Some thoughts on Sri Lanka....& moving on

After Yala, we headed to a busy stretch of beach just outside Galle, called Unawatuna. Now Johnny and Caroline might want to post their own comments about this as obviously everyone has their own opinion, but we weren't so keen.

We saw some of the devastation from the tsunami in Kirinda near Yala. We took an evening stroll down to the beach. I don't think we really though too much about what we were going to see. The first thing that strikes you are the broken boats still on the roadside, some over 1km inland. They appear like memorials. Then as you approach the coastline, it's really quite shocking. Entire houses ripped from foundations (the wave wiped out shanti villages and housing, but was powerful enough to take out well built houses too). Huge pieces of brick wall and concrete flung here there and everywhere; entire areas where all you can see are the floorplates where the houses used to be. The wave came into Yala park by 2km and 47 people died there. There's a memorial where the park office and cafe used to be. The land is now several feet lower than where the ground used to meet the steps of the floorplate of the old cafe. People were having their breakfast when it struck. The wave was over 40 ft here. Trees & shrubs ripped from their roots lie dead between phenomenal new growth (Sri lanka is so green and clearly gets plenty of rain and sun - judging by how bitten we all got too - but it means the forests are repairing themselves). Our Yala guide was in his groovy open top Landrover and he got swamped by the first smaller wave, managed to start the engine again (good old Landrover) and hit reverse as fast as possible - he survived by a matter of minutes. People looked genuinely surprised to see us in Kirinda, especially going down to the beach.

Now Unawatuna was a different story altogther. It's stunning scenery, with aquamarine seas and white sandy beaches all along the coast, but the road runs very close to the beach most of the way down, as does the railway line. In a lot of areas, they've not been allowed to build within 150m of the coast (as of last week the government have changed their mind). Anyway, despite the amount of work going on it's still looks very ropey in places - derelict buildings, big sand dumps, major culvert works that stink and people living still in tents. Unawatuna was also ridiculously expensive compared to what we had been paying, even in Sri Lanka. You seemed to get ripped off everywhere, with inflated prices (3 times what they were 18mths ago - what with all those NGO executives filling the hotels, it's a sellers market) and ridiculous overcharging ($1 for a single printed b&w sheet), constant short changing, dodgy billing (we were over charged about 4000 SL rupees at one guesthouse) and charity profiteering that leaves a VERY bad taste in your mouth. My advice would be don't visit the busy parts of the south coast for a few years yet. It's not just the damage, which is still very visible - it just seems so miserable (hardly surprising) and not a very chilled friendly atmosphere.

We reluctantly stayed in Colombo to try and get Indian visas but it was going to take at least a week and would cost an outrageous amount for us to return to India and travel up to Sikkim, so we decided to cut our losses and depart Sri Lanka as soon as possible.

We hopped a flight the next night and now we are in the glorious Bangkok - WE LOVE THAILAND. We haven't been hassled once - it's cleaner than any of us remember, although I think our frame of reference has been drastically altered by experiences in India. We've got a great place to stay in Banglampu with two fabulously clean rooms for under a tenner, the best food in the world (everywhere) and its cheaper than chips - hoorah!

So we're as happy as pigs in Pakistan and are really pleased we made the right decision to spend more time in SE Asia. Judging by the impact of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, we had our doubts about what it was going to be like in Tamil Nadu - it's not nice being emotionally manipulated by so much scamming, and I imagine the Indian government is even more corrupt with its distribution of charity money, than is evident in Sri Lanka (the government have yet to make their Dec '05 payment to refugees).

On a lighter note, we also realised we would hit the rainy seasons in Laos, Cambodia and Southern Vietnam, as well as the Andaman coast in Thailand, if we had arrived here much later. So it's off to Khao Sok and then Tarautao National Park in Southern Thailand. Then we're off to Northern Thailand and into Laos by March. We then plan to fly into south Vietnam at the end of March and fly out from the North back into Laos for the start of April. Finally we'll return via Cambodia and enter north-east Thailand. Jungle mayhem and we can't wait!