Nilaveli

Again, we had a fantastic nights sleep courtesy of the sound of the sea. We rose early as usual and went to the table and chairs to await our breakfast, again it was eggs, break, jam and roti but it was as good as previous days.

Today we had decided that we’d got toTrincomalee to check out a few of the sights we had heard about. We hopped in the Tuktuk and saw that it was really empty on fuel. I spun the knob to switch us to reserve fuel just to be safe and we headed to Trincomalee. On the way we stopped to get fuel and the fill up cost us just over 1,000 rupees...our biggest one yet but still only £4.20. One of the guys said our tyre was needing some air, so he filled it up, not sure if he wanted money or not. When he had done he then said “money”, he tried to get 100 rupees from us... we said we had no cash only card and drove away saying we’d come back later, oops we forgot! Trincomalee was a town with not too much going on, so we went to the tip of the headland where there was an old temple (Hindu) and the old Dutch Fort.

We parked up and began our walk to the temple, harassed along the way by a couple of beggars and cafe people wanting some money. We got to the entrance of the temple and once again there was a charge for leaving your flip flops which we always take exception to. We stuffed them in the bag but the guard still wasn’t happy. I ran up to see if the temple was worth a visit and it was to be fair. We both went back to the Tuktuk and dumped our flip flops, being harassed there and back by the same beggars and cafe people - got to give them one thing, they’re persistent. We walked barefoot in smug as you like and had a look round. The temple was perched high on the rocky headland with steep cliffs easing down to the ocean. It was a very colourful temple, made more so by, what we guessed was, a wedding. Lots of drums being sounded and people milling around gave it quite a buzz. By this time it was getting pretty hot so we decided that we’d check out Trincomalee beach, however it was no where near as nice as ours at Nilaveli, so we headed back via our bakery man - now a best friend. Instead of us asking what we wanted, this time he just said for us to come into the back room where it’s all made and and go through everything and pick out what we wanted. With the prices of everything firmly in our minds from the last three days of buying things we got ourselves 100 rupees of baked goods and headed back for a chill, swim and a read of our books.

We headed out for dinner to the local Kottu man at the main road, which was nice and easy for us. As we’d done some maths earlier in the day, we realised that we comfortably had enough cash to see us through the rest of Sri Lanka, so on the way back we went and bought even more baked stuff from our guy - we were slightly obsessed and was probably a good job we were leaving the following day. We got back via the beach and it was a dark clear night, so the stars were out in full force. We had to sort out a plan for the tomorrow, would we try and get to the west coast in one chunk, or would we break it across an afternoon and following morning? We decided on the latter and that we’d stay a night in Mihintale - a temple/ruin filled town much like Anuradhapura. With that decided we headed back for our final sleep in the beach cabana. I went to do my teeth and came back to Tom saying “don’t panic” whilst sat in the room. Immediately I guessed what it could be...a cockroach!!! Tom thought he had trapped it under a big bottle cap, but it had somehow escaped and was now with all our stuff in the corner. We thought that it must have gone out through one of the cracks in the floorboards, so we safely went to bed under our big mozzy net. About half an hour later we were both reading and I looked up to see the same cockroach climbing up the mozzy net, but couldn’t see if it was inside or outside the net. I got up with a massive exhale and quickly got out the net leaving Tom behind (sorry). He promptly thanked me for the quick escape and we saw that it was inside the net! I got a big empty 5 litre bottle and fed it inside the net trapping the cockroach, and Tom craftily went in and screwed the lid on, we’d triumphed and could now sleep easy.Read more