2015 March 12: Kandy: Part 2...Or, a Global Celebrity

On March 12th we spent several hours walking around Bogambara, popularly known as Kandy Lake.

Here are some things that we saw:

I know, it's just a pigeon...but it's the first GOOD picture of a pigeon that I have ever taken!

Little cormorant

Flowers

Egret

Pond heron and black turtle

Stork-billed kingfisher

Domesticated ducks

Cormorants in the trees

Entance to the pilgrim's bath houses

This one I just like a lot.

This could be a woodapple tree, but we are not sure.

Egret on its nest. I am still not sure whether or not getting crapped on three times while getting this picture was worth it. 

Pond heron

Little egret?

Flying foxes - a species of fruit eating bat

More domestic ducks

And more domestic ducks

And still more domestic ducks

Tilapia

I've got an itch!

Beautiful floating gardens with herons...

...and this big monitor lizard hiding in them!

Night heron

Water monitor lizard

More domesticated water fowl

A gigantic flying fox rookery

A spot-billed pelican - the locals claim it is not native and is from Africa.

Night heron again?

White-bellied sea eagle. We watched as he caught his fish and then escaped, leaving behind some very unhappy crows who wanted his catch.

The view of our hotel from the other side of the lake.

And this monster - a water monitor that is over 8 feet long and weighs over 100 pounds!

On March Mar 14, Steve was just reading the Wikipedia article on water monitors (a type of huge lizard found in the Asian tropics), and he realized that "one of the photos is of the exact same gigantic, very corpulent water monitor, resting on the very same dead tree, that we saw two days ago on our own visit to Kandy (the photo is captioned "Kandy Lake, Sri Lanka").... Apparently, he's now a global celebrity, thanks to Wikipedia."

2015 February 19: A Rare Perfect Day. Or, Jesus Got Our Number.

Ever have one of those rare almost-perfect days when everything seems to be going just right? when every care seems to melt away? where everything in the universe seems to perfectly aligned, for a few brief hours?

That was us today.

Steve and I awoke to a glorious gorgeous dawn.

We saw several species of birds while sitting on our top floor veranda waiting for Elanor to awake, and I was able to get this picture of a grey heron. Birds in flight are often difficult with my camera, as the shutter speed is too slow, so I was pleasantly surprised to see this.

We watched three coucals feeding behind the vacant lot next door, and I was finally able to get a fairly decent picture, something I have been trying to do since we arrived last Saturday.

At breakfast, one of the hotel workers offered to take our picture for us.

We began looking for a house, and Steve ran off to follow up on a lead given to him by the District leadership of our church here in Sri Lanka. A little while later, he came rushing into the hotel room, and very excitedly told us to come with him - the tuktuk driver was waiting to take us to the house he had looked at. Two exhausting but rewarding hours later, we had made an agreement to rent this house, a new luxury dwelling on Cemetery Road here in Negombo, close to shopping, groceries, the beach, church, restaurants, and downtown, for a very reasonable price. (More to follow when we get moved in.)

After our marathon two hour housing ordeal this morning, Elanor and I waited inside the open air lobby of our hotel while Steve paid our oh-so-patient tuktuk driver for all of the running around and waiting we had asked of him. We were chatting with the desk clerks when we heard Steve's raised voice say, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to insult you!" Uh oh, we thought. This did not sound good.

It turned out that Steve had offered him 100 rupees (78 cents) for his hours of work. Not wanting to insult Steve, our driver, named Jesus (pronounced with a 'j', not an 'h' sound like the Spanish), with clear disappointment in his voice, said, "I thought I would get at least 300 ($2.34)." Steve became flustered and couldn't think of the words he wanted to say in the sun addled state we were in - while the days start off at a 'cool' 25 or so degrees, the temperatures rapidly climb - and finally resorted to shoving a 1000 rupee note ($7.81) towards him while saying that he he misspoke, that he meant a thousand not a hundred and wasn't trying to insult him. Jesus protested that it was too much, and finally they got it sorted out between the two of them.

