After many years of travelling I have learnt to never take a table close to the buffet. Yesterday was okay though because the restaurant was almost empty. Then a bus load of Germans arrived and we were instantly surrounded  – I felt like Stalingrad.

Contrasting buffet bun-fights, one of the joys of regular travel is seeing and experiencing many and varied places and cultures and unravelling the history. A disappointment however is that you find yourself in the most wonderful hotels and resorts but for only one night. We are regularly asked “How was your stay?” We regularly answer “Wish we could stay more than one night”. There was the Hotel Sultana Royal Golf near Ouarzazate in Morocco which, intriguingly is nowhere near a golf course that I can establish. And the Bahari in Chitwan, Nepal. And on this trip, the St Andrews Hotel in Nuwareliya. And many more. The child bride and I tell each other how great it would be to come back and spend a bit more time, knowing the chances of that happening are slim. Who knows – maybe when I own my own jet.

In the meantime we’ve still got Sri Lankan stuff to do as we head off for a third safari, this time in mostly wetlands on the southern coast. While this place has the ubiquitous elephants and mongooses (again, I pose the question – mongeese?) and rabbits and crocodiles and crocodile food (deer) and many and varied birds, it also has pangolins which I’d never heard of prior to their being verballed for supposedly causing a global pandemic. Naturally we didn’t see one but neither have we caught covid (thus providing conclusive proof etc etc) and I am yet to see pangolin soup on any menu. Maybe we’re going to the wrong restaurants.

Speaking of retaurants last night I asked for the wine list at our otherwise excellent hotel and was shown two bottles of wine, one white, one red. The level of service sophistication doesn’t necessarily match the magnificence of the hotel building and facilities as we have found elsewhere. But that’s part of the charm of the place I guess. A week ago, I’d have got a bit irritated and I’m blaming that on fatigue. Nothing to do with the level of tolerance inversely proportional to age. Oh no. But now the pace has slowed a bit after we pointed out to our guide that relaxation is also part of the deal. We’re not here to simply stampede from one monument to the next from dawn until dusk.

That pretty much wraps things up for Sri Lanka. We wish we could have stayed in Galle because I love forts and this one has an international cricket ground in it. But you can’t have everything. We sacrificed some places for safaris, one of which was whale watching. We saw one whale very briefly so didn’t really have a chance to watch it as such. And luckily we saw a leopard otherwise our land safari record would be 0 – 5. So now it’s off to the Maldives where I may be able to squeeze out one more of these missives, between champagnes.

I commented earlier about how good the bitumen roads are in this country compared with the one just to its north. But once you go off-piste they rapidly turn to shit. I would suggest they borrow India’s grader but I don’t think they have one either. In fact that’s something all of the safari parks we’ve been to in Nepal, India and here have in common apart from a scarcity of exotic animals – crap access roads. I guess it all adds to the experience.

And here’s a suggestion for any future visits to a safari park, you dear reader may be contemplating. Don’t take a guide who’s a bird watcher because while I’m on the lookout for leopards, he’s stopping the vehicle for every peacock and parrot. We have a plethora of peacocks and parrots where we live but as far as I am aware, there are no leopards roaming wild in Brisbane.

We set off on our first Sri Lankan safari and it was like mobilising for D-Day as once we got out into the wilds there were more Jeeps than trees. If you’ve seen a flight map of the USA or Western Europe showing all of the planes in the air at any particular point in time, that’s what a satellite picture of this place would have looked like. So you wouldn’t be surprised if skittish wild animals stayed well away from the roads. A few strategically placed elephants and the occasional mongoose was about it, apart from the above-mentioned birds. The closest we got to a leopard was a small ginger and white kitten sitting on the steps outside the park registration office where our guide was probably signing a disclaimer on our behalf absolving the park of responsibility should we be eaten by a mongoose.

