A little bit behind...

So its currently Monday the 11th of August, and this is my last week in Sri Lanka! Clearly I am somewhat behind with my blogging! The Mirissa weekend I just blogged about happened on the 28th of June!

I plan on finishing blogging for everything that I have done, it's just going to be back-dated a bit!

Mirissa Continued

Jenn with PMGY for Plan My Gap Year

The hotel at Mirissa was amazing and allowed for a very chilled out weekend. Instead of paying for the AC rooms we opted for the cheaper option of fan-only. These rooms happened to be separate little bungalows which I think were much cuter than a regular room in the main hotel building would have been! I shared one with Hana while Jenn and Georgina shared the second. From our wee bungalows we could see the pool and beach. We spent most of the time (asides from whale watching) sunbathing or being in the pool. The hotel wasn't very busy so we mostly had the pool to ourselves! We were half-board so got an amazing buffet option for dinner and breakfast - a brilliant change from the rice and curry we get at the volunteer house! Don't get me wrong, that food is lovely but it gets very repetitive! May have gotten a little red over this weekend, but its ended up as tan so I should be going home looking brown!

 

the pool and the AC rooms behind it

From outside my bungalow, you can see the pool on the left and the beach on the right!

Bungalow!

Mirissa!

For our weekend trip Jenn, Georgina, Hana and I went to Mirissa.  A coastal town teeming with hotels for tourists. The hotel we stayed at had a lovely pool and was right next to the beach, as in RIGHT next to the beach! My Lonely Planet guidebook describes Mirissa as being 'a place so idyllic that only a fool would ever want to leave.' One of the popular tourist attractions in Mirissa, apart form the sun and beach life, is whale-watching boat tours. Although its considered off-season at this time of year (the east coast has better ocean conditions at the moment) we decided that the prospect of seeing whales was well worth the cost of a tour. Our coordinator Nalaka helped find us a good deal and arranged our tour for us.  

We got up excruciatingly early on Saturday morning to get a tuktuk to the harbour and our boat. Or rather, we should have got up early but somehow all four of us managed to sleep in! We were in pairs in two cute little bungalows (photos to follow in next blog post) and none of our alarms worked! The first we knew of morning was Jenn banging on our door telling us that we slept in! And they had been woken up by a phonecall from the man who was taking us to the harbour, telling us he was at the hotel waiting! We got ready in super-quick time and were only 5-10mins away from the harbour so we still arrived in plenty of time. Once we got on the boat we were all handed tablets for seasickness and then given a sandwich for (a very early) breakfast. It took about 2 hours to get out into sea far enough to start spotting whales. It was quite choppy and we got splashed a lot but I found the motion quite relaxing and dozed off for about an hour! Downside of this was that I ended up with a VERY red sunburnt arm, a tshirt tan too!

When I woke up there was only me and one other man left sitting in the original seats at the front of the boat, pretty much everyone else on the boat were feeling seasick and sitting at the back leaning over the sides feeling ill! Once we got out on the flat water it was lovely, calm waters with local fisherman on traditional wee boats floating by, and the sun looked amazing sparkling on the water. 

We were very fortunate and saw 7 blue whales! We even saw one flip/dive (not sure what the official phrasing is but I am sure you get the gist) out the water which was spectacular. One of them was also a baby! It totally fantastic and I am very glad that we decided to go for it! Unfortunately I didn't get any photos, I didn't bother taking my camera out because I was concerned about the salt spray from waves getting on the lens.

the harbour

fisherman 

the harbour as the sun went down

Cricket!

Cricket is a big thing in Sri Lanka, and our own coordinator Nalaka hopes to play preofessionally some day and currently has plans to play in England. Every so often there is a Plan My Gap Year cricket match and this time was played against another volunteer group which is also based in Ambalangoda. Instead of going to morning projects we walked to a cricket pitch and spent the entire morning playing cricket. I've never played or watched cricket before and had the rules explained a few times but still didn't quite get it, or rather didn't get what was so interesting about it! It was a fun morning nonetheless and I enjoyed taking photos of the games.

          

A House Party

The next week was another volunteer's 21st birthday so we had a house party at Lion House where we got some local guys in to sing us some songs (in english). It was a good laugh and they taught us a song about Hikkadua. 

Day at the Beach

Actually did this before the Yala trip but I forgot to blog it! There is a town called Hikkaduwa about a 30-40min tuktuk ride away from Ambalangoda. Hikkaduwa is a lot more touristy than Ambalngoda so it has some restaurants where they serve WESTERN FOOD woo. We went through there to the beach on Thursday because no projects were running due to it being Poya day, a celebration of the full moon. Since Fathers Day was coming up we all posed for a photo to send home.

Ella & Yala Weekend: SAFARI TIME

 

On Sunday afternoon we started our safari of Yala National Park. Nearly 130000 hectares Yala is the biggest and most popular park in Sri Lanka. It was a great afternoon and great experience however I most definitely enjoyed Uda Walawe more. Yala was very busy, with a LOT of jeeps all following one another, with each driver trying to give their passengers the best view and so on. It somewhat ruined the experience and I feel that if definitely did not encourage animals to come out into the open, so many jeeps racing around doesn't exactly make for a peaceful scenario!
We didnt see any leopards, which the park is famous for, however we did see a black bear. Apparently there is only one bear family in the whole park so this was very lucky, although we didn't see it very well or for very long due to the high number of jeeps congregated!

The bear