Sri Lanka! Land of tea and cricket, but not cricket tea!!

We flew out of KL at about 6am and arrived in Sri Lanka at 7am, this of course was with the time change. A very strange time chance because Sri Lanka and India are about two and a half hours different from Malaysia. I have been all over the world so far in my short life, gut i have never been any where that was off of a time zone by some increment of 30 mins...very strange if you ask me!! When we landed we gathered out bags and started to look for the train that was to take us to the larger train station where we would ride to the town nearest our first hotel. Sadly this train has already left (WTF?? We got in at 7am...no more trains for the day??). With the train gone we headed in the direction of the buses to get us to the train station. The bus situation was very difficult with us riding one airport bus to some small terminal, then hopping on another to take us to Colombo fort, the train station we needed! This bus had one of the local tv stations playing, so at least we had entertainment (though none that we could understand!) the bus was also packed to he brim with people and always stoping to try to pick up more people, even those that didn't seem to want on! After the 45 minute ride into the train station (passing it once because we had no clue where the he'll we were going!!) we were ushered off the bus. Though our stoping place was still blocks from the train station, we cut our losses gathered our bags and piled into a tuk tuk (small motorcycle thing with three wheels and a carriage type thing on the back) and rode the few more blocks to the station. Once there we bought some water and snacks and waited for our train to arrive.
Once on the train we sat back and grabbed some shut eye, watched the lush green countryside pass by, and watched a few episodes of arrested development on my iPad. At time we spotted monkeys or peacocks out the window and we were stopped for a while an hour at one intersection. After the 5 hour journey we had finally arrived at our stop...somewhere in the interior of the island (like I'm really caught up on my Sri Lankan cities!!). There our driver picked us up and carried us off to our hotel. One thing I can say about Sri Lanka is that the driving ranks amongst the craziest that I have ever seen! Motor bikes and tuk tuk's swerving in and out of traffic passing busses and cars where the streets would only be one lane roads in the states!! It's enough to keep your blood flowing that's for sure! While most of the buildings that I had seen so far were either old looking rundown concrete buildings or just plain shacks/shanties, the Royal Lotus (our hotel) was probably the nicest building I had seen in the whole country! They greeted us with complementary mango drinks and sat us down in the lobby while our room was prepared. From there we could see the outdoor pool which over looked part of the reservoir (which is giant!! Also it was man made, but done so 1500 years ago with nothing but man power! Quite an amazing feet even by today's standards!). From here we got our room, took our dinner and hit the hay after about 14 hours of travel from KL. The next day we would wake early to adventure to some cultural ruins!
We headed out for said ruins the next morning at 8:30 after a tasty breakfast. The area that we are in currently is know as the cultural triangle here in Sri Lanka, because there are many ancient ruins and the like spanning from around 500bc and on...all in, yes you guessed it, a triangle shape! Some of these ruins we were going to see! Many of them were temples of old ruins of palaces of kings long past. What really surprised me was that most of the structures were made of brick. Obviously in 500bc there were not any explorers that spread the concept or plans for brick and mortar to the native people here, but still they developed the exact same methods that were developed in other parts of the world! Crazy huh? Many of the structures we saw were quite old, but still very impressive, especially for their age! Quite a few Budas were in many of the shrines and temples and one place even used to house a tooth of buda relic! There were also some very large stuppas and a few larger buda statues! We also saw the oldest color paintings in Sri Lanka which retained a good amount of color for being hundreds of years old!
After the ruins we returned to our hotel where I driver told us that he had arranged a jeep to pick us up in a few hours to go to the wildlife reserve for our elephant safari, oh goodie!!
The reserve was about a half hour drive away zipping between cars busses and tuk tuk's. Once we got there we picked up a park guide and started out on the bumps park road to ht center of the reserve. Thankfully we lucked out and got a jeep with four wheel drive and a skilled driver! The last few days had been quite rainy for what was supposed to be the dry season, so not as many elephants had come out, but we didn't miss them! On the way to the elephant areas we say tons of different types of birds, a few that were endangered too! One crocodile, a mongoose (Riki Tiki Tavi) bunches of cows, and then yes elephants!! Our first group of elephants was about 6 strong with a large male a few smaller females and even a smallish baby :) we (a bunch of jeeps housing many different onlookers) all crowed as close as the jeeps would drive us and snapped away with cameras and just stared in awe at these amazingly large creatures in their natural habitat. Soon we pulled away in search of more. Not too long after we found two more, a female and a quite agitated male. When this male started to stalk out way our drive promptly turned our jeep around for a better position to flee if the elephant decided to charge...and charge he almost did!!! Not at us, no that would be far too lucky! But he did almost charge at this jeep ahead of us...boy did we want to get that on film, but I guess for the safety of those people in the jeep it was probably for the best...but damn it would have made for a good vid! After leaving the agitated male to his own devices we found two more elephants before we headed back to the entrance. Both male, but one of them had tusks! Yes while african elephants are the ones know for their tusks, apparently Sri Lankan males can grow tusks too, but only about 5% of them actually have them...making this elephant very lucky and us very lucky for finding him! With our elephant safari fulfilled we headed to the exit of the reserve and back to the hotel. While on the road back we came upon an area where three of four jeeps were pulled off to the side. As we passed we noticed about 5 elephants just munching away at bushes in the jungle! We pulled over to watch for a bit! Kinda funny cause wee almost saw a comparable number of elephants just on the road as in the reserve :p
What a great finish to a great day...tomorrow: relaxing by the pool and getting some photo work done!!!

More soon...