Weekly Review 11

We managed to get out of Colombo this past week, so I actually got something to tell you in this WR and not just ramble about the university and such, as I did in the past.

We had a long weekend ahead of us, so Peter, Felix and I decided to leave Colombo and do something useful with these free days. We wanted to climb up Adam’s Peak, a holy mountain in the south of Sri Lanka. It’s said that you can see an amazing sunrise from the top of the mountain, so one should be up there roughly before 6 o’clock in the morning. That’s why we left Colombo on Thursday at 8pm by train and it only took us a little over 7 hours to get to the foot of Adam’s Peak. When we arrived in Dalhousie, a small village from where steps lead up to the top of the mountain, we just put our stuff into the pre-booked hostel room and got going. It was 3.45h in the morning and 5200 steps uphill were waiting for us. Sunrise was supposed to be around 6.15am, so we had not even 3 hours left to conquer that mountain. It was by now the hardest thing I’ve done in Sri Lanka, and maybe in my life. You can’t imagine how tiring it is to climb up step after step after step with only more steps in front of you and no sign of an end to it.

But it was worth it. It took me more or less two hours to get on top of Adam’s Peak, so I made it in time for the really beautiful sunrise and to enjoy the view over Sri Lanka. You can find the pictures I took here: Adam’s Peak

Our journey went on from Adam’s Peak down south and to the west coast. It took us more or less 9 hours in the bus to get to Hikkaduwa, which is way more time then anybody should spent in a bus, but we were rewarded with a nice swim in the ocean and a really cool party in Unawatuna. As we had spent more time in public transportation then in beds, we were quite dead on Sunday and used the whole just to recover from the trip and to relax at the beach.

Monday started with snorkeling at some kind of coral reef in Hikkaduwa, the same one where we went snorkeling the last time, but this time the sea was much nicer. And after that we took the train back home to Colombo and to our apartment.

This was the last Weekly Review for 2010, as I’m leaving Colombo tomorrow to spend the holidays with my family and my friends in Germany. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and I hope you get a great start into the New Year.