the botanical gardens

we went there before Sam left - full of whiteys! FULL! i suppose our presence didn't help matters...here's some grass and whiteys:



the gardens are great, it's nice to see sri lankan families behaving like british ones do at national trust houses (i.e. lots of parents telling their kids to enjoy themselves and stop moaning, the occasional clip round the ear etc.). the bats are great although i don't have any pictures of them, the double coconuts look like arses and the orchids are all the same. that's about all i can think of in relation to the botanical gardens, it certainly isn't the kind of tourist attraction that would seem to warrant the hordes of pasty brits who stumble around in packs looking for Pringles, but it's OK.

plus as with every other open space in sri lanka, you get loads of couples snogging behind umbrellas, as if people won't guess what they're doing if they're behind an umbrella.

here's a picture of a flower:

great advertising slogans

on the road to Kandy there's a billboard advertising O and A level revision courses. the school's motto?

...


"lest we forget"

pinnewala elephant orphanage

near Kegalle on the colombo road there's this place called the elephant orphanage. they provide a home for knackered or ill or mental elephants from temples, who then have babies, so there's quite a big herd (herd of elephants? muh*). they just feed them and wash them and make paper out of their poo. the nice thing about the whole place, in fact that makes it quite unique as a tourist attraction, is that once inside (and apart from the tat sellers) there is utterly no pressure to do anything. no tedious tours, no people telling you what's going on or telling you to go to a particular place at a particular time. just a load of elephants, sometimes in a river and sometimes not. so you get to sit there for hours just watching them.

sorry the photo's a bit wonky but i was in the process of falling over.

*of course i've heard of elephants! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

arrack and sherbet

bloody horrible; don't try it. arrack needs to go with sharp things really and this sherbet is like liquefied icing sugar.

and now for something completely different

a tedious post. still pictures on it though!

i bought a chair! this is the first item of furniture i have EVER bought, although i dunno if I'll be able to get it back to britain, it may have to be retired here. it was only 3000 rupees (about 16-17 quid) and they are very comfortable, especially for sitting on the porch drinking and reading the paper.



next, a short story. i am very good at travelling, i go many places at a moment's notice, and tend to pack light. however, this causes problems sometimes, as i have been known to forget to take, on various occasions: toothbrush; towel; soap; pants; socks; shoes etc etc. i hardly ever forget the important things though because I always check them.

so when me and sam were off to colombo for a couple of nights out on the town, i thought "right, phone, keys, wallet" and left the house. unfortunately i did not think "trousers", so when we got to colombo i had to buy some. however the silver lining in this cloud of incompetence is that the pair of trousers i bought is an excellent fake:



and finally, you know in the 1001 nights where they're always sitting around drinking sherbet? i always thought that was just sherbet and water, like we used to make with sherbet fountains. BUT:



it's roses instead. i shall try this with arrack tonight and let you know...

joe

sri pada, or adam's peak, or the resting place of siva, or maybe st thomas

lots of pictures!

we went up sri pada on sunday night. train to hatton first, then a taxi to delhouse at the foot of the mountain, from where the peak looks something like this and very fearsome:



so we got ourselves a room right next to a loudspeaker and spent three or four hours listening to some very bad drummers walking around annoyingly before it was time to wake up again. what you do is, you climb the mountain in the dark and watch the sunrise at the top, then hang around for the morning ceremony (if you're buddhist) and then come down again. there are thousands of people doing this - we did some idle speculation and guessed at a million people a year - and some of them are pretty old, or young, or otherwise looking entirely unsuitable for climbing mountains.

it took about three hours, but we gave ourselves a few breaks - there are lots of tea shops all the way up although they get more and more expensive nearer the top.



this is us at the top with some people we met on the way. note the blankets; it was really cold!



and here, finally, the sunrise! our idle speculation as to where the sun might rise was almost completely incorrect, but if we'd been facing the other way we would have been right! see? you see?

after the sunrise, everyone crowds to the other side of the mountain to see the shadow the mountain casts on the haze below - it's said to represent the buddhist equivalent of the holy trinity:



and then you go down:



(there are steps you see, it's not real climbing), and then you are completely knackered for days, it's like jet lag.

