Amazing Sri Lanka 2

​

Aline eagerly wanted to see fishermen in Sri Lanka, which is a very unique and traditional way of fishing out of the world. Searching for them became the first mission of day 2. Although without a particular spot made our 1 hour of driving vain. Ridma and Mami are locals, they asked and drove around, yet we didn't find our luck. When we were about to give up, 5 or 6 fishers holding fishing stuff sticking to the wood near the sea showed up! We got off, there was already a group of Dutch tourists stopped by taking photos.

While a local guy directly came up to prevent us from taking photos, asking for paying. Later we realized that downside of here, like sometimes also in China, is that there are always foreigner prices two or three times the local prices. I sneakily took one picture with a lower quality though ;)

King coconuts are different from green ones in many ways apart from being more expensive. These golden fruits look not only Royal in color, but contain substantial juice with little flesh, opposed to green ones. They are connected to each other, even though the size of each is almost as huge as a basketball.

Coral seeing was in the plan, while snorkling was not. However, it definitely made my whole journey. We took some fishermen's boat with a glass on the boat bottom, so that we were able to see some corals. However, the view was limited, and the number of coral had been hugely decreased after Tsunami 2004. Indeed, apart from some small groups of corals, the rest are grey bottom beyond green and blue shallow sea. Soon after, however, a big turtle showed up! We tried to follow it with the boat. Aline gave the xiao yi water proof camera to the fisherman to take the photo of the turtle. We got some amazing ones! The ambition didn't stop here. We decided to go down snorkling to play around with turtles ourselves! It was the first time of my life to swim in the sea (although with my life jacket) and to be so close to turtles and sea fish...thus began my sea journery.

Amazing Sri Lanka

Mari and I finally make our words true and flew to Sri Lanka during Christmas. We had already got one of her friends, Aline, arrived there one day before and we joined her hotel in the midnight of 23rd. 

The first view when we got out of the hotel the next morning was pure light blue sky and deep blue sea, with some coconut trees. The dream scene came in such a sudden that I hadn't realized that we were already on the island. Walking along the road for some minutes, we passed by some stands selling green color drinks and orange skin coconuts, all looked exotic. Then we arrived at the train station, took the train where there was no door at all. People all stared at us, we were the only foreigners on the train, I also looked carefully into them, they all have well shaped figures, slimmer in general, super fit and long legs and proper outfits, better than I imagined for an underdeveloped country. One cripple came onto the train and began to beg, then played a drummer, gave some taps as if it would helps train to move with a better rhythm. 

It was barely 9 am, we arrived at the beach in Panadura , not a big one but clean like in the paradise. Taking a greedy breath, thinking of the pollution of 295 in Shanghai, great escape! No more freezing, no more misty, warm and shiny sands gently tickled the soles, we took a spot and lied down, leaving sunlight watering all the exposed part of the skin. I felt myself just fully melt in the air, it englobed me subtly without any stimulation, as if the skin has lost all its sensation and is perfectly integrated into it. 

We approached to the sea after a while, sea water jumped into my feet wave by wave as a game, the shallow bank allowed me to go deeper until sea covers my waist. A local family is playing a water ball. We joined them. The waves kept pushing us back to the bank, and the ball took all the chances to flee away. Either by waves or by wind. 

After a while, Ridma, my friend Aline's friend's sister came to pick us. Later on, she and her family proved to be one of the best people I have ever met. She took us to her and her mom's house to have Christmas lunch together. Mami already began to cook. Of course, the local food was the highlight. She prepared the Cudles, a kind of fried balls made of tuna and potatoes. There was also Bringjol, the dish looked quite similar to eggplants, but it was because the plant got fried, the texture was more solid with darker color.  We also got other curries, fish meat, bettrave and nachos on the table. Aline has travelled to a lot of countries before and was also in India last year, she was quickly adapted and ate with her hands. Sri Lanka, like in India, is one of few countries that use hand to eat meals. Freestyle. I was a bit reluctant to do so in the beginning, but my other little girl side of mind was saying: come on, you're getting too old and stubborn to try new things? You want to belong to those boring people who never want to change? 

Aline playing with the dog

Ridma's garden

Cudles still in the pot

Bringjol, a local fried veggie

It did required some skills to mix sauces and rice without leaking those harder grains of rice out of fingers. I didn't really enjoy sticky sauces crawling on my hand skin and nails, but it was a funny and tiny mindset chanllenge after all. 

Like many other Sri Lankan families, Ridma's family is Buddhist. They are not supposed to kill animals in a direct way. Therefore, their house is also shared by a kitchen wall of busy ants, a bunch of birds flying acrossing the rooms, a transparent house lizard, a sneaky squirrel in the backyard, apart from Aline's friend's dog.

We headed to Galle after lunch, a historic city 2 hours of car away from Panadura. It used to be a battle field among Dutch, British and Portugese. Dutch people built up the defense stone wall to prevent strangers to enter, and also brought the religious culture into the island. We saw a Dutch temple, and a street called church street. Among others, there were also Arabic church and Islamic church. I'm not really sure if it was an overlap, anyway, we spent the rest of the day lying down on the stone walls to see the sunset. The ship in the sea far away was still like a house. 

