Ceylon Off World's End

Against everything we've learnt and against our instincts we travelled by train to Nuwara Eliya in second class. The issue here was not that we weren't in first class but the fact that we weren't in third. First is full of wanks, second full of nervous, needy "travellers" and third is locals.

At least in third the locals are used to being in confined spaces and work together accordingly. In second, everyone is used to having one seat for their bag and another for themselves and expect a level of service and space in line with a $160 ticket, not a $1.60 one. After a couple of hours of standing we finally secured the open doorway and everything was good, away from the adventurers.

The first morning in Nuwara Eliya we were out the door by 5am headed for Horton Plains, an undulating plateau 2000m above sea level that's covered in wild grasses and patches of thick forest including the mystique inducing 'cloud forest'.

An overzealous driver and husband meant we were the first on the trail and we had a few minutes of the main event's precursor - Mini World's End - to ourselves.

It also meant we had the main event to ourselves - Greater World's End - where we managed to find a track leading away from the main platform and could take in the spectacular vistas unencumbered by tourists whose soul intent was to take away from the peace and serenity of the place. The sheer 880m drop off forced more than one, "Please be careful."

The trek continued with a stop by Baker's Waterfall and wildlife sightings that included samba deer, yellow eared bulbul, three red-backed woodpeckers and a mongoose. A v productive morning.

The following day's adventure was a trip to Pedro Tea Estate packed so tightly into a bus that sardines would have scoffed. The ticket collector played human tetris at each stop directing where people should squeeze in to. I spent most of the journey with a breast pressed against my face.

We did a quick tour of the working tea factory decked out in groovy hair nets and aprons.

At least this time we could sneak a quick whiff of the dried tea leaves. And again, you know it, we finished with a cup of tea.

After that fan-tea-stic tour we went for a stroll through the tea fields ending up at Lovers' Leap waterfall.

It was then time to get back in the sardine can.

The food entry for this post is not so much a what but a how. We've fumbled our way through eating with our hands in countries like Morocco and Laos but Sri Lanka has upped the ante. The various Sri Lankan rices we've encountered have been light and fluffy and beautiful but exhibit no ability to bind like couscous or sticky rice. Chuck a couple of wet curries on top and eating with your hands becomes an exercise in shovelling and hoping, and covering yourself from fingertips to elbows.

After our first pathetic attempt and thinking surely we must be doing it wrong we went home and Googled it which offered hardly any assistance other than a few 'rules'. So next time we just kept an eye on other people eating and gladly discovered that whilst those rules are loosely followed, covering your hands and face in curry and rice are just how it's done. To show you an illustrated example of the shovelling act in full force I'd taken a selection of flattering photos of Nix. I was however strongly advised not to show those photos and to only show this one. You get the point...

Kandy, Kandy, Kandy I Can't Let You Go

You know you've arrived in Sri Lanka when you walk into the arrival hall of the airport and every man and his son are sat around a TV watching the cricket. After an obligatory score check we were on a bus to Kandy, crammed in with the rest of Sri Lanka.

An 8.8% Sri Lankan stout in a dingy locals' bar was in order to wash away three days of travel and two nights in airports.

We hung around in Kandy for a few nights coming to terms with a part of Asia that we haven't ventured into before. SE Asia feels like home now but this was a whole new kettle of fish. Super smiley friendly people, delicious food and animals running around everywhere meant we were pretty happy with our surroundings.

Kandy is positioned around a beautiful lake that's teeming with wildlife despite its proximity to traffic and its fumes and tourists and their selfie sticks.

Tortoises, monitor lizards, funky birds, fruit bats, spotted catfish things... Hours of viewing pleasure.

