The Travelling Buncebury's

  late afternoon view across Kandy  Kandy sits at about 1550 ft above sea level and we were headed south from here towards the highest parts of the country.   Travelling this way really is a different experience for us.   Instead of a taxi or tuk-tuk to the bus station and the puzzles to be solved when we get there, we just have to present ourselves at our hotel reception and there’s Niroshan with the car.   It is very convenient but we’re not meeting locals and experiencing our slight exposure to the way of life as we normally would.   That’s just an observation, we chose to travel like this for this trip and as recompense Niroshan is a rich source of information about Sri Lanka.   Rambola On the way we stopped at a tea plantation and factory for a tour.   The place was full of old but still working machinery for drying, cutting, rolling and generally producing tea from the bud and first couple of leaves that are picked by hand.   The pickers, who are usually women pick about 20kg

  Finally, here we are on another trip nearly two years since we got back from our last foreign jaunt to Mexico.    That was just before the Coronavirus era when because we were travelling full time, we were homeless until an hour before the first lockdown.    However that’s a different story (available by request) and now here we are in Sri Lanka. This one started with a bit of a hiccup.    After a fine pre-flight hotel stay at our friends Jan and Clive’s place we turned up at our long term parking site to find it closed.    A note on the gate gave us a different address but there was no internet signal.    So we had to drive until we got a signal and that was that.    Nothing on the company website, no email warning but at least we had time to spare.     two shots of the fishing boats in the lagoon at Negombo Sri Lanka has been on our mental list of destinations for quite a while and everybody we know who has been here says it’s wonderful.   Some of you will remember it as Ceylon and