March 16 -17 Yala to Colombo to Negombo

We managed to get some internet at our hotel lobby, and then started the long drive around the southern tip of Sri Lanka, past Matara to Galle, the old Dutch port with a major fortress to guard it. The road was mostly quite straight but slow because of traffic hazards, so it took almost until noon to reach Matara and we were not at our hotel in Colombo until 7pm.

We had lunch at a beachside restaurant, watching Western tourists trying to body-surf in the big waves, without much success just outside of Matara . This area is well known for its beaches and surfing, but is also plagued by touts.

We drove through the old Dutch fort at Galle, which was interesting. We looked at a cute old Dutch home that had been made into a museum cum gem shop, and then left to head north to Colombo. In looking at the houses in Galle we noticed that roofs were decorated with fretwork. As Leslie likes the Victorian houses with all their fancy fretwork( "painted ladies") she was forever looking at them from that point forward along the coast. As the Dutch did not go inland this is why she had not noticed the pillared verandas and fretwork facades earlier.

The whole coast here was severely impacted bythe tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, which also hit Thailand and parts of Indonesia. 50,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka, and the evidence of destroyed buildings can still be seen.  Going further up the coast, we reached a spot where we were scheduled to hire a glass-bottomed boat for a look at the local fish and corals, but the weather seemed rough and we decided to keep going north.

It took several hours to reach Mount Lavinia and the famous hotel of the same name, which sits on the coast just south of Colombo and where parts of "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was filmed.  We looked around the hotel, took a few pictures, but we think that a new wing has been added where the lawn overlooking its northern beach used to be, while otherwise it seemed the same. We both had stayed here in younger days and it had made an impression.

In 20 minutes we reached our Pearl Grand Hotel, in the business area of Section 3 of Colombo, where we were given a nice room on the 10th floor with an ocean view and good AC. Again it was a very long day in the car and several grey hairs with the driving behavior. We would definately not advise a self-drive holiday here.

Sunday we were up and out the door by 9am, first to pay for our Sri Lanka tour ($1,500 which was for hotel with breakfast, car and driver for 9 days). We then did a city tour and stopped in a couple of shops but purchased no real souvenirs only some fabric for some future project. We drove from Colombo along the Dutch canal, bird watching as we went along until we reached Negombo.

The Dutch built an extensive canal system that runs 120 km from Colombo in the South, through Negombo to Puttalam in the north.  The purpose of the original waterways was to transport the export produce to seafaring ships leaving from the port of Negombo; the cargoes consisting of precious stones, pearls and spices, cloves, cardamoms, pepper, arecanuts and above all, cinnamon.

Negombo is still an active fishing harbor with large vessels that go out to sea for 2 weeks. As it was a Sunday the market was closed. This area is an old Portuguese one so most of the people are Catholic and have Portuguese sounding last names. We spent the afternoon doing laundry, reorganizing our bags and catching up on email and blog.

We have found another interesting free ebook related to the early days in Ceylon.  Robert Knox's An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon is an account of his experiences on Ceylon while he was a captive of the Kandyan king in 1659. He was there for 20 years before he was able to make his escape. The King treated the prisoners fairly leniently and Robert was able to become a farmer, moneylender and pedlar. Now David and I will be fighting over the IPad on our trip tomorrow to India as we have now two interesting books on it to read.
As evening entertainment we watched a webinar related to fundraising and the role of the Board in non-profit organizations. It was interesting. While this webinar attendance was at the request of NCUSAR for all their Board members there were other webinars that looked of interest in relation to Tribal Music Asia's Resonance Project.