You can also find moneys down at the lake. The friends of those monkeys could be found running amok near our guesthouse. A common theme throughout this trip has been me being woken up to Nicola fretting that something was in our room. Not once has anything actually entered our room. (Note from Nicola - this statement is not true) (Note from me - maybe we've had the odd giant gecko, skink, massive spider, strange insect, cat, dog, mouse, hermit crab in our room)

This time however we both woke to a bang on the roof and then Nix saw our curtain billow and in a daze sat up and looked to the floor to see a monkey staring back with a look of shock that mirrored hers. "Oh no... Brim! There's a f*cking monkey in the room!!" Once I'd been called to action Nix hid under the blanket whilst I waved my arms and did my meanest kkkkssssss to get him out. He bolted out the window and grabbed some rubbish from the bin on the way out as as a keep sake. These particular monkeys have a geeky looking centre part that managed to make the ordeal even more comical than it already was. Funny little bastards...

Keeping on with the wildlife/nature theme we hopped on a bus to the Royal Botanic Gardens which are famed throughout not just Sri Lanka but the region. They were OK. The palm lined boulevards were nice,

the cannonball tree was a cool new discovery,

and I finally got to continue my love affair with sleeping in parks but the highlight was the fruit bats. Tree upon tree filled with thousands of bats that were very active given it was three in the afternoon. We'd read that Sri Lanka was going to be wild - it was living up to its billing.

The following day we had a Tea-rrific time at the Ceylon Tea Museum. Seeing the machinery and learning about withering and drying and such. Wow, what a roller coaster of emotions.

The tour culminated in, you guessed it, a cup of tea. 

In all honesty it was a decent tour and provided a good platform for a month of drinking the stuff by the gallon and actually learning how you go from leaf to cup. 

Food and drink - you didn't think you were getting away that easily did you?

Faluda (a super sweet rose syrup/vanilla icecream dessert) and buffalo curd with treacle (buffalOMG - he knows who he is).

Woodapple juice (like a fizzy tamarind juice with off blue cheese blended through it - actually really good).

Red rice with curry.

And so much other stuff that we shoved down too quickly to get photos of. Hoppers, string hoppers and simple things like dhal curry and sambols have us falling head over heels for Sri Lankan cuisine.

We're off to a cracking start, we really hope this place keeps it up.

Our Happy Place

Paradise is a word that's bandied around all too often. I admit to using it too many times in this blog. I retract all previous uses of the word paradise in order to use it one last time as we have most certainly (with great sadness) just left it.

You'll find paradise somewhere in the Visayas in the Philippines. It's a place that doesn't shove a souvenir t-shirt up your nose, where locals still greet the few tourists that visit with a smile, if you stay at the right place you'll be looked after like family, it's where you can snorkel off the shore and swim amongst beautiful hard and soft corals, turtles and a kaleidoscope of fish, (if you're lucky) you'll have encounters with a couple of the ocean's creatures that couldn't be any more pure even though they appear staged and you'll drink rhum, HEAPS of rhum, with a type of people that seem to have some common personality trait that draws them to the island to begin with and then allows you to become lifelong friends with ease.

Let me expand on a couple of the things that made this place one of our trip's true highlights. Firstly, let me set the scene.

We were staying in a tiny nipa hut just a few metres from the shore surrounded by friendly pooches and trumpeting roosters. Life was simple, life was good.

Dolphins

I find dolphins boring. I think most men find dolphins boring. They're definitely a woman's animal.

Enter the spinner dolphin. So named because of how it acrobatically spins as it leaps out of the water. Interested yet men? I'm not, they're still a bit boring.

However, take me out in a boat as the sun rises up over the ocean and surround it with more than a hundred spinner dolphins launching themselves around you and even through bleary eyes it's hard not to get a bit excited.

Throw in your hut's owner (also your dinghy's captain, Junior) still taking pleasure from seeing this spectacle of nature, despite seeing it every morning, and you're suddenly sold on dolphins. Unfortunately all other dolphins are now most certainly very boring in comparison.

I almost forgot the best thing about the tour - these hats!

Whale Sharks

At the right time of year you can head out in a small pam boat as the sun goes down and snorkel with whale sharks. 

When we arrived on the island a Dutch guy had been out seven nights straight looking for the whale sharks but they just weren't around yet. He left the day after we got there.

