Sri Lanka - We decided that the best way to visit Sri Lanka would be a three-stage process. The first stage would consist of settling into the culture and time zone. That manifested itself as our first night at a fairly nice hotel in Colombo. The second stage was to be our adventurous stage, where we would explore this island nation on the cheap and constantly on the move. The third and final stage was to be our relaxing period, at a beach resort doing nothing at all. As you can imagine, the second stage was when I thought I was going to die.
For the most part, the adventurous traveling was fun, and although it wasn't luxurious, it was perfectly comfortable. The hotels were mostly homey, a little rough around the edges, but charming enough. The part where things got hairy was the transportation. At first the transportation was also charming. We started with a train ride from Colombo to Kandy, which is world famous and boasts some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. We went for second-class tickets, but for the most part the ride was cool enough and there weren't many people so we could move around comfortably.
After that train ride, our transportation descended in quality. We went from Kandy to Nuwara Eliya, high in the mountainous tea country, in a bus. The bus was very full. By this I mean the bus (which was a van) that should have seated at most 10 people was filled with at least 25. It wasn't that bad because Allison and I managed to get seats. Sure our seats were crunched at the front of the bus with no legroom, but everything was OK enough despite the crazy driving through the switchbacks. After a few days in Nuwara Eliya the plan was to take a longer bus ride to Galle. We would have rather taken a train, but it appeared that no train went straight to Galle from the mountains.
As it turns out, it was impossible to build a train into these mountains. We didn't really think much of this until the bus ride from Nuwara Eliya to Galle. As with the bus before, there were many more passengers than there were seats (about 80 passengers and 45 seats). This bus, however, also had the "advantage" of being decorated to look like a cross between a Buddhist shrine and a 1980s Florida disco. There was very loud Sri Lankan disco music blaring from very large speakers all around the bus. Your senses were instantly assaulted before the bus even started moving. The worst part about this bus is that we were convinced by the local bus station manager to change to a first class bus from a second-class bus just before we left. I'm wondering if maybe the second-class bus might have had a little less bling; that would be a good thing.
So off we went, working our way down the steep and treacherous hills of Sri Lanka's tea country. At first it was fairly calm and easy going. I even thought it was charming that our bus conductor (the guy who helps people get off and makes sure everyone pays) would drop a few coins at each temple and say a little prayer. Little did I know then how important those prayers might be. After about an hour the bus started to fill up, and the speed of the bus started to increase. The quality of the roads also started decline and the height off the cliffs seemed more and more dangerous. I'm also pretty sure that the music was getting a little softer, but that could have been my sheer terror causing temporary deafness.
The moment where I was sure that I was going to die happened at a pretty sharp turn, with cliffs on both sides of us. One cliff was a sheer rock wall; the other was a sheer drop. We took a turn fairly fast, with traffic heading straight for us. Our wheels were screeching, and the bus was leaning pretty heavily. I'm pretty sure on this particular turn only two of our wheels were actually touching the ground. I had been given the window seat, with an open window (because the AC wasn't working). The larger group of people standing on this bus heaved into Allison, who then heaved into me.
The open window was the only room for me, so I was halfway out of this bus, hanging onto a bar that was outside of the bus. I was leaning out pretty far, and that's dangerous enough. As I leaned out I realised that I didn't have to worry about hitting anything. That was because there was nothing to hit. I looked down and I didn't see road... I didn't see shoulder... all I saw was down, I saw down several hundred feet to the bottom of the mountain we were zipping down. I hung on for dear life and figured that this was the end. Eventually we made another turn, and I was thrown back into the bus.
I should mention that in Nuwara Eliya, a local car driver had asked us if we wanted lift into Galle. He said it would cost us something over 100 dollars, but we could enjoy a nice leisurely drive with stops along the way. The bus cost us about 3 dollars all together, and since this was the adventure part of our trip and not the luxury part, we chose the bus. As I pulled myself back into the bus, I looked at Allison with what must have been a look of sheer terror. I screamed something at her about how we saved a little money, but now we're going to die. This is when she grinned at me and calmly said, "If we live, we'll have a really cool story to tell".
Later