Sri Lanka — Jim Winslett

We were more than ready to get off the ship and see things again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful ship and for those days in India, when everyone but the Canadians and the Brits got to go ashore, we had the thing mostly to ourselves, which was really nice. But after seven consecutive days without being able to leave, we were really longing to see something different. So we had all our paperwork in order, we filled out our landing cards, gathered up our tourist visas, and waited to arrive in Sri Lanka. We were greeted by lighthouses of various design.

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Full disclosure: I really didn’t know what to expect in Sri Lanka. It’s an island nation off the tip of India, so I imagined they’d share much of the same cultural influences. When I think, “Sri Lanka”, I picture elephants, exotically clad dancers, and elaborate, colourful fabrics. And the welcome committee at the end of the gangway certainly reinforced that image.

But if the costumes were tribal and traditional, the rest of the setting was anything but. The cruise terminal is right in with the container terminal, which was very, very busy.

We hopped on the bus and headed for the drop-off point, Colombo’s largest shopping mall. My first thought was “oh, please don’t let it be another Mutrah Souq with crowded streets and in-your-face shopkeepers trying to push their stuff in your face”. Happily, it was nothing like that. It was a seven-storey, very Western, very modern mall.

There was some sort of cake competition happening at the time. The cakes looked good!

Shopping here was pretty interesting in terms of the prices. Firstly, the exchange rate between the Sri Lankan Rupee and the Canadian Dollar isn’t something you’re going to be doing in your head, so every time we’d see something interesting, I’d pull out the phone and check the Currency app to see what it cost in figures we could understand. Secondly, whether or not something was a good deal depended on the brand. I found a toy store that sold Lego, but the prices there were almost twice what they are at home for the same sets. Rob found a Polo shop, but again… about twice what you’d pay for the same thing at home.

But if you shop the local brands, like you’d find at this nice store, the prices are very reasonable.

I found a fun short-sleeved casual dress shirt there for $20 CAD. Not bad! Rob shopped at a different store and got two nice shirts for about $20… no, not each. Total. That store carried a local Sri Lankan brand with a name that belongs more in Canada:

And yes, the pants really cost 3490.00 LKR - that’s why I was happy to have the conversion app. That sticker-shock-inducing number comes in at just under $13 CAD.

After some shopping, we got a bit hungry - and I broke my cardinal rule of travel, which “never eat at a place you recognize from home.” I enjoy trying the local foods wherever I go, but I saw a Chili’s on the way into the mall and I really needed some cajun chicken pasta and a margarita in my life more than I needed a curry and a green tea, so in we went. It was actually pretty nice for a Chili’s!

I got a chuckle out of the art on the wall as we came in…

It’s fun to realize that the food you grew up with is considered “exotic foreign cuisine” to others. And even though I was in a familiar chain restaurant and had planned to order my usual, I noticed that Sri Lanka had my beloved Cajun chicken pasta, (pic from the menu)

…but they also had a second version, Tex-Mex’d with corn salsa, hatch chilli sauce, and some other stuff. It was even better than the one I usually get, so yay. So I still had food that I can’t get at home. Double-yay.

Off in the distance, we saw the Lotus Tower, a very tall freestanding structure with a lotus flower design. Its has a restaurant, night club, and other entertainment options as well as housing a bunch of communication equipment.

Sadly, the pollution haze tends to make seeing anything that tall rather problematic. Luckily, we could see the tower fox our ship and after dark it lights up with a rotating selection of colours. Without sunlight in the haze, the tower isn’t as obscured and the tower’s lights cut through what haze remains. It’s quite beautiful.

And so ends our first day in Sri Lanka. We have a tour tomorrow, so we should get to see more of the city then. I’ll leave you with a pic of the sunset as seen from our balcony. I’m half-hoping to see the Buddhist temple on the left blast off to the moon before the night is over. We’ll see.