I have been collecting video of our travels in the tuk tuk for a few weeks now. I am a terribly slow video editor, so it took a while to get this all together and posted here. Rather than make a bunch of small posts of each section of our travels, I have decided to bore you all with one post of greater length to tell the story. This covers four short videos, a few too many words, and a handful of pictures (along with my usual claptrap, asides, and parenthetical ramblings).
So, if you have ay interest and a few minutes, settle in with a cup of coffee and read on…
We loaded up the tuk tuk with a few bags, said good bye to all of our new-found friends, jumped in our trusty little tuk tuk Enzo, and left Kalpitiya.
We really did not have much of a plan. We were stopping in Colombo for a week or so, but then after that, maybe wandering East and North until we hit the other side of the island, then down to Arugam Bay (where we are currently calling home).
What ensued was three weeks of some grand adventure, some white-knuckled driving, and some really great memory-making:
We drove our first “long” trip in the tuk tuk to get to Colombo. It took us five and a half hours, and by the end of the day my Left hand was a wreck. All the engaging the clutch and gear changing is done with your left hand, so the seven thousand shifts I made took their toll. We started out with some nice, rural driving, that progressed into… well, the city.
After Colombo, we drove through the countryside again, to Kandy. Except, it was not really country. It was villages and town all the way, moving very slowly on windy roads with a plethora of “danger buses”, lorries, cows, dogs, goats, tuk tuks, cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians the entire way. luckily most of us were moving the same speed as the pedestrians, which is slightly quicker than the cows, but frighteningly slower than the lorries and “danger buses”.
And then, seven and a half hours, and twenty two thousand gear changes, we got to Kandy…
Never mind. I will let the video tell the story.
Yep. That was more traffic, more frenetic, and more stressful than I have seen in a bit. And that one “danger bus” forced us completely into the ditch. We were lucky on that one!
From Kandy, we wanted to see the Knuckles National Park. It is named after the fact that the mountain peaks look like knuckles on a closed fist, but I never was able to make that connection myself.
This was completely different driving for two days: Not a soul around for miles, and steep, winding, potholed road the entire way. We failed to get much video of the really terrible spots because Tam was beyond terrified, and convinced we would tip over at any moment. She did get out to walk quite a few times (I myself decided to quit and turn back ten different times before we continued on and found our destination).
This really pleasant waterfall.
And crazy lightshow-sunsets!
And then, finally, our last epic drive took us from the town of Dambulla to the city of Trincomalee. It should have been a four hour drive, on perfectly maintained roads, but… yeah. We decided we had a higher chance of seeing elephants if we took this little vague line of a public road through Somawathiya National Park. It shows up on Google maps, so it must be a road, right? Well, as one may already suspect, it wasn’t quicker.
Eight and half hours and thirty-seven thousand gear changes later…
I will leave it to the video to fill you in.
We are now posted up for the next month or two in Arugam Bay, and we are using the tuk tuk to get our salty selves and our surfboards to one of the many different surf breaks within an hour drive or so, so no more eight and a half hour epics again for a while…
Probably.
On our way to a surf spot the other day, one of our rusty old wheels disintegrated and broke into two very distinct pieces. We did the Sri Lankan style repair on the roadside: tipped it up on its side, stuck a rock under it, and voila! 5 minutes later the spare was on. Then we realized the spare was rusty and broken as well.
Two new wheels.
Oh, and a dirty carburetor that just got cleaned as well.
Oh, and the left headlight just went out.
But that’s all of it for now!
Wind, Water, Waves, Wander 