Trincomalee

A penultimate post from Sri Lanka, we'll write something more as we await our flight to Bangkok...

Sophie has managed to get a cold, so we've taken a few lazy days on the beach to recover. I've been practising my front crawl, which has always been a problem stroke, whilst sophie watched from a hammock. We've treated ourselves to huge prawns and lobster for dinner on one evening, have found our favorite rotti/ kottu rotti place and also somewhere to watch the football that makes a cracking cuppa. Its been a good few days with little to report, at least until we set off for the train station...

Being a country of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and a Christians; there is seemingly always some religious celebration kicking off. For Buddhists, every full moon brings some form of celebration, usually accompanied by dansal (free food). It seems that the Tamil (Hindu) celebrations see the free food and then raise it with men suspended from moving vehicles by fish hooks through the skin... Sophie was horrified!

The night train was OK for me but a bit of an ordeal for sophie. 1st class was "sold out" so we had second class seats. These were similar to airline seats but we were directly facing another 2 seats, which meant half the legroom. A couple of hours in, 1st class suddenly became available. In fact only one of the 10 or so cabins were occupied... Naturally there would be a supplement, but after some hard negotiation, we settled on just over £2 per person! Corruption worked in our favour for once! The 1st class cabin was fairly rustic and came complete with the odd cockroach, but being able to lie down and stretch out our legs was a dream. I slept fairly well, but unfortunately sophie wasn't so lucky.

When we arrived, we headed to negombo and splashed out for our first AC room to spend the day and allow sophie to catch up on sleep. She's still not great, but I hope is on the mend. We fly at 1am so its going to be another long night, but we have a nice hotel in Bangkok booked and hopefully shell be back on form soon...