More From Sri Lanka - The Beach

Jeremy and Talia playing on the beach with their new friend Ipi

The kids loved Mirissa, a small beach town on Sri Lanka's southern coast.  We initially had intended to stay for three days, but we ended up staying for five.  The kids frolicked in the sand and surf for hours at a time, and we ate heaping fruit plates and fresh seafood at the water's edge.  We stayed in a lovely little guesthouse with only three rooms about five minutes from the beach, on a narrow winding lane that leads up through the jungle to a hillside Buddhist temple with great views.  We met new friends from Austria (Mike and Tanja and their five-year old daughter Ipi) who made our year-long adventure look like a casual jaunt to the Bahamas:  they had just driven across Eastern Europe in their old rickety van, then through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India - with frequent breakdowns along the way and stories of police escorts and mechanics of varying degrees of effectiveness.  And after weeks of intensive sightseeing starting in December - in Israel, Petra, Egypt, Turkey, and India - we finally got a chance to vegetate.

After hours on the open ocean, finally - a whale tail!

But it wasn't all about lazing on the beach.  We went on an epic whale-watching adventure:  They have to return your money (or offer you a free ride on the next day's tour) if you don't see a whale, so they motored across what seemed to be the entire ocean to make sure we found one.  So, we did see a whale, but some people on the boat (including a German man who was laid out on deck moaning in agony for the entire trip) definitely did not enjoy the eight-hour round-trip journey on the high seas, with only a limited on-board supply of bananas, cookies and butter and jam sandwiches.  Fortunately, we brought along some medicine for seasickness and plenty of snacks (mmm, peanuts for lunch!).  We had three whale sightings, but I think it was only one whale that we saw three times.  But I am thankful that we saw one, or else they might have never let us get off the boat.  

There he is:  The largest seated Buddha in Sri Lanka!

We also did a half-day trip by tuk tuk to see some kitschy Buddhist temples in the area.  There's the Weherahena Temple, where hundreds of comic book-like scenes of the Buddha's life are housed in an artificial cave under a large seated Buddha.  There's the Wewurukannala Temple, with the largest seated Buddha in Sri Lanka and a hall of murals and life-size statues graphically depicting the gruesome punishments inflicted on those who have committed such grievous sins as not listening to their parents - take a good, hard look kids!  And there's a third temple with a large standing Buddha and several halls of brightly colored murals illustrating various themes from Buddhist myth and tradition.

Thankfully, despite heavy rains in January and early February, it didn't rain a drop during our time in Mirissa, until it poured like buckets for hours the night before our departure.  We were also thankful to be able to visit Mirissa while it's still a small, quiet town, before it hits the big time - with more and more tourists coming here, and with a flurry of new development seemingly on the horizon, I'm not sure we'd recognize the place a decade from now.

Our next blog post takes us to Galle, famous for its Dutch colonial fort, the largest remaining European fortress in Asia.  See you there!

 

Tourist fishing

Here are some cool surfing shots (these are for you Justin!)

Hilltop Buddhist temple

View from the Buddhist temple

Nighttime ceremony at the Buddhist temple

In our neighborhood

More from our neighborhood

Chatting with our hostess at our guesthouse

Our host making bricks

Captivating nature scene in our front yard

Talia and Ipi drawing at our guesthouse

Here are some shots from our whale-watching extravaganza

Fellow tourists looking for whales

Talia and Ipi, prepared for the worst

With no whales in sight, and hours with nothing to do, Marc takes pictures of large ships

Hooray, a whale!  We can go back to shore now!

Shore at last!  (Good thing because we ran out of peanuts!)

First Buddhist temple

Jeremy and Eden with our driver

Second Buddhist temple

Entrance to the hall of sinners

Sins are shown on top, punishments on the bottom

Don't sin - leave a contribution!

Bye bye big Buddha!

Third Buddhist temple