The drivers, or many of them, keep contact with each other so that if someone spots something interesting like a sloth bear (I don’t know what this is because I’ve never seen one but they apparently reside here) or a leopard, Jeeps from all points of the compass descend on that spot like seagulls on a chip. These guys don’t miss a thing. It’s like they have lizard eyes. You wonder if they can see through your clothes.  And so it was on our second safari that day. We drove back and forth on the same road six times because there had been a rumoured leopard siting along with leopard prints (feet not clothing) in the mud. There wasn’t while we were there. Then word came through that one had been seen somewhere else so we were hell-for-leather through the jungle to another cluster of Jeeps and people all looking at a tree about 100m away. The CB and others said they saw it but I didn’t so like lower court judges in the USA I’m going to go against overwhelming evidence to the contrary and deny the majority.

On the way out of the park, the call came through again. We rushed to an intersection of three roads with a tree in the middle of said intersection and sitting next to the tree was the smuggest looking leopard you’ll ever see. It casually considered it’s frantically snapping audience then with a look of disdain turned and strolled off down the road as cool as a cool cat could be, like Josh Homme…..wearing his wife’s underwear. But we had finally seen a big cat after three countries and four safaris.

We’ve just had a couple of mostly sweat-free days in Kandy, or at least the sort of sweat that accompanies great physical exertion. We have however, been subjected to relentless economic tourism. I guess there’s a price to pay for standing still in an airconditioned room when the alternative can be rather unpleasant. It’s been a fairly frugal trip up to now with most things already paid for apart from the very palatable Lion Lager. This drop has figured prominently during lunch breaks and in hotel bars post climbing up, over or on various rocks and ruins in humid heat. But a trip to a wood carving establishment (three masks and a bowl) a batik or “batiq” boutique as the locals call it (a t-shirt), a gemstone and jewellery fashioning business (cats eye earings and a sapphire pendant) and a tea factory (one packet of tea) has seen the credit card, which has had a rather relaxed holiday to this point, kicked most of the way up Lion Rock.

All of the major thouroufares in Kandy are festooned with courful stripy flags dominated by the colours red, blue and yellow. What does that remind you of? I figured either the Kandy-Ass Fudge Packers are playing soon or the Romanian Ambassador is in town. Turns out it’s the Buddhist flag and that religious festival I previously mentioned is still on. That explains the crowds of people camped on the footpath under miles of canopies which lead straight to the temple where you can gaze at a box which is supposed to have one of Buddha’s teeth in it.

It’s not easy to get into all of these Buddhist things for Buddhist people so visiting a temple complex (another one) with a heaving mass of Sri Lankan humanity, many of whom are determined to get as close as possible to that tooth, isn’t front of mind. What did attract my attention, for a couple of reasons, was the temple’s massed drumming ensemble. They could really play and they were really loud. It was John Bonham loud. It was blast your ear wax loud.

Loud drums it seems, are a part of most if not all religious and cultural performances. We watched a dance troupe comprising 11 men and three women. The men bashed drums as well as blow into conch shells, play shrieking bugle type things and performed multiple back flips, forward flips and no-hands flips across the stage and managed to pull up before flipping through windows within about half a metre of the end of the stage at both ends. The ground was three floors down. Then some of them went downstairs and impersonated dragons with mouthfuls of kerosene and other firy tricks before walking across flaming coals. Not bad all up for a bunch of male dancers, if you get my drift. The three women confined themselves to traditional dance which mostly involved waving their arms.

We have left Colombo and I could say “finally” but that would be unfair. Nice place but you couldn’t get a beer (or anything else of significance) from a bar or restaurant for the two days we were there thanks to Buddha. The first day we were fortified by Air India’s perfectly acceptable French fizz. The CB and I took it as a challenge to see how much we could guzzle between Delhi and Colombo. A respectable amount by Absolutely Fabulous standards I think. Religious festivals unfortunately also apply to those who have no formal interest in them so we were collateral damage. But room service was the loophole we were looking for so the CB and I pulled a couple of chairs up to our hotel room’s window and pretended we were in the bar.

