Postcards from Sea: SRI LANKA

DAY 67 — March 12, 2017 – Sailing the Straits of Malacca

DAY 68 — March 13, 2017 – Sailing the Indian Ocean

DAY 69 — March 14, 2017 – Sailing the Indian Ocean to Colombo, Sri Lanka

DAY 70 — March 15, 2017 -- Colombo, SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, is the land of tea plantations and Asian elephants, both of which we chose not to visit. It was tempting to take the $300 five-hour round-trip journey by train to visit the Pinnawela elephant orphanage. But $600. And five-hours. Everyone who went said it was great. Maybe next time.

Instead we hit some of Colombo’s hotspots:

A local park (Viharamahapevi), beautifully landscaped with a golden Buddha, beautiful ponds and fountains, and a tree full of Bats.

After we took this photo we learned it is bad to turn your back on a Buddha statue.

If you turn your back on a Buddha AND get into the pond, you could have really big trouble.

And one tree here was loaded with bats. Yes, those are bats, not birds, and they were quite active here during the day. But they only liked the one tree.

There are no taxis here just these little two-stroke wonders called tuk-tuks. And they need their own traffic cop. Everyone loves them, I guess, because they are so cute.

All over Asia we saw unusual skyscrapers but this one took the prize for originality. Hey, let’s make it look like it is falling-down right from the get go.

Our visit to the Gangarama Temple, a working Buddhist temple, required us to remove our shoes and walk around on the dirty wet floor in our socks or bare feet.

As we made our way through it, however, it started to look more like someone’s garage waiting for the upcoming sale. This was in total contrast to the usual austere atmosphere of other Buddhist temples we have visited.

At the National Museum, we saw thousands of historic artifacts, sculptures, pottery, coins, weapons, cooking utensils, and tribal masks. But my takeaway was this: For centuries, men have found the Barbie Doll figure to be most desirable.