvisor called Zion View, was a lovely place, but had no availability for us and no place for our driver to sleep or park the car. We ended up at Ambiente Hotel, which had a similar view and a very nice garden (see images).

We took a walk along a path through several tea plantations and on the way back ran into some school kids on their way home. Toby and I took a longer walk up the hill and ran into a middle aged Indian/British/E. African couple who lived in the UK, but spent several months a year touring India and Sri Lanka. They were avid yoga practitioners -- getting up at six every day, and had travelled very extensively throughout India – so much that they were able to pass off as locals to visit UNESCO and other cultural sites (a very difficult thing to do if you are an Indian living overseas). She had worked for the immigration office in Croydon, UK and kindly provided her email address in case we had any questions about the process for the boys this coming year.

At some point on our journey, our driver “Somay”, revealed that he had taken the band Duran Duran on a tour around Sri Lanka sometime around 1994. “Very nice gentleman – there were five of them”, he said much to our amazement. Our driver hadn’t slept very much the night before as he had picked someone up from the airport, got home at 3 a.m. and then picked us up at 7 a.m. He had then driven us about five hours with a few stops on the way, so was probably quite exhausted. At Ambiente Hotel they seemed to provide good accommodation for drivers so he was well rested the following morning. However when we arrived at Nurawa Eliya we ended up choosing a place called Alpine Hotel to stay, which had comfy beds, children’s television and internet access. Unfortunately, next morning we found out from the driver that they had given him nothing to eat or drink, and the building in which he slept had poor insulation so that it was like a refrigerator, and he slept very poorly. We ourselves had got very good service to the point that our waiter gave us his address and asked us to contact him if we wanted anything sent to us in the UK (I think he meant tea), but our driver hadn’t. I hadn’t considered how important the driver’s quarters and treatment is in choosing a hotel. Obviously if he didn’t sleep and/or eat well, his driving would be adversely affected and we could end up in an accident. I made a point to listen more to his recommendations on places to stay.

Next morning our driver took us to the Ella train station for the 9:30 a.m. train to Nanu-Oya, nr. Nurawa Eliya. The plan was for him to drive on to Nanu-Oya while we enjoyed the view from the train. We had not seen any trains since our arrival in Sri Lanka despite seeing numerous tracks. The reputation of trains in Sri Lanka was lateness is measured in quarter or half days. Our train was 45 minutes late and we waited with the other tourists outside the station or on the platform, stepping on to the tracks to take a picture of the station. At one point, Toby, Ethan and I went further down the track and thought we heard the train. We rushed back to tell Carmen, who came to the platform. The other 50 or so people waiting saw us getting ready and started preparing and moving themselves to get on the train, but it was another ten minutes before it finally appeared. We were in second class and rushed to claim a seat, but by the time we got on, the good seats were taken, so Carmen and I spent most of the journey standing up peering outside the open door of the train as it moved slowly through the hill country. The boys sat in their window seats peering around the pillar in the middle and asking us for snacks every ten minutes or so. The scenery from the train was spectacular and the three hours went by too quickly. We ascended into the mountains for about half of the trip and went through several tunnels which concentrated the diesel fumes from the locomotive inside the carriage. We had to stop at one station for about twenty minutes to wait for the train coming in the other direction, as the rail is primarily single track. This train journey was definitely one of the highlights of our trip to Sri Lanka.

Nurawa Eliya downtown turned out to be an excellent place to buy factory seconds for outdoor clothing, particularly Columbia and EMS clothing and we got some wind proof gear for our Adam’s Peak attempt. Other than that, we visited Victoria Park playground before heading on towards Kandy.

On the way to Kandy, we visited what an excellent tea plantation called Mackwoods , which in the UK is only available in Harrods unfortunately, as the tea and cake turned out to be the best we had. After a tour of the plantation in which we were shown the equipment and various types of tea produced, we sat down for a cup of broken orange pekoe (BOP). We bought some BOP tea bags but for some reason it doesn’t match the quality of tea we had there. We also got Ethan a small teddy bear there (since he lost his previous one on the sail boat last year) with three leaves sewn into his paw, and named him “Plucker”.

Posted by chris at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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We had planned to spend about ten days traveling around Sri Lanka by car, focusing on the hill country, but Lonely Planet mentioned the possibility of sitting in hotel rooms, waiting all day for the rain to stop. Besides, we were enjoying our stay at Nor Lanka Hotel in Unawatuna too much to move on.

Ethan and I drove the moped an hour east to Mirisa Beach, where we were told to visit Paradise Beach Resort. Half way through the journey, we stopped at a café where a man sat outside glumly selling coconuts in the hot sun. He had two dogs tied on a leash to some trees and they were unable to seek shelter from the sun. Since they were panting rapidly in the heat, I indicated that perhaps they needed water, but he just looked at me blankly.

Although the café was quite run down it had a covered balcony with a spectacular view overlooking the beach and perfect surfing waves. Sitting with our cokes in hand, we saw a man sitting on a makeshift seat in the middle of a long pole. The pole itself was stuck in the sand about 20 meters offshore. To make conversation, I asked the café owner what the man was doing and she said: “fishing for tourists”. Apparently if you take a photograph, these fishermen will climb down from the pole and ask for 100 Rupees. His fishing bag seemed quite empty but his other pocket seemed to have a bulge, no doubt where the tourist money was kept. He seemed to be smoking a cigar and I wondered if perhaps it was a Cuban Cordoba. Luckily our camera was well concealed at the bottom of our bag, and I made no move to get it despite his gestures between puffs.

