By the time we were ready to leave, we rather liked our tea plantation. We certainly loved our spacious new room, and we had come to like the staff quite a bit. It is a particularly magical place in the morning. The mist on the mountains was not quite as thick as it had been the day before, but the deck overlooking the tea bushes was still beautiful. Some of our fellow guests, a family from Norway, had the good sense to have breakfast out there.
Today we were in the car for about five hours, but it felt like double that. Sri Lanka is not a large island, but it does not have a well-developed system of roads. Other than one new toll road between Columbo and Galle, all the roads are pretty much two lanes and there are commercial and sometimes residential developments on every inch of both sides of the road. Cars and buses must compete with bicycles, mopeds, and tuk-tuks. Most of the time you are lucky if you can go 15 miles an hour. To make matters worse, much of the route today from Hatton down to the coast was fairly windy. John fortunately did not get motion sickness as he often does on routes like this.
But it was all worth it when we came to our last real hotel in Sri Lanka, Adithya in the district of Rathgama, near Galle on the south coast. We had told the travel agent when we booked this tour that we wanted to end it on the beach in a place where we could just relax. This place is perfect for that. We have a large room.
Out one window we have a lovely view of a koi pond.
Just outside the room on another side, we have a patio with a cold tub.
We relaxed for a while and then made arrangements to go into Galle for the evening for dinner. The hotel arranged a tuk-tuk to take us there and bring us back. Along the way we passed a small procession.
I am not sure who they were or what they were celebrating but it seemed like a very happy group.
Galle is the largest city on the south coast. It is most well-known today for the Fort, the walled fortified area of the city built by the Dutch in the 18th century. Most of the fortifications are still in place.
But today the fort serves no military purpose. Instead, it is a old neighborhood that is rapidly being transformed into a tourist destination. But thankfully the tourists have not yet completely taken it over. Locals still wander the sea walls
and play soccer adjacent to historic structures.
We had dinner here. The most celebrated restaurant in Sri Lanka is The Ministry of Crab in Columbo. You need reservations a month in advance, and we were not going to be in Columbo, anyhow. So when we heard celebrity chef owners opened a second restaurant in Galle we decided to try it. It is not the same menu they have in Columbo. In fact, this one is basically Japanese. But they did have some of the greatest hits of the Columbo eatery. The people next to us ordered better than we did. They started with this amazing sashimi presentation.
I had some crab fried rice and John had a crab salad. They were good, but nothing extraordinary.
After dinner, we caught a tuk tuk back to our hotel half an hour away. Tomorrow will be our first full day at the beach … but we will be starting with whale watching. Stay tuned!