The night after that a fisherman had a spotted a couple and let Junior know which sent everyone into a frenzy pulling on bathers and grabbing snorkels before piling into the dinghy and flying out to find these creatures of the deep. We looked hard and checked with a couple of fishermen that were on the night shift but it was too late and too dark and we forlornly cruised back in. That disappointment was quashed by Junior's optimism proclaiming that this was a sign that the whale sharks had arrived and we'd see them the following night.

Talk the following day was all about the whale sharks, would we see them? How crazy would it be? Should I surf it?

Four thirty arrived and having dreamt about them during my afternoon nap I told Nix I was full of confidence, for some reason she had more faith in Junior's confidence. So about twenty of us were slowly paddled out in fifteen pam boats by increasingly desperate boat drivers (they'd been coming out for weeks and it's only pay day once you find them). This was a team effort on many levels.

We pushed out into the deep and my luck had come in as I'd landed the hardest working boatman on the island (or the one with most at stake back at his hut, if you know what I mean). After about 15 minutes one had been spotted in the distance by a motorboat and the race was on. I received my cues, "Snorkel ready!!?", "Snorkel on!", "Now!! Go! Go! In!!" and I was in, face to face with the ocean's biggest fish. My heart was racing as I dived in and pumped harder and harder as I tried to keep up with the immense animal but it eventually descended back into the depths. 

I jumped back in the boat, heart still racing and feeling pretty bloody blessed that I'd swum within touching distance of an animal that many would spend their entire lives dreaming to see.

It was getting late and the sun was beginning to fall beyond the horizon. I was starting to worry that not everyone was going to see one, in particular my non snorkeling wife.

We bobbed around for another twenty minutes and then out motored the local king of the ocean, part man part fish, Junior. It was then that a few huge fins appeared in the distance and the race was on again. What happened next, I don't think any of us expected.

My new best buds, plankton, were out in force, dancing across the surface of the sea and bringing with them an s load of whale sharks.

What would you say is a lot of whale sharks in one group? Five? Higher. Ten? Bit higher. Fifteen!? Higher still. TWENTY!? Yep, about twenty whale sharks had congregated to put on a show that your wildest dreams could not conjure up. Huge gaping mouths breaching the surface in all directions, massive fins intimidatingly cutting through the water and tourists sh*tting themselves wondering whether they really wanted to get in the ocean with what was a plankton blood bath on top of it.

The energy felt by the group was something else. We were all connected in the moment knowing that we were seeing something truly special, truly wild and nature at the absolute top of its game. 

We've seen some great things on this trip but think that that experience takes the cake.

Cockfighting

Cockfights are a Sunday event. We'd been in the Philippines for three other Sundays before finally deciding to head along - partly having not had the chance and partly because I think our mind was subconsciously asking, 'Do you really want to see that?'

Junior led us through the village and to the community's main weekly gathering. A couple of hundred people were milling around a large grassed area that's dotted with palms for shade from the sun where everyone's chowing down on chicken bits (what else?) and waiting for the fights to kick off.

Before two cocks face off in the cockpit their owners go through a long deliberation process in order to determine who they'll be happy to put their pride and joy up against. After a good three quarters of an hour they'd found a match up and we were off.

Us foreigners (about 9 of us) all huddled around a corner of the cockpit and after the formalities (like getting your rooster to bite the others wattle and strapping a blade onto its foot) we were away.

You're immediately transported back to a bygone era. The crowd goes nuts (kids, women and grandmas included) and it's brutal. When placed down to start the fight both roosters' instincts take over and they begin to peck around looking for one final meal. The crowd however wills them together and all of a sudden they look at each other and it's on. Feathers fly, blood is spilt and in an instant it's over with one rooster limply flopped on the floor - tomorrow's Chicken Adobo.

After that first fight I went holy shit, Nix went holy shit and people began to split realising it was far from their cup of tea. It shook us a bit but we got it. We understood the tradition and during the weeks before had seen the love for and connection with that men have with their roosters - this is blood sport but it's not brutality for the sake of it.

Us and a Dutch guy stuck around and we began to bet, began to sink rum and began to get those sideways glances from locals that said, 'Wow, they're actually enjoying it and hanging around.'

