Legends of the tuk tuk: #8

Life is Nice Rainbow / I cant be felled down

Plastic wrapped flying fish & whales

Iris clutched her Playmobil sperm whale as we boarded the small ship for our whale watching trip. At this point I was hoping that she wouldn't be too disappointed. I felt a certain obligation towards her in that I had banged on about how she would be able to enjoy turtles, whales and dolphins in Sri Lanka and that, in this light, leaving behind all your friends, the home and city you have grown up in was no big deal. So far, after four months, she has seen none of the sea-life I promised, not that she has rebuked me for this as yet.
We passed an almost furless, blotchy dog that had a single tuft at the nape of its neck, giving it a slight zombie hyena appearance, and stepped onto the boat. It was about 10 metres long, with a viewing platform set up above the main deck. It soon fired up and we (myself, Iris and Heikki - Anu staying behind with Arlo in trade-off for her having a surfing lesson).

We were served out breakfast in a knotted plastic bag, which contained a polystyrene lunchbox with a plastic wrapped cheese spread sandwich, a slice of pineapple, a square of cake and a banana. I struggled to unwrap and eat this (and Iris's) without losing any plastic overboard - the articles I have recently read about whales and ingested plastic fresh in my mind (and obviously yet to register with the tour operator).
About 1 km from the harbour Iris asked 'Where are the whales?' I start reading her The Witches as we have a long way to go.
After about an hour she is sleeping with her head on my lap. There is no life. The only bird I have seen is a lone egret; I'm really not sure what it was doing so far out to sea. While I had not counted on seeing a whale, and despite reports of dolphins not being sighted, I was quietly confident that I would see some leaping during the trip. But there were no dolphins and almost all of the passengers were asleep.
Just off the prow four flying fish suddenly surfaced glittering sliver and wet-eyed, gliding along a little before disappearing again. I nudged Heikki awake hissing 'flying fish!'; even as I did I realised both that they weren't going to surface again and that Heikki may well have seen them before. He went back to sleep. I also started to imagine if I had imagined the fish. I had hardly seen any life and had been staring at the sun flickering on the waves with my radar on for dolphin fins or the turtles that the surfers had assured me were two a penny away from the shore. About ten minutes later I was relieved to spot a lone flying fish in a similar spot before the prow.

Before too much longer however some blowhole spouts were spotted ('a big one! It's a blue whale' the crew told us) and we cranked up the engine to bear towards them and my excitement grew as I tried to awaken Iris. Shortly after this point, I realised that, despite setting out with no-one else around, there were around eight similar sized vessels all making a bee-line for the spout. We were pack hunting. I began to have some misgivings about the trip. A whale surfaced but it was too close to one of the ships (we were told) so it dived. Apparently 100-150 metres is the golden distance that doesn't scare them yet allows tourists to see something. Anyhow, I took some desperate spout photos and imagined that I might get no closer and that I would be left with a series of photos looking like this:

The slight sour tone was compounded by this noisy hydrofoil. It could have even been designed to frighten whales off and seemed to enjoy flexing its muscles by outpowering our little boats to get to the spouts before us - only the very speed necessitated the noise that then scared off the whale they were pursuing. Also it soon became apparent that this was a little like a Spanish galleon. It was bigger and stronger but clumsy and it couldn't turn around.

Anyhow, at least our tour captain had the sense to hang back from the pack and the fifth or sixth whale to have visibly broken the surface did so close enough to the boat that my fully zoomed lens actually had to be zoomed out a bit to get these shots off.

On the road to Galle

Strike that. On the Gateway to Miracle. At the service station.

Kandy

Kandy, Sri Lanka's second city, is dispersed in small pockets over the scrunched surfaces of the mountains it is folded into. It centres around a 200 year old artificial lake (flooded paddy fields with any disgruntled labourers set on stakes in the lake-bed by a disgruntled king) and most famous for its Temple of the Tooth, that houses Budha's tooth, rescued from the ashes after his cremation. Apparently it is three inches long but it is rarely shown (perhaps in part due to the number of scientifically minded sceptics that abound in these modern times). On our previous visit the lake's fountain had never been on  so I was pleasantly surprised to see it shooting a single jet 12 metres or so into the air. There was also an unusually large crowd outside the gates of the Temple of the Tooth. We soon found out the reason for this - a prince was coming. Iris was distinctly thrilled at this news. Anu had to gently break in the news that Prince Charles of England might not be the vision of a prince that she had in mind from due to the twisted imaginings of Walt Disney and his cronies. 

