Fishing canoe with sail and fish net basket on beach

Arrive Sri Lanka
We have arrived in the land of beautiful golden beaches, fishing boats and tuktuks. After 30 hours of airports and airplanes we landed in the Colombo airport at 4:30am. To our surprise so did many other flights, and Sir Lanka was there to greet us with a huge duty-free shop selling travelers everything from refrigerators to flat-screen TVs. We passed it up to gather up our 2 huge suitcases from the conveyor belt and headed out on the very busy street with our guest-house driver.

Fishing canoe with log out-rigger

Laundry day

After settling into our guest house, we walk down to the beach to an amazing view of fishing canoes with huge square sails and one-sided outriggers. The canoes are so narrow that the fishers straddle them while they are working their nets. Made of hollowed out logs and patched sails, they are a wonder to watch bobbling up and down in the enormous waves falling and rising from view as they move across the horizon.


Negombo
Negombo is a small city near the airport where we have decided to stay for a week while we get our feet under us and get on Lankatime. Colombo, it turns out, is 30 K from here and since we are headed to Thailand on Wed, we will wait until we get back on Oct 21 to go to Colombo the capitol for training at the Embassy.

 Smiles and Fish Markets

Sri Lankans are the friendliest people, greeting us with smiles and "Hello Madame" everywhere we go. The question we get over and over: "where are you from?" and "how long you stay?" To our amazement everyone speaks English from the children to the grandpas, and they love to try it out on us along accompanied with a big smile.

Sri Lankan smile

Drying fish on the beach near the fish market

 We took a tuktuk, a kind of motorized rickshaw to the cell phone store and got our phones; then we walked to the fish market to find the beach covered with tarps spread with drying fish for as far as the eye could see. Fishing is the main industry in this city on the sea, and we have had many wonderful meals of grilled tuna and seer and crab curry. Yum!


 On the Street

Tuktuk

The streets are all very narrow with no traffic lights filled with bikes, scooters, tuktuks, buses and cows, not to mention people walking because the sidewalks are very narrow and ofter broken up. This all makes for a lot of horn-beeping and swerving. But somehow it all seems to work itself out, and people move along nicely.

Room for everyone on the streets