Dutch temple 

Watch tower

Ridma drove us to the hotel at the beach, we found a restaurant nearby. Although we  were really full from the generous lunch, we had proper dinner for Christmas Eve. Mari, Aline and Ridma ordered curry and Mami had seafood with rice. I had cuttle fish with salad and chips. Surprisingly,they didn't sell alcohol, the runner is buddist and during holidays like Christmas l, it is not allowed to sell alcohols. Oh well... Merry Christmas!

Sinus Bradycardia

I went to have a medical check this morning for this Sunday's marathon, didn't expect anything special. Surprisingly, doctor told me that I got sinus bradycardia. Comparing my electrocardiogram with the examples of real sinus bradycardia, I confirmed that mine is a typical case, with 49 beats/min.

Hope this will not screw up Marathon...

Hiking Zhang Jia Jie

Right, it's all about HIKING in Zhang Jia Jie! Nothing is better than breathing deeply in nature, away from city pollution and just integrate ourselves as part of the nature.

The plane took off in Shanghai on Thursday night and landed 2 hours later, at Zhang Jia Jie International Airport, there goes the most ripped off airport ever: I'd rather believe it's a temporary bus station with plastic kind roof as if a typhoon can easily blow it off; the luggage convey line is around 10-15m, next to the stinky toilet, preventing me from going even though my tolerance to toilets are usually very high. The airport hall is no bigger than a football pitch, the check out process, therefore, took us for no more than 20min. The funny thing about the airports of Hunan province is that they are all named after flowers, so beside Zhang Jia Jie Lotus Airport, there are also Chang Sha Yellow Flower Airport (in the province capital) and Chang De Peach Blossom Airpot, even though ZJJ airport is apparently not in the same level as the one in Changsha in terms of facilities.

My boyfriend's colleague recommended us to this Base Youth Hostel, very close to the airport and Tianmen mountain, where we were about to go the next day. It proved to be very nice and quiet, economical and friendly. Arrived at around midnight, the cab was the only option, we managed to negotiated the price from 250 RMB to 30 RMB, "very warm" welcome from the local drivers.

• Impression on the airport: ★★☆☆☆

Day 1 - Tianmen Mountain

It was very easy from our hostel to Tianmen Mountain ticket office, cab for 5 RMB, almost 1/3 of the price of Shanghai. There are two ways for the mountain trip:
A - climb by cables and down by bus
B - up by bus and down by cables

B was definitely our wise choice, where the bus led us to a great view all the way up. The slope was quite sharp that we couldn't stay stable for a moment, knowing that our altitude rocket-rose from 200m to 1300m within 15min, with constant 180 degree turns in direction. At some point, we could even hear other people screaming in the shuttle, and one of those guys looked out and shout out in a very girly way: "这么高啊！(so high)" and that sentence became the new byword of my bf through out the trip. When we reached the 1300m of altitude, there was a huge amount of sharp stairs to climb up, yeah we needed climbing than just walking - the slope was sharper than 45 degrees.

Another reason the B line was a better choice was that we were climbing up to reach the huge gate but not stepping down, which was way much more scary!

After 20min's climbing, sweating work, we finally got our rewarded gate hole, which is more than 100m high itself, with the heavy mist, the gate became more mysterious. As it's the most popular site of the mountain, we had to quickly move on and went up by 12 escalator carriages that were newly built this year.

We got up quite late, by the time we arrived at the escalators, it was already 11 am, our way up was extremely empty, on the contrary to the opposite direction. We arrived at the top of the mountain, it was a huge garden with even more fog. We could bearly see people 10 meters away, it became quite freezing with out T-shirt and shorts, we had to speed up our walk to warm ourselves, but the path was quite narrow and there were always people coming from the opposite direction, making the way difficult to move on.

It suddenly began to rain, the hard heavy drops flashed through big trees and froze on the skin, it was chill to hell, we had to stop by a canteen, which prevented us from getting a cold. We tried to get out of the canteen several times, but eventually ran back to canteen to be covered in warmth. By the time we were determined enough to throw ourselves outside, the only thing we wanted to do was to get out of this freezing mist asap, urgent mission. So all the temples, stones and statues became ignorable, we couldn't really appreciate them properly with the heavy mist after all. We didn't feel a hint of fear either on the glass path, all what we saw was just cloud.

We quickly went back to the hotel and the first day was not yet really hiking, oh well, eye hiking.

• Impression on Tianmen Mountain: ★★★☆☆ (would have given 4-4.5 if we had better weather)
• Tianmen Mountain ticket: around 260 RMB/person for 1 day availability

I have to break down the travel journal into 2 parts as it's been quite long...hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to finish the other part.

Use Shortcut to Paste in Excel Filtered List

Full Marathon Registered

What a great day! We are all successfully registered for Marathon. Here begins the training!

Stressful Visit in Fengjing

Yeah, finally a meet with my parents. What a stressful day and how embarrassing it was when my dad asked me to urge my own relationship. Good that everything passed fairely well and we went to run again for 10k, just before the rain of cats and dogs.