The first picture here was the view from the balcony of the Olde Empire hotel that overlooks the entrance grounds to the temple - the little rooftops are for a little run of market stalls selling beautiful flowers to be given as tributes within the temple. And some very annoying salesmen with brightly coloured 'bird' whistles that they continually play in an effort to entrap young children into believing they might be able to make similar sounds were they to purchase one. 

We took Arlo out for a bit too long and his batteries ran low. On leaving the van from the botanical gardens he was taken kicking and screaming up to the hotel room, where we remembered we had run out of the milk he was screaming after. I decided to pop out to the shops with Iris. On my return I found that we were stranded on the wrong side of a ten elephant and drummer procession that cut us off the hotel.

We took the train there and back. The view from the train offers some fine views out over the mountains and on our return trip a heavy morning mist hung in the tropical valleys with their palm tree scattered hillsides. We dropped out of the hills and down into the paddy fields, peppered with clean white egrets and water buffalo and the odd worker. And for context, all this exoticism was offset by the A/C chill of our Expo carriage that had some B-list Disney animation chattering away, interspersed with the odd Mr Bean sketch.

Fruit, spikes, stumps and frills

When in Kandy we visited the Royal Botanical Garden. It is just under 150 acres and so we failed to navigate much of it with the little legged ones along. What we did see however was simply stunning and quite trippy. Familiar plants were swollen gigantically to cartoon-sized proportions. Unfamiliar plants sprouted fruit, spikes, thorns, flowers, frills, huge leaves, teethed leaves, weird roots, microphones, buds, bad haircuts and stumps.

House crows and palm squirrels

There are two creatures that you cannot avoid in Colombo: the house crow and the palm squirrel. The crows are pretty hard to love as, despite being a fine glossy blue-black with slate grey parts, they are opportunistic in the extreme, little scared of humans and their beaks are thick enough and tough enough looking that you wouldn't want to chance a jab - especially when at face height, on a fence for example. The squirrel is half the size, has endearing Chip 'N' Dale stripes and a full tail and is altogether more timid. They emit a cheeping sound that I constantly mistook for a bird at first. At least neither one suffers from the rattiness that so often afflicts urban animals, like the urban squirrels and foxes of the UK for example.

Guest blog of Anu

We visited Kandy last weekend, as Mummo & Heikki are visiting. It is situated in the hill country, and the train ride there is spectacular. Kandy is an old kingdom with a lake in the middle of the town. On a walk around the lake Duncan was teaching me photography, or rather let me shoot away with his camera, and here are the results. I have always wanted to learn photography, but gave up immediately when the Rule of Third  on composition was on the agenda - as somehow the rules seemed to kill the spontaneity and cause frustration. But I guess such rules are inherent for the pros anyway. After we returned back to our hotel, there was a procession going on, celebrating the full moon. 

Superficial

Anu's mum brought my new figure 8 ankle strap ("as worn by Andy Murray") and I was puppy eager to test drive it with my now unsprained ankle. I left Anu, the kids and grandparents at Bayleaf, an Italian near our house, turned up early at the cricket grounds we play frisbee at and hopped out the taxi, stepping through the broken wall at the edge of the pitch.
I vaguely thought I'd scratched myself and, glancing down, I was amazed to see a 5-6 cm gash yawn on my left leg's upper calf. I looked again. It was still there, still yawning.
So I pinched it back together and hopped back in a tuk tuk (almost the one that dropped me off) to return to Lanka Hospital's A&E. I told them I needed stitches and a dull eyed doctor had a look at my wound. "A little one" he said and took me to a 'mini theatre" (not as cute as it sounds) and gave me five or six stitches (I was staring at the ceiling so my count is vague).

Lizards

Here are some lizards I've seen over the last few days, minus the anemic house geckos that I am still struggling to appreciate - they seem so boneless and wormy. This selection is more of the crispy fried scaly shrunken dinosaur end of the spectrum, maybe excepting the long-legged, froggy lizard that skitted through the woodland floor.