Mihintale —> Kalpitiya

Up and out by 730, today we were going to check out the Mihinthale ruins, which we had heard were for the most part free of charge, apart from the main ones where it was 500. We parked our TukTuk at the parking area at the top and the man from the shop last night who tried to sell us a tour popped his head through the TukTuk...to get rid of him last night I had told him we were coming up for sunrise, he obviously knew now we were lying. We politely got rid of him again and walked to the big pagoda that sat on the top of a huge boulder that you could see from the town. On our walk there we were being whistled at, the whistles were of course coming from the direction of a ticket office. After checking out the map, we went over to the ticket office where they demanded 1,000 (not 500), we contemplated whether or not we actually wanted to see the ruins all that much (we would be in Hampi, India in 2 weeks time), and we decided not really, however as we were chatting a few Sri Lankan tourists walked in completely free of charge... this infuriated me as I said why don’t they need a ticket, the guy said that they would make a donation at the top. I asked if I could make a donation and he said it wasn’t allowed, so we left. We checked out one of the ruins that was free to enter on the way back to the hotel. When we got back to the hotel we were met by the owner, who looked a bit confused at how quickly we had done the ruins, so we just told him a white lie that we were going to do them on the way out of town and we’re just grabbing some breakfast..

We packed up and checked out, and said goodbye our host who asked where we were staying tonight. The place in Kalpitiya was called Dolphin Wadiya. He promptly gave us a definition of what Wadiya meant - it describes an old fashioned fishermen’s hut made up of sticks and palm leaves for the walls and roof. We thought that was quite cool, so we we made our way to the West coast excited to stay at our Wadiya in Kalpitiya! I was driving today and it was 140km to our accommodation. About half an hour in I catapulted Tom forwards in the Tuktuk as I slammed the brakes on...I’d spotted a food stall at the side of the road that appeared to be selling donuts. Tom got out an asked the lady for 2 of the “donuts”, they were 15 rupees each! We ate them and they were delicious, not sweet but instead filled with vegetables and chilli...shortly after finishing them Tom went back to the lady and got 2 more...she found it funny how quickly we’d decided to get more! After about 100km we reached the coastal town of Puttalam, where we stopped and grabbed some lunch. We shared a Kottu and a veggie fried rice, was delicious and only 300, total!

We eventually arrived at our accommodation at midday where we would be spending the next three nights. The check-in process was unusual, and by unusual I mean there wasn’t one really....we ended up milling around for 20 minutes chatting to a Danish and Canadian guy who were staying at our place, but after nobody turned up to check us in we left our stuff in the TukTuk and walked to the beach. Our accommodation was positioned on the edge of a lagoon and a shortcut for us to get to the beach was to walk through the shallow waters of the lagoon...after taking about 3 steps we discovered it was not sand under our feet but silty sludge - erghhh! We even tried to put our flip flops back on to walk through without feeling the disgusting slime oozing between our toes, but that didn’t quite work as the sludge became thicker and our flip flops started to get stuck! I took my flip flops off and made a run for it, Tom tried to do the same but one of his was wedged into the sludge and all of a sudden he felt a nibble on his ankle...after the story the Danish guy had just told us about him getting stung by some creature in the lagoon earlier on, Tom made a run for it, abandoning the flip flop in the sludge. When he got to the sand, it floated back up to the surface and he now had to retrieve it as I pointed out it was actually my flip flop I was wearing!

We enjoyed the beach for a few hours, playing around in the waves and sand and watching the kite surfers do their thing (Kalpitiya was a hot spot for kite surfing). We then thought we would head back to try and check-in, it was around 4pm now so surely somebody would be back...wrong. Nobody was there still so Tom made a few phone calls and eventually one of the managers turned up and made up our room. We showered and chilled out for a little while and then went to watch the sunset at the bottom of the garden at the guesthouse that was right on the lagoon, the sunset was okay so we made our way back to our room to get ready to go for dinner. Twenty minutes later I shouted for Tom to come back outside, the sky had turned a deep shade of red as the sun was fully setting now. We made our way round the back of the property where the fishermen kept their boats and watch the sun completely disappear until we were surrounded by darkness. It was now time for food! The Danish guy had told us about a little place just a 2 minute walk away, so we decided to check that out.... we arrived and were greeted by a friendly middle aged man and woman, they owned this very local restaurant that doubled up as a shop. We ordered two vegetable curry and rice and waited for them to finish making the curry before the woman served us with a HUGE portion of rice and 4 curries. Tom and I are very similar with how we eat our food, always starting with the dish that looks worse and finishing with what looks best...we started off eating the green bean curry and the dhal and when we had both finished those two curries the woman took the bowls away and filled them up! This was amazing, it was all you can eat for 250, and it was amazing food too! Completely stuffed, we paid up and waddled back to Dolphin Wadiya where we played cards (shithead obviously), and also counted how much money we had left and knew that we would be fine for the rest of Sri Lanka with the amount of money we had...which shows how cheap Sri Lanka is as we only would have £14 left after accommodation and the dolphin watching tour we had planned was paid for. I had agreed to take the Danish guy who was staying at our place to the bus stop tomorrow early, as his TukTuk has let him down so we decided to get an early night.Read more