Pleased with ourselves for finding somewhere to live, we thought we would get some lunch and check out a nearby marshland for some bird watching. Jesus, our tuktuk driver from the morning, came to see if we needed to go anywhere. Now that he knows we are not trying to cheat him - plenty of tourists try to get the cheapest rates they can from some of the poorest people in the country - he was eager to help us, and gave Steve his number. He knows where our new place is, so we will likely be seeing him again and calling him if we need to take a tuktuk a longer distance.

We walked south along our street to Sha Indian Restaurant, where we had a simple lunch of rice and curried chickpeas - Elanor had shrimp, which she has learned to eat Asian style with shell and all intact. The servers were marveling over our binoculars - a luxury item in many poorer places - and were excitedly taking turns while we ate our meal. This was a second story restaurant which overlooked a garden full of trees across the street. More excellent bird pictures followed, as well as observations of just how these birds feed.

We continued south, looking for a tour company that arranges boat tours of the marshlands that we are interested in seeing. We didn't find it, but did find ourselves on the beach where Steve spent much of his time when he was here previously. (More about that later, too.) More great pictures, such as this one of a big yellow crab.

Back to the hotel for a couple of hours of rest in the blazing heat of the day. And then we went to the beach, intent upon taking a cool dip. As Elanor and I walked down the pathway, I got distracted by this Pond Heron.

Elanor ran ahead as Steve and I stopped to talk to some of our new Tamil speaking Muslim fishermen friends. Yesterday when Steve was in Colombo, they approached me at the nearby taembili (King coconut) stand, asking, 'Where is your husband, the one who speaks our language?" They were happy to see him and talk to him in Tamil. Steve glanced to where Elanor was standing near the water and then suddenly exclaimed, "There's one!" and took off running. I followed, perplexed at what was going on.

Well, while Steve and I were attempting to find out where the nomadic snake charmers he is here to study actually are, Elanor was happily talking to one of them and playing with his pet monkey! A long discussion and introductions ensued, Steve received all sorts of valuable information, an invitation to visit, and assurances that he would be quite welcome to learn whatever he wanted to from them.

We then went for an hour-long ride in a traditional outrigger fishing boat with our fishermen friends. We paid them, of course, but you know you are being accepted by a people when they start kidding around with you and joking in their language!

A sunset swim in the sunlit waters of the warm Indian Ocean was the perfect ending to such a rare day as this. May there be many more.

Sixty-Four Degrees

To pick up where we left off last time....

We got our Suburban fixed (well, sort of - Dad reports today that it's not running again), got everything packed, and headed for St. John's for the night on Wednesday. The two little dogs knew something was up, as they both refused to leave my side during the trip. The snow started coming on as we finished up some last minute items. And the baleful look of my Shih-Poo as Mom and Dad pulled away from the hotel broke my heart. They drove our truck back to their place in a wintry blast all the way to Whitbourne, where it suddenly turned into a beautiful evening for a drive. Poor little Essie (my first dog, named Essex after my first new car, a Dodge SX) cried all Thursday because he missed his momma.

With yet another snowstorm forecast for Thursday morning, we were relieved to see clear skies when we awoke at 5 am to go to the airport. As we walked into the lobby a scant thirty minutes later, the heavens opened and we were in whiteout conditions. By the time we got to the airport, just five minutes later, all incoming flights had been cancelled, and our flight was scheduled to be the last one to leave.

And leave we did! Although, admittedly, it was more than a little disconcerting to be in 70 km / hour winds, with snow whipping everywhere at -31 C, and snowplows clearing the runway in front of the plane as we took off!

With all of the opposition we had faced while getting ready for this adventure, it was no surprise to be given this one last kick as we left for warmer climes.

