A “where’s Waldo” moment…

I was just thinking this morning, as I sat listening to the rain in our new comfy little colonial house in Weligama, that it has been almost three weeks since we moved down here. I guess we should do a little “Where’s Waldo update, so if anyone wants to know where we are, here goes.

Around the end of September we left Arugam Bay, driven out by the omnipresent throngs of tourists rocking their micro-thongs on the streets of the town. As we said pretty much every day: everywhere you look is butts, butts, and more butts. Funny the things that start to annoy you over time. Arugam Bay is a predominantly muslim town and has a serious effort in place to stop tourists from wearing bikinis (or anything extremely revealing) on the streets of the town, but it is overwhelmingly disregarded. It is appalling to see the level of disrespect for the local muslim way of life. I know this sounds like a weird complaint, but it makes sense when you see it.

This really wasn’t our biggest complaint, but kind of a funny problem to have.

The biggest complaint we had was that the surf there was like the bad days at Malibu: too many people and far too much bad behavior.

So we left a month early. We decided to head down here to Weligama, before the peak season begins, to try to find a house and get some time in the surf before everyone shows up again and things get crowded. We knew its was going to be the last month of the rainy season, but we misjudged how much it would rain.

It really rains here.

It has gotten better this last week, but boy those first couple of weeks were something. It is still raining on and off most days, but now just showers for an hour or two, not the non-stop deluges every day for the first two weeks we were here. Rainy season should wind down over the next few weeks.

We have lots of these little guys here. They are adorable and help with the rainy-season mosquitos.

All the rain aside (and it has been fairly nice to some extent to cool off after the blazing, unrelenting heat in Arugam Bay), it was good that we got down here when we did. We were able to find a cute little two-bedroom, two-bathroom colonial-era house, a one-minute walk from the main beach in Weligama. We are close to many restaurants and shops, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays there is a huge farmer’s and fisherman’s market right next to our house. There is a full selection of everything that is grown, raised, dug up, foraged, or caught from the local area. The house is cozy and quiet with air conditioning in the bedroom and comfy furniture in the living room. We ended up with another open-air kitchen, and we even have a resident rat out there for entertainment (the little bugger gets into everything).

And its priced right, just five hundred US dollars a month.

So, we should be here for the next two months if anyone wants to come visit and get some surf and adventuring in with us (just sayin’).

I’m sure we will have plenty of updates as we get around the area and explore. More to come on here…