Travels Outside the Box

Sri Lanka 2008

New Year's resolution for 2008: update blog more regularly. With that in mind, here is a brief post with some photos from our trip to Sri Lanka.

The last time we were in SL was only 5 months after the Boxing Day Tsunami and that trip was all about helping rebuild houses and get food to people. It was like a blur and didn't really seem like a trip home for Gish or a vacation for either of us. Rightly so. But this past December we were really ready to soak up some home cooked curries, tropical heat and sea salty air. I got my scuba diving certification last year and was eager to see SL from underwater. And Gish was ready to give it a try too.

We landed on the 29th of December, after long flights and an eleven hour layover in Heathrow Airport. Our first couple of days were spent in Colombo, at Gish's parents' new apartment. Then we set off for Hikkaduwa, a town on the Southern coast renowned for its diving and surfing.

Hikkaduwa has a coral reef offshore which creates a naturally calm beach area (it was spared the worst of the tsunami). The reef also makes for the excellent diving and snorkeling. We stayed at the Coral Sands Hotel, due mainly to the fact that we had a connection at the International Diving School, which is connected to the hotel. It turned out to be a pleasant place to stay and we befriended most of the hotel staff over the eight days we were there (5 days the first week, 3 days the third week of our trip).

I dove every day, sometimes twice a day, at sites including the massive underwater boulder piles Goda Gala and Hikkaduwa Gala ("Gala" means "rock" in Sinhala) and on the old shipwrecks, the Earl of Shaftsbury and the Conch. Conditions varied from good viz and calm currents to ripping currents and bad viz. Water temp was always 81 degrees. Heaven.


Gishani did a Discover Scuba dive, where she took some brief lessons and then went on a shallow dive with an instructor. She liked it so much that she decided to go ahead and get certified for diving. So she did her classes and skills dives with an instructor (a wonderful Austrian chap named Rainer) while I was out with the group diving. By the time we left Hikkaduwa after the first week, Gish was a certified Open Water Diver, so we planned to return in a week to do some more diving. I was, and am, so proud of her.

The week in between our diving adventures, we drove inland, to the Hill Country, with Gishani's parents, to stay at an old English bungalow on a working tea estate. Fantastically remote, Mahatenna House had a spectacular setting high on a mountainside, with views over acres of sloping terraced tea and misty mountains in all directions. The weather was cool and rainy and we spent days huddled in bed, reading and sleeping. Perfect way to off-gas all that nitrogen we'd sucked up while diving the week before.

The one day the rain stopped for more than five minutes, Gishani, her father and I decided to hike down to the waterfall on the property. This entailed a steep walk down a slippery path through the tea bushes. What we weren't prepared for were the legions of leeches that were lying in wait for us. They attacked en masse, climbing up from the mud to get in our sandals, dropping from trees to attach to my neck, and even one that found its way.... well, never mind that bit. Needless to say, we didn't make it to the waterfall, but turned and high-tailed it back to the house, where spousal duties extended to thorough bodily examinations that would make an airport security agent proud.

All Biblical rain and leeches aside, it was a relaxing way to spend four days. We all left feeling rejuvenated, which was negated by the bumpy five hour drive back to Colombo.

The second time around at Hikkaduwa, we went on three dives, the last one to Goda Gala being absolutely spectacular. Visibility was over 60 feet, currents calm and stunning scenery. Huge schools of colorful fish spiraled above us and we saw numerous morays hiding among the rocks. After surfacing, while we waited for the dive boat, I saw two dorsal fins surface about 20 feet behind Gish. It was a brief moment of anxiety (i.e., panic) for both of us until I realized they were dolphins breaching. Whew...

Our days in Colombo were spent visiting old school friend and relatives, eating well and a bit of shopping. Meals consumed included wild boar curry, crab curry, roast beef, godhamba roti, pol roti, chicken curry, potato, prawns, kola kandha (Gish's home-cooked favorite, my least favorite) and on and on. The entire trip was a movable feast (we hauled a frozen wild boar haunch back from Mahatenna House) and one from which our waistlines are still recovering.

Our trip back to the States was predictably long and unbearable, with two ten hour flights separated by a mere 45 minute walk between terminals in Frankfurt. Ouch. Anyway, now we're home and it's February. Enough said. We're ready to go back.

posted by Outdoor2some @ 4:28 PM