Our taximan was gas. Brian asked 'Is there much crime here?", and he replied, "no sir, the only crime was on one tourist who was an Englishman. He came with his wife and he upset a lot of people when drunk and everybody killed him''. We imagined everyone in Sri Lanka ganging up to kill this drunk Englishman. The 1916 rising, poppadum style :)
The place we are staying is called Dalmanutha Gardens in Bentota http://www.dalmanuta.com - it is a gorgeous little spa hotel on the Bentota river in the forest. There are only 9 rooms available to stay in. They are lovely little bungalows with their own gardens and there are tropical birds, lizards and squirrels everywhere and the river even has crocodiles. We ate dinner on a little pontoon thing out on the river on our first night, it was gorgeous!
After 14 hours sleep (we had been up for 36 hours straight while travelling here), we took a boat ride from our hotel to Bentota beach and on the way we were shown all sorts of things like how to carve a coconut sea turtle and we saw the Monday market (a local market where the people come to buy fish, spices, veg, etc. It was mad but they fling all their left over crap in the river water out back which is a bit sad to see as it is such a beautiful place :( ).
The beach is stunning though, no high rise buildings here, just beach and forest. The water is 27 degrees and so clear you can see to the bottom. The local people are brilliant, genuinely nice with a bit of "I'd love a rupee orf this cohint" about them. Not too much hounding by them, and even the ones that do try to pester you are so smiley you don't even mind.
Caff is humming a trance song as I'm writing this! I'm trying to get her into it before Van Buren's concert on Friday. It seems to be working. I convinced her 'BT sky larking' is about a bird flying around at the edge of space! She loves it now, lol!
We got a tukx2 to a restaurant on a lake which had good reviews on Trip Advisor and had some savage tucker - giant fresh prawns and curry. Our crazy tuk tuk driver insisted on waiting for us for two hours! Felt like I was being watched by a Daly 2 months in when I was with Caff first! No dropping the shoulder over dinner anyways. Just home now with a glass of vino. Going fishing in the morning to crocodile river (not rock, clear off Elton John).
A local guy, Khan, brought us fishing on the river. The same thing again, he was a super happy chap, carving out his living doing ten jobs a day. He wasn't too fond of the Muslims. He had two dairy cows and his home was broken into one night and the two cows were stolen and slaughtered (apparently by the Muslim cohints). He told us that he killed one of them, eek! Brian said "fair franks to you". He'd also told us that the Muslims had put the cows into a taxi so we might have been a bit lost in translation with the whole chat.
Brian caught a giant shark on the trip and was chuffed. He wanted to throw the fish back in but Khan wouldn't hear of it and banged it on the head a few times with the priest (that's what us fisher people call the fish killer tool) 10 minutes later, the fish came around and started flapping around in the boat. He was a fighter so he was but Khan wasn't having any of it so we took it home and our hotel chef cooked it for us!
On our last night we went into Bentota town for a few drinks and some dinner. A mad local guy walked us to our restaurant, even though we knew where we were going. I think he gets a few rupees in commission if he shows up with some people. The place is so quiet, you'd hope that it's not like this all the time. These lovely people could do with a few more tourists to keep them going. They live on so little yet are so happy and peaceful (Apart from culling the odd Englishman or muzzie).
We will definitely come back here someday!
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