Talpe Kanda

Tom woke me up early with a text to see if I was up...I was now! He’d been awake for a while and thought it was best we got off in good time to Mt Lavinia. At that point we decided that if one of us was awake super early, we’d leave it to a sensible time then get the other up so as not to waste the day. So we checked out and headed for Kollupitiya station for the 7:30 train just a 10 minute walk from the hostel. We ended up arriving just as another train did so we were swamped with people on the stairs, and the train tracks. We grabbed some tickets, a mere RS15, so 6pence in England and boarded the train to Mt Lavinia along with the locals looking bemused at us. We got off the train, which runs between Galle Road and the Ocean, and decided we’d head straight for Tuk Tuk rental.

After the video and the briefing we met our instructor and went to a secluded part of town. Tom was up first, we soon realised how complex and counter intuitive it is to drive a tuk tuk. Tom confirmed this by not being able to reverse, so we decided there and then that any reversing would be done the dumb way - by hopping out and pushing the tuk tuk backwards. Fairly soon Tom got the hang of it and the instructor took us back to the start point for my lesson. It was weird at first but got the hang of it quite quick. Few more bits of paperwork and we were off - straight into Mt Lavinia/ Colombo crazy traffic. We were getting used to the controls, one of those ‘practice makes perfect exceecise’ we found out. After a couple of hours we stopped for lunch and we got our first taste of the assortment of curries which is common across Sri Lanka. The food was amazing, it was a bit of an order and see what happens situation, but it paid off. After this we kept heading south and made it to the Hikkaduwa tsunami museum. This was on the site of a lady’s house which was washed away in the 2004 tsunami. It was a huge collection of information, photographs and memories which she was sharing with everyone, quite a touching museum. Further south and we hit Hikkaduwa beach...our first Sri Lankan beach!! We couldn’t resist a dip and the water was like a bath. We bobbed around for a bit thinking of how just 36 hours earlier we were on a plane. We needed to continue further south to Unawatuna, so hopped back in the Tuktuk. We found our hostel and parked up inside the gates. Next job was to get to Unawatuna beach a kilometre or so away. We walked there to get sunset but it wasn’t so great, but we still went for a swim in what turned out to be a Russian hotspot, so strange.

On the way back we found this tiny house on an almost commercialised street. It was a little restaurant called Sridhara, great local cooked food. We were the only ones there as it was the cheapest place around! We were exhausted, so we walked back to the hostel grabbed some showers and called it a day.Read more