2025 BY Sri Lanka

Suriya is a big chunk of rock sticking out of the jungle. Some king a few zillion years ago, fearing retribution from his brother whom he had dethroned, built his palace on top of the rock. It is one of the most popular tourist sites in Sri Lanka and rightly so.  In the afternoon we went looking for Elephants.

Danbulla is an unremarkable town. But it is close to a whole bunch of historical and religious sites. We discovered that we had chosen the most absolutely perfect budget guesthouse. It was perfect in every way. Sometimes you arrive at a guesthouse and things look alright, then you discover a plumbing problem, usually the toilet, or most of the lighting doesn't work, or there is dirt or bugs, or it is noisey or some other problem. At Athula's place everything worked, you could eat off the floors the bed was comfortable the air conditioner and fan worked and were quiet. Every detail had been dealt with. We rolled into town not having any idea what we would be doing. Athula came up with a whole itinerary within a few minutes. I forgot to mention the included breakfast which would feed an elephant and was composed of local delicacies.  A few kilometers from downtown are the  Bhuddhist caves. They are a few thousand years old and an important pil...

Delft Island is only about 35 miles from.India. if you are a birder you come here to see the Indian Courser, a plover type bird which is not seen elsewhere in Sri Lanka.    Lots of people come here on a day trip. We opted to spend two nights at the Salmudra Resort. We checked into the honeymoon suite with a ten thousand flies. Hotel wasn't bad except for the dam flies. Our first day we did a self guided trek across half the island we saw the Growing Stone, The Banyan Tree and The Baobob Tree.  This Baobob Tree is not native to Sri Lanka. This tree was brought here by Arab traders in the 16th century  We were continually on the look out for the Courser but no luck. And I was getting a little discouraged. Day 2 we took a tuk tuk tour to the other sights  and I showed a picture of the courser  to the driver . He took us to the area of wild horses where we finally managed to see the bird.

Jaffna is at the North tip of Sri Lanka. From 1983 to 2009 the Tamils were fighting a full blown war here. The Tamils are from a different wave of immigration from India.  They speak Tamil as opposed to Sinhalese. They are Hindu as opposed to Buddhist. Anyways they lost the war and business is back to normal. Hard to believe all is forgotten after 40000 deaths or more, and countless war crimes. At times you feel you are back in India. While here we visited the Old Fort and also the biggest Hindu Temple. We went birding with our bird guide, Kajen.

From Anuradhapura it is about 35 kilometers to Wilpattu National Park. We stayed at Mango Villa a few kilometers from the park entrance. We stayed in a glorified wall tent with a real tin roof over it and all other amenities. The staff were really nice and helpful. You have to go on a guided tour into the park which is what we did the next morning. The forecast was not good and it was raining as we entered the park. We did see about thirty hornbills feeding in a fruit tree at the park entrance.  During the morning the weather was not too bad and it was dry for large periods of time. Unfortunately it pretty much poured down all afternoon. We did see a lot of animals and birds. The closest we got to see a lepoard was seeing some bushes move as he disappeared into the forest. Later in the pouring rain and near darkness we saw a sloth bear and her cub. It was hopeless to get a picture. We also saw a brown fish owl fishing over a very muddy stream. Ha...

It was a three and a half hour train trip starting at 0530 hr. We were up at 0400 and managed to get dressed packed and ripped off by a tuktuk driver by 0500. Lots of confusion finding our train but when we did , it turned into a pleasant comfortable train ride. At Anuradhapura we met Lal a tuk tuk driver who was reasonably honest  and set us up for a tour of the ruins at some point in the future.  Anyways this town is pretty sleepy compared to Colombo. The old town has most of the ruins and is protected parkland . There are ancient beautiful trees everywhere interspersed with all kinds of man made lagoons and wetlands. Three or four hundred years before Christ this town was the center of a bhuddhist empire. There were thousands of monks . One of the stupas here was the tallest man-made building in the world at the time. We arrived at our small hotel and immediately regretted we hadn't booked for a longer stay . It turns out we are at the start of a mas...