In the meantime, my husband (who claims to be an introvert and anti-social) happily spent an hour at the gate chatting with former Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Beaton Tulk about politics, books, the oil industry, finance, Kevin King's back country cabin, Mr. Tulk's 76 year old house that he and his wife bought and restored in Musgravetown, and my first-cousin-once-removed Eli who is a good friend of his and whom Steve spent a day this past summer helping to put up a fence around a cemetery where many of my ancestors are buried - part of yet another cemetery restoration project envisioned by my great-uncle Sim who is celebrating his 91st birthday today! Our many hours long stop-over in Newark also saw my husband happily chatting away with the guys at the pizza stand in the airport food court - in Spanish, Sinhala, and Tamil.

The flight from Newark to Mumbai was an uneventful but long fourteen hours. It was rather strange in some ways, because we left on Thursday, but were flying east, so we had an extremely short day and landed in Mumbai shortly before midnight on Friday. It did give one pause for thought as we flew over Afghanistan, grateful to be flying at over 30 000 feet. But the sunset high in the air over Pakistan was truly spectacular - there is no word to describe the colour of where the saffron and cobalt of a Middle Eastern sunset meet as the sun is just sinking below the horizon. And one doesn't often hear this about airline food...but it was incredible. Curried chickpea wraps for snacking, some sort of crunchy grain salad and cauliflower curry for supper, mini samosas with sweet chutney and curried sago for breakfast.

The airport in Mumbai was incredible - the terminal has been completely renovated and now doubles as one of the pre-eminent museums in India, with 3 kms of exhibits! And, unlike American, Canadian, and other Western airports, photography is encouraged. With ancient and modern arts and crafts, frescoes, and archeological displays, it is truly breathtaking.

While wandering around and exploring all there was to see, I happened to stroll down a side hall in search of 'the facilities'. As I passed by a huge open double-door leading to a florescent sterile tube shaped corridor that apparently runs around the entire outside perimeter of the shopping, duty-free, and display area, I caught a glimpse of a large man with Asian features being held and forcibly removed of his jacket and backpack by three security officers. Needless to say, I did not stick around to see how this ended.

A couple of hours later we were on the final leg of our journey - Mumbai to Colombo - where again, the airline food was delicious - a spiced pancake with a vegetable korma and fruit salad (the one thing I did not like was a piece of fruit found in the fruit salad which tasted the way I imagine socks that have been worn for far too long in old hiking boots would taste), and Moong Dal for snacking. (This treat reminded me of a student I once taught who was supposed to be autistic and had been placed in my hard-to-serve regional autistic program. While trying to find some way to reach him, I visited him and his family at their home, where I discovered that he was a very different person at home than at school. While he obviously did have some intellectual delay, he could communicate just fine with his family, showed all sorts of social skills that he did not display at school, and did not have many of the repetitive behaviours that were his hallmark while in the classroom. After speaking at length with his huge extended family, I determined that the boy could not speak or understand English, but spoke Urdu at a child's level, and that Dal was his favourite food. I started bringing Dal to school to share with him whenever he became agitated, and miraculously, many of his autistic behaviours disappeared, and he was later moved to a program that better fit his needs as an ESL learner with intellectual delay, rather than an autistic program.)

At 5 am we landed, and quickly made our way through customs and immigration, found our driver (named Walleterad), and marveled at the beauty of a Sri Lankan early morning in 33 degree weather.

Of course, there was a mix-up at the hotel where we were supposed to be staying (are you surprised? given the nature of our trip to this point, we certainly weren't!) and our reservation had been lost. The owner of the hotel was very apologetic, especially after he learned that I am Canadian. He lived in Calgary for several years and loves Canada, but it was too cold for him although his wife loves it! First they lived in England, but it was too expensive, then Arizona where he loved the weather but it was a terrible place to raise children, then on to Calgary which was great for his children and he even considered buying some farmland, before deciding to move back to Sri Lanka, "the most beautiful and best place in the world!"

Fortunately, however, his son and daughter-in-law or daughter and son-in-law (it was a little confusing to follow) own a hotel across the street from his establishment, and Steve quickly arranged for us to stay there.

And so, here we are - from a North Atlantic blizzard to Sri Lankan humidity. And only 64 degrees change in the temperature!