On arrival at Mirisa Beach, we rented a body board from the resort and Ethan had his first go at body-boarding. A couple of waves later he was completely hooked. Unfortunately, the waves were quite erratic: large one minute and completely quiet the next, so I had him ride the broken waves most of the time. The next day, he insisted we go again, so we all boarded the moped for the one hour journey, stopping at the café on the way. At Mirisa beach, we were all enjoying the body-boarding until an enormous wave appeared. I was holding Ethan on the board and was telling him to put his legs straight behind, not noticing the wave behind until too late. I thought I could pull him and the board through the wave backwards, but miscalculated as the four foot wave crested, ripping the board and him out of my hand, throwing us both directly over and onto the sand. Carmen and Toby were slightly ahead but they also got caught up. When I surfaced some moments later I couldn’t see Ethan, and when he surfaced momentarily, he disappeared almost immediately after. I managed to grab him and saw that one of his arm bands had come off and he looked shaken. This was unusual as there isn’t much out there that fazes Ethan – he takes a lot of things in stride. We retreated for the safety of the resort’s small swimming pool and filled him up with some soothing lunch, and it was a while before he was able to tell us that he didn’t want to ever go body-boarding again. Toby and Carmen were less fazed by the experience although they were also thrown around. New word added to vocabulary today: “Wipe out”.

This episode inadvertently reminds me of the fact that southern and eastern Sri Lanka suffered catastrophic losses of about 250,000 from the tsunami in 2004. Most locals have a tale to tell about relative(s) lost. It’s really very sad. Now there are tsunami early warning systems and signs in place everywhere, and no indication of the devastation that occurred. Increased tourism will help the locals move forward with their lives, but I heard from locals the winter tourist season has been dismal due to the economic crisis. Given that the civil war was ended officially in March 2009 last year, and the mention of Sri Lanka as one of the top destinations for 2010 by the New York Times, tourists should be flocking. We certainly hope to be back again soon, possibly this coming Christmas.

One day we took the moped to nearby Jungle Beach. The path starts from the Peace Pagoda at the top of the hill, overlooking Galle to the west. It takes about ten minutes to walk down the very jungely path to the beach during which time it's possible to see snakes, scorpions and leeches (although we didn't see any). We bumped into an German man in his sixties who spent a long time in the water floating on his back and making backward fanning motions with his hands. After about half an hour, a glass bottomed boat appeared with two tourists on board. The German man waved frantically to the Sri Lankan captain of the boat, but he gave no indication of seeing him and passed by about ten feet away. I was sure the captain had seen him, but just not acknowledged his presence, although he could have given him a bit more room. The German man swam slowly to the shore and by the time he got to the beach, he was in a complete rage at the captain, shouting: "The reason I come here is to get away from the pollution and danger from the boats on Unawatuna beach and now you are coming here and almost hit me! You didn't even see me!". The captain denied this but the German went on unrelenting until the captain asked him to just stop. The German just shouted "How are you going to stop me. It will take a knife to stop me. Do you have a knife?". Later, when the boat had gone and he had calmed down, I went over to speak to him. It turned out his wife had died the previous year. They were in Sri Lanka and gone to the Doctor who said they should return home as soon as possible. She died soon after of pancreatic cancer, despite being very fit and healthy in all other respects. They had traveled extensively together and he recounted a story where they had been trekking in Nepal and arrived late one rainy night at a tin roof shack in a remote village. The rain hammered down on the tin roof, but they managed to sleep somehow. Later, he woke up and it was silent. He looked out and saw snow falling. In the morning, there was a foot of snow and flowers sticking out from the snow. There was a gap in the clouds and a ray of light fell on the flowers in the snow. He said it was one of the most memorable experiences in all his travels and recommended we go there. We have put it in our calendars for five years time, when the boys are old enough for trekking.

We became accustomed to riding on the moped together, so the remaining days we spent visiting Galle, Mirisa beach and the nearby tea plantation called Handunugoda. We met the owner of the tea plantation called Herman and had a good discussion about tea drinking around the world. Apparently Ireland now drinks the most tea per capita in the world, although I thought it was Turkey (true for 2004). There was a good article in the NY Times recently about Sri Lankan teas battling the large tea companies like Lipton, by establishing a reputation for higher quality. Given our own experience of being presented warm water in a styrofoam cup and a Lipton tea bag, we hope they win this battle. Until then, we’ll drink coffee as circumstances dictate. Unfortunately, like the food, quality of tea served in Sri Lanka was quite erratic, and on too many occasions served very weak. Possibly it’s because the locals only drink the strong tea bags which contain ‘tea dust’ and don’t take a long time to brew. The good quality tea bags require hotter temperatures and longer steep times, so bringing a pot of hot water and a couple of tea bags isn’t going to end up with a happy result.

We hoped to learn more about tea on our trip to the hill country, where tea plantations are more numerous.

Posted by chris at 04:34 PM | Permalink