My trip to Hikkaduwa

Not exactly Bo Derek
Originally uploaded by Rob@SFU.

I had a good weekend away, very relaxing and enjoyable. I went with Laura to a town called Hikkaduwa down south near Galle. We stayed at a resort that was sort of like a Club Med minus a few stars. It was a large hotel with about 160 rooms and a spa. You could do the whole inclusive package or variations of that, we did the B&B option but ended up eating all but one meal at the hotel anyway. Just before sunset Laura went up the beach to watch the sunset and came back to tell me that she thought there were sharks in the water. I headed down to the beach and since there is only one real way to tell I nicked my toe with a pin and stepped into the water – just kidding mere  I saw the fins and they didn’t look right and the shadow were the wrong shape. I realized they were very large turtles! So we went swimming with them for a while and that was real fun. We were going to head down to the city of Galle on the Sunday to look around that town and also to have a better chance at getting a seat but the lounge chair had a good grip on us and we stayed at the hotel. Rather than getting onto an already full train and standing for two hours we decided to try the bus system. The first bus that stopped pulled Laura on and was shoving her back into the crowd as I jumped on. I saw the look of horror on her face and made the driver stop to let us off, no way I was standing on a bus for three hours!! So we waited until a quieter bus came along and got seats. It was a great ride until about ¾ the way along the driver pulled over and the conductor kid got off with a hose in his hand and a container of fluid…. He had to bleed the brakes and do something under the bus, then of course the driver needed to test the brakes at various speeds… it made for an interesting few minutes. On a side note that relates in a way…on Friday our driver had to go do a job in the interior so we were given another driver. Now you may recall we sort of fired the other temporary driver we had last time Ravi needed a day off so we were hesitant to see who we got. We ended up with the father of our young office person (she reported to the manager we got rid of so she’s more than a secretary but not really the manager either….). Well poor Gamini was injured in an LTTE blast and has a damaged left leg which makes using a clutch rather hard, almost impossible I would have to say. So the ride was described by Laura as “Mr. Toads Wild Ride”, and wild it was!! Nice nice man, he should stick with the automatic vehicles though… Back to the bus ride… It was actually quite comfortable and it dropped us off right at the end of our street so it was a 7 minute walk home and didn’t cost a dime. The three hour ride cost us each 90 cents. Train fares went up yesterday without any warning and people are irate, they fares are going up by 50%! Our trip down south cost 64 cents for the train fare, 6 cents for the bus from home to the train station (door to door), then we split a three wheeler from the train station to the hotel 25 cents each, the hotel room was rather expensive and cost us 24$ including breakfast. We at out for lunch and dinner at 7$ each and bought a few bottles of water for 20 cents each. I also had a cool drink at the pool for a dollar. All told the whole weekend cost less than $40 and most of that was the hotel. There are rooms that range from 5$ and up in Hikkaduwa and I might try a place that’s a little cheaper next time. You can always pay about 3$ to use the pools of the big resorts too so that’s an option…