The end result was one hell of a cracking afternoon, getting right in amongst it and drinking way too much rhum and then even more back with the crew. Things got messy, we did Australia proud. 

The Peeps

But the glue that held all these great experiences together were the staff where we were staying that would provide three delicious meals a day (the best food we'd had in the Philippines) always with a smile on their faces and the guys that we spent our days and nights with.

Two Australians, Two Israelis, Two Danes, an Austrian and a German plus beers and four bottles of rhum are evidently a very lethal combination. This one night started off tamely enough but then the booze began to flow, as did the conversation with someone remarking at one point that they didn't know where to listen as everything sounded weird or interesting. 

The night culminated in a beach relay between the men explained in excruciating detail by one very merry Dane. Team Austrialia came through with the goods and I was smothered in a very ecstatic Austrian man. There's a photo. Trust me, you don't want to see that photo.

It was five nights filled with a lot of highs shared with some really great people. It really peaked on the final night when Boris (my Austrian comrade) proposed to Heike (his lovely German partner). "She said yes!!", he yelled from the beach to let us know he'd succeeded. As I said, a special place.

But the name of this special place? You'll have to figure that out for yourself...

The Turtle Sardine Sandwich of Moalboal and Apo Island*

We bussed down the length of Cebu Island to get to Moalboal. 

Moalboal is one of those places that makes you feel like you're venturing into the great unknown. You see no foreigners during the approach and the main strip is just a limestone track. That all changes once you pass as many dive shops as there are locals.

There's a reason why divers and snorkelers flock here - tens of thousands of sardines hang in massive schools just twenty metres off shore. Before I went in Nix asked me if they would make shapes like an arrow pointing out an incoming shark, they may not have been that creative but they were pretty immense.

Quite skittish, they'd move like one giant organism and whilst snorkeling above them was fun, diving in amongst them was quite special watching any disturbance send them into a lava lamp like swirl of glinting silver.

The other noteworthy event of Moalboal was saving a pup from possible death after finding her stuck in a hole devoid of energy following repeated attempts to get herself out. We brought her to our bungalow, gave her some water and removed a couple of ticks before marching her around trying to find her home. We had success and are hopeful that she's now OK.

Each evening was spent waiting for nonexistent sunsets, trying to spy the odd turt head and watching a thousand sparrows come home to roost on moustache boat.

Our next stop was Apo Island - one of the world's best diving sites.

Nix was a diving/snorkeling widow again as I fluffed around for hours in the water leaving no ledge unperved and constantly cursing 'sh*t I wish we had an underwater camera, why does f*cking everyone have a GOPRO'. Nix wasn't too sympathetic to my material wants.

The dive highlight was a night dive from shore where I spotted a school of baby cuttlefish, a smallscale scorpionfish hiding itself away in the sand, a painted cray, a velvety black Spanish Dancer, heaps of prawns and cleaner shrimps and got to muck around with fluorescent plankton and some strange jelly like vibrator thing that would light up when umm, given a bit of encouragement. A seriously good dive.

The accumulation of seeing things that I hadn't seen before or never knew existed is what made diving Apo so enjoyable. 

What made snorkeling Apo so enjoyable was the 100% guarantee that just 5-10 metres off shore you could swim with sometimes more than ten huge green sea turtles. Swimming with that many turtles was one of those times that you just knew nature was taking the p*ss. 

After Apo and still not done with the diving caper we dropped in to Dauin for a night before leaving the Negros region. Over the last month I've become obsessed with wanting to see a frogfish under the water and apparently Dauin was a good bet.

Among a heap of strange creatures living in the sand and enough ghost pipefish to last me a lifetime, I spotted my frogfish. He may have only been half the size of your pinky's fingernail but I've at least seen one now. The quest to see an adult has commenced.

It now might be time for me to spend a bit of time out of the water and with my wife. However given I'm now shrivelled up like an old man's ball sack Nix may be happier with her life as a lady of leisure.

*Please note that no turtles were harmed in the writing of this post