I write this post almost two weeks post experience.  This is partly due to the lack of available internet and partly due to my lack of inspiration.  Not wanting to sound unappreciative or jaded, and not wanting to convey a false enthusiasm, I waffled on writing anything at all about our fifth week of travel.  But, my compulsion for a neatly organized chronicle and a realization that it’s OK to write about being bored, underwhelmed, exasperated, defeated is an essential part of honest travel blogging.

Week Five marked our third and final week in Sri Lanka.  Our time in Sri Lanka ended up being fairly evenly divided between the southwest coast (Week 1) , the hill country (Week 2), and cultural triangle/ancient cities (Week 3).  So the cultural triangle – the most heavily beaten path by tourists (though we still saw few) – boasts several towns that are surrounded by clusters of ancient temple ruins (and many temples still very much alive and running).  The main draws in these areas are the ruins at Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa, and Anuradhapura.  These sites were cool.  Yes, even awesome at times.  But the effort involved in getting to these places, the weather endured in the travel and in the actual site seeing (monsoon! sweltering! mosquito armies!), and the accrual of seeing temple after temple after stupa after stupa after dagoba after dagoba (ho-hum) summated to warrant an underwhelmed response.  Even writing that makes me feel a bit spoiled, but that was my honest experience.   Iggy’s musings on this and about our third week in SL are  more complete…

I will also note that a major force contributing to my overall lack of a sense of free-spirited, joy-filled adventuring is witnessing how women live in this part of the world.  While India and Sri Lanka are decades ahead of some of their neighboring countries, it’s still unsettling to be moving about in a “man’s world”, sometimes being the only woman in sight.  But I’ll save that for another post…

Our final 36 hours in Sri Lanka involved yet another very long, very crowded bus journey (though my elbows and knees were sharpened at that point so no one’s crotch touched me) that had us debarking in a little town called Negombo that was near the Colombo airport.  After the sticky and sweaty and stressful bus ride, Iggy and I were literally dropped kicked out of the bus on a dark, mostly deserted street that we were told was Negombo.  The bus stopped just long enough for our feet to touch the ground and our bags to be tossed to us (inexplicably soaking wet).  That might have been the  nadir of our time in SL but perhaps not…  So we trudged down the road with our water-laden (and heavier than ever!) packs, praying that everything inside wasn’t wet, until we found a very kind rickshaw driver named Mouhammad who delivered us safely to the hotel at which we had a reservation.  There we found a clean (!) and inviting room with air-con (!!!) that had plenty of space for us to hang a line to dry our soaked clothes.  We spent the following day hanging around the lovely hotel garden reading, chatting with other travelers, waging war on mosquitoes, and playing with a cute little kitten that we temporarily adopted (we named her Tabitha).  Not a bad way to finish our time in the land of Ceylon. 

Week Six: Kerala coast…. coming soon!