OBLIGATORY WEIRD ANIMAL PHOTO: it's a big moth! life size-ish.

quick pre-post post

just because there's this one left over from sinharaja that is rather good. this is from the top of Moulawella, about 750m i think, the trees are what we biologists call 'forest' and that bloke is joe. or sam, i can't tell the difference really.

pre-train posting

actually we have longer than i thought before we have to catch the train - we're off to hatton to climb Adam's Peak.

but me and my friend from Britain (Sam) have just been to Sinharaja (rainforest) and Unawatuna (beach) on a bit of a holiday.

Sam got seven leech bites on one day, which was excellent cos you can't really go to the forest and come out without any leech scars, you look like a wuss. here's some blood! (connoisseurs note the West African Recycled Plastics flip flops)



more weird stuff:



this is a giant earthworm (and my foot). it's actually pretty small as giant earthworms go, they can get to about twice this size...

and then we ended up in Unawatuna, which looks like this:



this is most definitely the life, wish i was doing a phd by the sea.

right that's it for a day or two, will do proper post about stuff in a week or so.

joe/sam (sam/joe nig ltd)

just a quicky

cos we're only back here for a few days then off to adam's peak! hey, i like dossing around like a tourist MUCH better than working, maybe i should try to do it more often.



this is Adam's Peak (sri pada) as seen from the forest in sinharaja (the most distant ones - the peak itself is the highest). this is very unusual as it's usually covered in cloud and is a good 40 odd miles away.

photo crazy

seeing as how i can put em on the blog now, here's some more, hopefully this'll keep you all quiet when i fail to update for weeks again.

this is a caterpillar on a mango leaf - that is some serious camouflage, it looked better in real life, the flash sort of de-camouflaged it a bit, but when i first looked at it i couldn't see the caterpillar. i was about 6 inches away and still couldn't see it



next - a preying mantis. you don't see too many of these out here but i think they're ace. this is a baby one, you can tell because it hasn't got wings. the best thing about them is that if you make a movement close to them they turn their heads and LOOK at you, like the alien in alien. and you think wow, is this an INSECT? certainly cleverer than dogs anyway, i'd much rather have preying mantises protecting my home than stupid dogs any day.



this next one is really cool:



it looks like an ant but it's not at all; it's a SPIDER. really! it's not the best photo but you can just about see - it has 8 legs but it carries the front two up in the air, pretending they're antennae. spiders have loads of eyes but this ant-mimic has one pair very big so they look like ant eyes. the key is in the way it moves. this thing runs like a spider, quick little dashes, and not like an ant runs at all.

right that's all for tonight, more calpol plz nurse

photos!

hello vast audience

i went to the forest and it was rubbish. but here are some photos!



this is on the way; from Kandy to Colombo the main road goes through a big pass, and when you're on the other side you get views like this! I'd like to find out where that is and go there, but well, the alternative is sitting round on my arse posting rubbish on the tinternet, so you can tell which is going to win.

on with the post!



this is the plot where i spend most of my time. this is serious virgin forest, and man it's untidy. there's logs and leaves and crap everywhere. it's called a plot because all the trees are numbered. this is dead handy, because if you're completely lost, running out of food and losing your mind you can always look at the base of a tree, pull up the tag and read...164075. which is a great comfort obviously.

note sunshine - this is freakishly unusual, the next period of sunshine in Sinharaja is estimated to occur in 2009. the next picture shows more normal weather conditions:



there is 5 and a half METRES of rain a year. that is 16 FEET, or something. when you consider even south brent probably only gets about 5 metres this is clearly an unnatural quantity of water, and should be stopped.

the green hut in the background is the kitchen by the way, that is where i burn wellies to make tea (unfortunately no pictures of burning welly).

joe

calpol

sorry for crap updating but i came back from the forest and found that my university has quite sensibly decided not to let me ftp to my stuff. fools.

so without pictures it would have just been me ranting in a boring sort of way.

BUT

i think i've worked out a way of doing it, next post might have photos if i'm right! and boring ranting as well obviously, you don't get away that easy.

oh and vimto and arrack tastes like calpol! pheersome

joe