Sri Lanka: Days 8-10

Travel diaries for Saturday, April 5 to midday Monday, April 7 written Monday, April 7

Saturday, April 5:

We woke up Saturday morning at the beautiful Niketh Villa in Komari, a town on the east side of Sri Lanka. Daniel had gotten up early enough for a sunrise beach walk, and Aparna was up for early self-guided yoga. Once the late sleepers (me and Tosh) got moving, we had some breakfast in the hotel and chatted about the plans for today: croc spotting. Etosha is a big fan of crocodiles, and much of the point of the day’s itinerary would be finding crocs. We headed out to our Tosh-led trek around 10:15, and on the drive, we passed a ton of rice fields. Once we got there, I was relieved to see that it was a pretty open, dry, non-jungly, non-leechy walking trail. We saw some cool stuff, including giant termite mounds and big lily pads with lotus flowers and elephant footprints and some cool large rocks that seemingly used to be part of an ancient village of some kind – but not too much in the way of crocs.

We stopped for lunch in Arugam Bay, which is a cute popular surfer beach town. We had lunch right on the beach, and a bunch of cows walked by. In Arugam Bay, I saw a sign on a restaurant that said Foreigners Only – apparently some establishments refuse service to locals, which is not only super shitty but also illegal. Tosh told us a story about how a couple years ago, some Israeli surfing tourists were not respecting local norms in the community and ended up stirring up trouble with the local mob, and because they’re Israeli the mob people were then labeled “terrorists” and there were international travel warnings issued and the whole situation really messed up the tourism industry in the area for like a couple years.

After lunch, we were heading back to the hotel and Daniel and Aparna decided to stop to buy phone chargers. The guy sold Aparna hers for 1,500 rupees, then looked at Daniel and said “It’s 2,000. No – 3,000.” Aparna was like, no. As we continued the drive, we “popped out at a croc spot” (something that we then did many times over the next couple days), which in this case was a bridge with known croc sightings. Indeed, there were quite a few more crocs around the bridge area than there had been on our whole trek earlier that day.

Aparna spotted a little white-and-black cat who had been standing cluelessly in the middle of the road and was now standing near the crocs yelling at them. Aparna insisted that the kitty was not okay to stay here near the cars and the crocs, and Etosha insisted that it was fine; in the end, we were driving away from the croc spot with a little kitty in tow. They dropped Daniel and I back at the hotel for a siesta while they went to convince the hotel next door to take in this stray cat (they kinda know the owners, and the hotel already has cats – and it was a success! Croc Kitty is now a Hotel Kitty).

By this point, I felt pretty much 100% better after feeling quite sickly for almost 48 hours; but, like a perfect relay hand-off, as soon as I was done with my sickness, I passed it to Daniel. We all went down to the pool, but Daniel, who was starting to feel a bit unwell, rested on a pool chair while Aparna and Etosha struck up a conversation with a British woman in the pool who was also staying at the Villa. She knows their friend, Budhi, who lives nearby, and it turns out she actually used to be a professor at Aparna’s design school. Small world! (A theme of this trip is definitely that Sri Lanka is a small world, especially for social butterflies like Tosh and Aparna.) Budhi himself actually stopped by the hotel too, and in chatting with him, we found out that former Sri Lankan presidents (not the current president or the ousted dictator but older former presidents) often like to stay here at Niketh, and specifically in the room Daniel and I were in. So we truly had the presidential suite.

Daniel became properly sick (I have started using “properly” as an adjective since being here – Aparna says it a lot) and retired to bed while Aparna, Etosha, and I chatted over dinner. Aparna fell asleep sitting up at the dinner table, so we called it an early night.

Sunday, April 6:

Daniel and I woke up before dawn for an early sunrise viewing at the pool. He was still feeling unwell, so we first stopped at the downstairs bar/kitchen area to get some cold water from the fridge, but to our dismay, the door was locked. One of the windows over the bar part was unlocked, however, so I snuck in through the window. I saw that there was clearly a security video of me doing this (there was a video monitor inside the kitchenette area that I could see myself on), but I hoped I’d be in and out quick enough that no one would be disturbed. Not so. Immediately, a security guy appeared from who-knows-where. We acted sheepish and apologized, and he unlocked the door and let me out without seeming too annoyed.