To get to the Dambulla temple caves you have to climb 393 steps, all of them up until you get to the top where they turn round and go down. When we got to the turnaround point I was sweating like Mr Creosote on death row. There were five caves/temples and each one had a huge (as in length not bulk) Buddha lying down. Apparently he was dead in one of them. You could tell by the way his feet were oriented apparently. I don’t think I was the sole person who couldn’t nail it. There were also numerous identical statues of Buddha all through the caves. They must have only had the ingredients for on mold.

Having completed the challenge of getting to the top but more importantly getting back to the air conditioned car in the car park, we went to lunch looking like a couple of San Franciscan hobos. I was extra uncomfortable because I had to wear long pants. I made the mistake (or was badly advised) in assuming i would’t get into the caves unless i pulled a pair of jeans over my shorts. If it had been a Jain temple l’d have got away with wearing no pants at all, like the Jain disciples we saw striding through the heaving Varanasi market crowds in their birthday suits trying not to step on bugs. But young ladies in crutch hugging shorts got in after having a sarong type thing tied round their waist. I’d have done that.

There are just the two of us on this expedition with our driver/guide. So if things get a bit too strenuous and out of hand I can tell him to get f…d. After the Dambulla climb I was set to do that but we got to lunch and cold Lion Lager before I could. After lunch we were still struggling and I got all philosophical. The stages of our lives are generally defined by infancy, school-years, college, marriage, parenthood etc. Right now they are defined by the time it takes for the nearby fan to swing back onto me as it does it’s back and forth.

It sounds so crass but we just spent quite a few hours in a heritage listed place called Polonnaruwa which is magnificent and we saw everything. But we didn’t need to. All the temples look the same, especially from the outside – I am not taking my shoes off again. This is the attitude that emerges when you are struggling to make your legs cooperate, your shirt is soaked with sweat and you know there is something better. Little did we know but we were about 14 hours away from something infinitely worse.

The Child Bride and I are now in Sri Lanka. We’ve noticed one or two differences already with two standing out. In #3 of this saga, I outlined the tortuous procedure we went through to get into India. It was almost like they were agonising over whether to let these two reprobates in. Here, we bowled up to the almost deserted immigration line. We abandoned the business class line as it was occupied by a couple of dozen shouting, arm waving family members of a particular religious persuasion. Our immigration man looked at all of the items I put on his counter, took the passports, made sure it was us, stamped them and gave them back. I said “is that all?” He nodded and we headed to the baggage carousel where our bags appeared in the first half dozen or so. Way to go Sri Lanka.

So far all’s hunky dory. The drive in was on a smooth almost deserted highway. If this road was custard, the Gwalior/Orchha road mentioned previously (at length in #7) would be gristle. The roadside is mostly clean and tidy with no randomly arranged piles of dirt and broken masonry and walls don’t look like they are half built (or half demolished). In other words, while India looks partially finished, like Rome, the Sri Lankan’s have completed the job.

Colombo has quite a Singapore feel to it with lots of colonial style buildings and an increasing number of glass behemoths. I say “increasing” because these guys are relatively late to the building orgy which has seduced much of Asia. 2009 to be exact which is when the civil war ended. It’s amazing what can be achieved if you’re not spending most of your money on guns and bullets to kill each other. Consider the USA after their civil war, the Japanese and Germans after WW2 and the South Koreans after the Korean War. The Vietnamese are also going okay with their version of capitalist communism.

This blog has always tended to focus on the quirky, weird, funny or, as a last resort, the interesting. Something happened when we checked out of our hotel in Colombo which we have never experienced before and falls under all of those descriptors. We met our guide in the hotel driveway but there was a short delay in leaving. It turns out that something suspicious was found on a towel in our room. It was blood because the CB scratched her nose. I guess they had to ensure there wasn’t a body stuffed in the safe before allowing us to leave. You’ve got to think that nastier things than a drop of blood on a towel are left in hotel rooms on a regular basis. Especially this place which has just had a religious festival. Say no more.