Elephant Alert!

Mosquito Netting over our Bed

Wine Service in the Jungle 

White Flags of Respect for the Dead

One thing that I forgot to mention that to me was unique, was the Duty Free shopping at the Colombo Airport. We have been thru many duty free shops, and they are usually on the other side of security, in the lounge area. In Colombo they are located after you pick up your luggage. It is what they sell that is unusual. Refrigerators, washing machines, dish washers, etc. We saw several families pushing a typical airport cart with a couple of pieces of luggage on it, being follow by a porter, with a large dolly, holding a refrigerator! I hope they weren’t planning to take an airport shuttle back home.

After breakfast, we left Colombo and started out on our 4.5 hour drive to Anuradhapura. The roads and traffic are better than India. When Indians come to Sri Lanka they are amazed at how clean it is. We drove thru many small towns and villages. One unusual and nice touch is that when someone important dies in a village every one hangs out a white flag from their business or house. So as we drove up the road, we saw many of these flags. They also put up big posters of the deceased. Although the country is 75% Buddhist, there are Christians here and Muslims. They all seem to love building shrines. There is a sense of “mine is bigger than yours” as they try to outdo themselves in showing devotion. Of course the Muslims win because they can’t depict human form but do build minarets.

The weather is incredibly hot and humid. We are drenched! I didn’t realize (probably cause I didn’t read the itinerary in detail), that we are spending the next 2 nights in the Jungle. As we drove thru the jungle to our hotel, there were numerous signs of elephant crossings. There are wild elephants in this part of Sri Lanka. We arrived at our destination drenched in sweat, it was 2pm, and we decided to call it a day. Tomorrow we will explore the ancient sites here.

Because of mosquitoes, we are heavily covered in insect repellent. For the first time ever, for us, our bed is surrounded by mosquito netting. By the way they gave us the honeymoon suite. I guess they like us. We actually like the mosquito netting – it is very gossamer – like to be sleeping under it. There are three types of mosquito issues. Malaria – which our daily pills protect us from, Dengue Fever, which is extremely painful and but curable, and Japanese Encephalitis which our doctor said is always fatal. We are taking mosquito prevention very seriously!

The most practical thing to do in this extreme heat is to not be out in it. So, we did the next best thing to site seeing. We decided to have a massage. After the massages we decided to go look for elephants! There is a small lake behind the all of the separate cabins and supposedly the wild elephants show up around 5:30 to drink at the lake. We walked to the lake and waited on the safe side of the lake for about an hour but never saw any elephants. Oh well.

We returned to the main lodge where they had a surprisingly good buffet. To bed early, there isn’t a lot to do in the jungle.