For context, this is a tiny boutique hotel with maybe 6 total rooms, so this level of security seems surprising. One thing about Sri Lanka is that security is generally pretty high, especially in nice places. For example, when we arrived to Galle Face Hotel, the security guards scanned the underside of Tosh’s car with some kind of bomb-detecting device. The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted from 1983 until 2009, followed by years under a genocidal dictator who was only deposed in 2022. The memories of violence are still quite fresh for the people of Sri Lanka, and the aura of suspicion and militarism reflects that.

After a beautiful sunrise viewing, Daniel rested while I went with Aparna and Tosh to buy some electrolytes and anti-nausea meds from a pharmacy. We had some breakfast at the hotel and I had a quick accidental nap before packing and heading out for our next destination. Before we left, Etosha and Aparna said farewell to their new British friends, who they also convinced to become beanbag customers. Always hustling, these two. We were heading to another hotel here in the east part of Sri Lanka, but we had several croc pop-outs on the way. We saw some good crocs, and we even saw three elephants! They were pretty far in the distance, but they were really cool to see.

The next hotel is called Kottukal Beach House, and it’s gorgeous. It’s owned by a British guy called Len Porter whom Tosh & Aparna befriended when they stayed here previously. Turns out, Len Porter is a bigwig hotel owner in Sri Lanka, and of course he immediately adored Etosha, as everyone does. Len is the one who introduced Tosh to the trek that we had taken the previous morning where we tried and failed to see crocs. Tosh tells a story about how back in the ’80s when Len first moved to this region, he was trying to go to that trek area, and the army stopped him from entering. He was feeling all put out and insisted that he wanted to go see the crocs, and the army guy was like, “Sir, there is a battle going on right over there, unless you want to join the battle, you need to leave.” Len and his wife are often here at Kottukal Beach House, but at the moment they’re in England.

Daniel went to rest in the hotel room and the rest of us ordered a late lunch from the hotel. Tosh and Aparna’s friend Anisha and her boyfriend Akeel who live nearby joined us at the hotel. The original plan was to go on a boat tour of a nearby lagoon, but we got rained out, so we just hung out and chatted. We went to bed early, since we had to be up before 4:45am the next day for a safari.

Monday, April 7:

The guy who hung out with us at the hotel last night, Akeel, recommended his friend Shohan to take us on an early morning safari tour through Kumana National Park. This guy is apparently a major leopard expert. In Sri Lanka, if you are the first person to photograph a leopard, and the leopard lives past the age of one, you get to name it. I think this guy has named at least a few leopards (and there aren’t that many overall – the leopard population in Sri Lanka is endangered, with fewer than 1,000 leopards remaining when they used to be very abundant). Unfortunately, like the croc let-down of the previous trek, we saw no leopards on this safari, nor sloth bears nor elephants. We did, however, get to drive on a 2,000 year old road that has historically been used by Hindus for a yearly pilgrimage from the north all the way down through the south of the island (the national park makes accommodations for these pilgrims to let them come through each year, while usually it is closed to anyone not part of a licensed guided tour).

We also got to see monkeys steal the sandwiches that we had brought and happily munch on them in the tree above our heads. And we saw other critters, like buffalo bathing in water holes, spotted deer, a Brown Fish Owl, a giant squirrel (the national animal of Sri Lanka… as Daniel pointed out, kinda surprising that it’s not a leopard or elephant or crocodile, but go off squirrel), and some Sri Lankan junglefowl, which is the national bird of Sri Lanka, and which is pretty much identical to the colorful chicken sidekick Hei Hei in Moana.

We are now back at the beach house. I’m writing this poolside. We’ve ordered some lunch. Both Daniel and I are pretty much 100% recovered from our illness. We’re remembering to wear sunscreen and drink water and take lots of pics. Life is good.

Go to next: Sri Lanka Days 10-12