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  • Day 21

    Polonaruwa —> Kalkudah

    January 26, 2020 in Sri Lanka ⋅ ☁️ 29 °C

    We woke up for an 8 o’clock breakfast, an assortment of baked goods, a simple breakfast but a free one! We were getting our things together and suddenly we were joined by five cats! Two adults, two young cats and a tiny kitten. I enticed them further into the room, but the little posse didn’t come much closer. We paid up for the night (after awkwardly disputing the cost) and made our way to Kalkudah in the TukTuk.

    We had decided to not take the B502 road (which was famous for elephants) to Kalkudah as it was massively out of our way and we had seen an elephant on the road yesterday anyway. Tom drove today and we got there in good time, arriving at our place ‘Inn on the Bay’ just before midday. Naturally, we dumped our bags and made our way straight to the sea! We were a 5 minute walk either side from two different beaches, either Kalkudah beach or Pasikuda beach. We decided to check out Pasikuda beach for a few hours first. It was a beautiful, a long stretch of beach full of local people and a few fishing boats scattered along the shore. We found a spot and chilled out for little while before heading over to Kalkudah beach. There was no litter on this beach and the water was gorgeous here, plus we had the beach all to ourselves. We did our usual by playing around in the waves for a little while as a few locals looked on in amusement (or so we hoped).

    We made our way back to the hotel made use of the outdoor shower and then went in hunt of food. We had been warned that the east coast was pretty dead as it was out of season, so a lot of restaurants would be closed...we found this out first hand after we drove around the local area and couldn’t find anything open or at least any local food place that were charging reasonable prices. We decided to drive into the bigger towns nearby in hunt of the local places because whether it is in season or not for tourists, the local have to eat! We drove to a small town and our logic paid off, we pulled into a very local looking place, and when I say local I mean plastic table and chairs, no menu and lots of local people sat around enjoying their food. Tom got out the TukTuk and asked the guy how much for Kottu, he said 250...I assumed that this was a western price he was charging but as it was much better than the other places near our hotel we accepted and sat down at the plastic tables as they cooked our Kottus fresh (with the loudest Kottu making yet)! The food came and it was delicious and the spice was killing me today, I think I went a bit overboard with the chilli! When it came to paying the man actually only charged us 125 each, so half the price he quoted! I presume he had reduced the price from the western price and actually accepted local price from us... finally an honest man in the north!

    Before heading back to our hotel we went on the hunt for something sweet and it wasn’t long before we rocked up to a place that was pinned on maps.me as “the Muslim Place”, that had a jam packed bakery section that had Tom and I drooling! We ordered a bag full of sweet baked goods and were happy now to head back! We thought we would enjoy our sweet food outside as we could hear the ocean but there were lots of bugs so we settled for under the mosquito net in bed with a film on!

    Midway through the film (Bridesmaids of course) we heard a scratching noise on the roof, coming from what we thought was a bird or a monkey. To our surprise we then saw four little footprints on the canopy that was draped just beneath the ceiling held up at each end by some string... what the hell was this about to join us in the room!? It slowly walked closer and closer to the wall until we could see, it was a rat! It then went from the canopy, tightrope walked across the string that was holding it up to the other side of the wall and back out... relieved that it didn’t join us in the room but hey it was still a god damn rat, albeit quite a clean looking one. We thought we had seen the last of it so got back into our film but then another scratching noise about 20 minutes later was followed by the rat running across the top of the wall much quicker than last time - Tom and I were in stitches at the acrobatic/tight roping rat and finally got to sleep, it was like some sort of guessing game whether we would wake up with company in the bed!!
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