Colombo, Sri Lanka
Day one
Sri Lanka - we’ve been here before, so we had a couple of things we wanted to do, and we didn’t see a reason to repeat the tour we’d done before. But since we didn’t dock until 2pm, we had the matter of brekkie and lunch first. Brekkie was in the usual spot, with the usual routine: I was up there just before 5am, having my coffee and listening to music via earphones. This time, I was jamming to a song by the Northern Boys - a UK trio, with two singers and one guy named Kevin who just dances. Anyway, it was a live track called “F the World” and if you’re interested, you can find it on YouTube, but I can promise you this: you are NOT ready for it. Regardless, it’s a banger and it will stick in your head, no matter how much you might not want it to.
Lunch was in the main restaurant: chicken satay with peanut sauce, penne arrabbiata, and a chilled pineapple soup. It was good, but I’m saving the best for later.
Once we docked, we grabbed a taxi with our Aussie friends Doug and Heather and headed over to the One Galle Face mall. It’s a huge, 6-storey mall with all of the things you’d expect to find in a North American mall. Plus some other stores that are unfamiliar, such as my fave store, ODEL.
It’s an outlet store and it specializes in clothing made in Sri Lanka. The last time we were here, I got a shirt that I really like. This time around, we both got T-shirts with elephants on them. I opted for the line drawing one and Rob got one with multiple elephants. The pair of shirts cost $25 total.
First thing done! The next thing was to hopefully find a place that sold Dilmah tea elixir in mango/ lychee flavour. We got a taste of it when we checked into the hotel in Singapore and we loved it. We asked and they said it was an elixir, a tea concentrate.
Our search for it yielded mixed results: they had mango, but not mango/lychee. We got the mango anyway, I’m sure it’s good, too.
We had a bit of time to kill, so we dropped in at Chili’s (yes, the American restaurant chain) for some margaritas. Inside, there’s a big Texas and I always find it amusing that something like Chili’s would be considered “exotic foreign food” somewhere.
Rob got a “fresh” margarita (with squeezed fresh lime juice) and I got a spicy jalapeno margarita.
Notice how much stuff is in my margarita. Now, if I were to order a jalapeno margarita in Texas (even at Chili’s), it would be a margarita with a few jalapeno slices. This is not that. This is a margarita with either jalapeno juice or pureed jalapeños and at least one whole jalapeño, diced and mixed in. They give you a bubble tea straw, so there’s plenty of room for you to suck up several pieces of raw jalapeno in every sip. That first sip was a real eye-opener. HOLY CRAP, it was spicy. How is it that a Chili’s in Sri Lanka understands “spicy jalapeno margarita” better than a Chili’s in Texas?
Anyway, we needed a ride back to the ship, so we hired a tuk-tuk.
The ride was fun, if a little harrowing. Traffic gets a bit crazy and these tuk-tuks maneuver in, around, and among vehicles many times their size. I kept thinking, “if something hits us, we have zero protection”. Plus, I had to fold myself like origami to get in the thing. If it gets mangled, I might not get out.
We had to get back to the ship, because it was our first Chef’s Table reservation. It’s a neat concept: you’re a guest at the chef’s table. There’s no menu, you just have what they serve. Every three days, the menu changes. We’ve got five or six of these booked. The first was tonight, with a British menu. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking, and we thought the same on the Marco Polo trip, but the British menu ended up being our favourite on that trip. We were happy to see it again this trip. It started out with an Amuse Buche and the “wine” pairing was a sparkling tea from Copenhagen.
Firstly, since when is “sparkling tea” a thing? Secondly, it’s absolutely delicious and it paired well with the Amuse Bouche course of a scotch egg and veggies.
Next up was fish and chips with some tempura haddock (delish) and some potato wedges (also delish) and minted mushy peas (blecch). It was paired with a nice Spanish sauvignon blanc that I even liked - and I don’t like white wine. The tartar sauce was amazing, too.
This was followed by a granité. That’s a small cup of shaved ice with flavouring. In this case, the flavour was gin and tonic. It was crazy good. It’s like a gin and tonic sno-cone. It kinda made me want to scour eBay to see if anyone still had a Snoopy Sno-cone machine so I could make these at home.
Next up was the quintessential British dish, beef short ribs, gravy and a Yorkshire pudding. It was all good, and paired with a delicious Australian cabernet. The yorkie was topped with grilled onions and bacon. Could it get any better?
Dessert was “whim-wham” (a raspberry trifle) paired with a nice port wine. We liked the meal so much, we booked it again day after tomorrow, before the menu changes to something else.
After dinner, we headed up to the front of the ship to our favourite spot, where we sipped espresso martinis and watched The Lotus Tower change colours. It’s a communications tower that cycles between aqua, purple, red, blue, magenta, and green. Very pretty.
No plans yet for tomorrow, other than dinner at Manfredi’s. That’s the nice thing about a holiday like this. You can make your day as busy as you like… or not.