Yeah, yeah, I know. I forgot another Wednesday, but with all the Uni stuff, I had too many other things to do. (Actually, that’s not completely true, but it sounds better than “I was just too lazy to write a post, yesterday” :-) ) But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
We spent the weekend in Kandy, which is one of the largest cities in Sri Lanka and for once not close to the beach but in the mountains. On Friday morning Peter and I once again decided to leave Colombo behind us and travel to Kandy. Steven spent the weekend somewhere else doing something else, so he missed this trip. Kandy was on our list of places to see for quite some time now, so we decided to finally go for it and for once we wanted to travel by train. We had to get up quite early on Friday morning as the train was leaving at 6.30 from the main train station, which is a 20 minute bus ride from our apartment. We managed to get up and to get to the station on time just to be told, that the train is already full… Yeah, trains in Sri Lanka get full, something that I hadn’t expected, but well, as the bus station was also close by we again went for this way of travelling. We didn’t choose the public bus, but one of the a little more expensive private busses, which have an A/C and more comfortable seats. The seats where nice and even the bus ride was ok especially because we drove into a completely new direction, but the one thing that really bothered me was, that could not regulate the A/C which meant it got freezing cold half way through the bus ride.
As Kandy is in the middle of the island, surrounded by mountains and built around a lake the climate is much nicer than in Colombo. We arrived around noon and as it is our luck it immediately started to rain right when we got out of the bus. The first thing as usual was finding a place to sleep. Lucky for us a nice guy walked straight to us and asked us if we need a place to sleep. Well, it wasn’t actual luck, as you can usually expect someone walking up to you asking you if you need a Tuk Tuk or a hotel when you get out of an intercity bus, but the guy was quite nice and offered us to drive us around the town for 200 Rs. and to show us some nice hostels. If you agree to an offer like this you can count on the fact that the first place you get to see is quite out of your budget, and that the owners are somehow related to the driver. But as the guy had agreed to show us some nice places to drive us to all the places we wanted to see the journey went to three more hostels till we finally got to a nice private family guesthouse. It was still a little out of our budget but the owner was quite nice and she agreed to give us another 150 Rs. discount. We put our bags into the room and headed for the town and to all the sights we wanted to see in Kandy. First sight we got to see was the “Temple of the Tooth”. We didn’t actually see the tooth (I’m not even sure if there really is a tooth), but we wondered through the temple and the integrated museum and all this, and the best thing is, we did it for free. We saved the 1000 Rs. entrance fee thanks to our residence visa. This nice little stamp that was so hard to get, proved itself quite useful. We managed to save quite some money and not only at the temple, but also at the botanic garden and the tea museum and hopefully it will save us a little more. The thing is with a residence visa you don’t have to pay the tourist prices but you get the local prices, which are usually 10 to 20 times lower :-)
We left rainy Kandy on Sunday at 3pm, this time by train as we had already bought out tickets on Friday. Travelling by train is so much nicer than by bus. You have a lot more space, you can walk around, you don’t have to fear for your life when the crazy bus driver overtakes two Tuk Tuks at the same time, it’s much more relaxed, although a little shaky.
Colombo is quite rainy at the moment, which really starts to bug me, especially since I forgot my umbrella on the train. I want the sunshine back and I want to go to the beach, but as we have classes during the week anyway it’s not that bad, I guess, at least it gives some time to do the reading. I’m going to write another post about Kandy and one about the University, soon. So don’t forget to come back for the pictures.
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