Highway to Hell (not!)

December is almost over, and what a December it has been... most of it has been spent on the road, away from home. With the Southern Expressway opening up, the long journey up to Delwala has been shortened to a 2 hour cruise along scenic routes. The stretch of road between Agalawatte and Kalawana must be one of the most beautiful and naturally set roadways in the island. And the land surrounding the expressway isn't hard on the eye either (for now...)

A few snapshots of the expressway:

...the Kalawana road:

This is, I believe, the famous "Akasa Bokkuwa"

Delwala Valley, from the Kalawana - Thiruwanaketiya road

We even caught a fleeting glimpse of Siri Pada
(faintly appearing in the middle of the picture)

A bridge on the road during a normal day...

...and on the day we got caught in a storm :D

But to be honest, the most beautiful road that we got to travel on was the Rathnapura Panadura road, which is a messed up road to drive on (has way too many curves, and is narrow... we passed one head-on collision), but has views that are to die for. After coming down from the mountains, there are the industrial parks of Horana, which are vast! (You literally can't believe we have such huge factories in Sri Lanka)

There is also a bad ass bridge across the Kalu ganga somewhere near Kiriella that I wasn't able to snap, which is a shame coz it looked really nice, deserted like an old Western film and leading to a haunted-looking rubber estate on the other side. :D

Update: Here's a photo of the bridge I managed to catch a few weeks later. It doesn't look that haunted in the mid-day sun, but at the right time, in the right light, it looks seriously haunted. ;)

Huge rubber estates were a recurring theme

So were awesome sunsets

Here's something strange I saw, and I hope Amila can shed some light on this. At sundown, Mathugama town is filled with literally tens of thousands of these tiny birds (a friend of mine suspects they could be 'Vee kurullo'), fluttering around like tiny moths near a lightbulb. They were on every visible tree and lamp-post, and I had never seen anything like that before. O_o

Like 'Meruu', but bigger o_O

Oh, and here's a video of Tommy and his friend Achcharu being idiots. :D

The Southern coast in 8 pictures

Over the bridge...

past the temple in the sea...

a beach!

A wide deserted beach, with the softest, whitest sand...

But the sea is rough,

red flags are up,

what to do but walk away...

...at least the pool is tranquil.

Kinda ironic that I'm writing about beaches and sunshine when Colombo is undergoing the worst flooding in decades. What can one do but have hope in times like these.

Rainy rainy Katharagama

I've been to Katharagama about a dozen times, and I never knew that it rained like THAT! On the 4th evening, just as we got there, it began to rain by the bucket-load. I hadn't seen rain like that since... since the last time Colombo got flooded! :D

At the end of the day, I was drenched to the bone... and shivering on the bed. The rain subsided somewhat in the night, as we made our way to Kiriwehera in darkness (the electricity supply had been disrupted due to rain) in a tuk-tuk taking a jungle road, all the time hoping that an Elephant won't emerge out of the shadows and just flatten the little thing into a roti pan. Kiriwehera in darkness (and ever increasing rain) was a surreal experience.

By next day though, the rain had thankfully ceased.

Katharagama Maha Dewale

These guys were out in force.

Elephant bathing in Menik ganga.

Sellakatharagama seems to have undergone a construction boom since the last time I visited, which includes the building of a new bridge, a parking lot, a suspension bridge from the temple to the parking lot and a beautiful hollow stupa.

The roads in and around Hambantota are beautiful, though they seem to have undergone a deterioration due to the construction that's still taking place.

Thissamaharamaya

P.S. If you ever go that way, don't forget to eat Yoghurt from the NLDB farm in Weerawila. That stuff is gooood. :O

Window seat

The view over our beautiful city at 8.15 this morning. I've been meaning to take a panorama and put it up but it never happened till today. Once, on a really really clear December morning, Meshak and I were treated to the silhouette of the central mountains in the distance, and the distinctive shape of the butterfly mountain in the middle. Unfortunately, stupid old me didn't realise at that time how rare seeing the mountains were. I've stared out these windows on more than a hundred mornings since, but never again caught a glimpse. But I'm hopeful. Maybe this January, eh? ;)

p.s. Please excuse the image quality. This is what you get when your phone camera shoots through an unclean window. :D

p.p.s. You can see Mount Lavinia in the distance. :)

Also, I'll tack on a pic of old Tommy since this post is a bit too short. :D

Hanthana

These pictures were taken almost a month back, and since I got my PC back I finally got a chance to upload them! :D (please click on the images to see them at the proper resolution)

The famous communications towers atop Hanthana.

Two Eagles/Hawks in flight. Sorry about the quality since I had to crop the image.

I saw this dragonfly and was reminded of the LBO ad... 

"Hmmm... Is this a Pink Skimmer?" I thought! :)

The reason we went there: The gingerbread guest

houses my uncles were building.

The view from the restaurant.

Sorry about the wonky/tilted panorama. Got a 

bit carried away taking the shots! :D

A sunrise and a sunset

I don't think I'll be posting anything for a while, so I thought I'd upload some photos that I took around the house... :)

These two were taken on the same day, looking east as the Sun woke up. I'm beginning to play around with the centre-weighted exposure metering on the camera. Funny thing is that I didn't know this feature even EXISTED before I took my first proper look at the manual after like an year and a half of using the camera... *facepalm*

These were taken today, as dusk set in. The first was looking eastwards and the second was looking westwards. We get such lovely sunsets sometimes, and this makes me wish I had a rooftop like Me-shak's! :D

And the final photo is totally unrelated to the whole 'Sunrise sunset' theme, and depicts some little Monkeyboos having mangoes after their leader raided our tree! My comfortable slumber was interrupted by these fellows and had to rush out with eyes still half-closed to chase the buggers away... *grumble* :D

One for the road

It's been a few days since I put up a post, and I'm putting this up from uni due to the fact that my internet connection at home has been busted due to lightning... Me without TEH INTERNETS! I KNOW!!! :/ *rants*

Anyway, some friends and I visited a friend that I've been wanting to a long time, and took some pics at his place. Can you guess who the friend is? ;)

Beach panorama

View of Colombo from up north

Sunset clouds

random post #61

I haven't written one of these since this, and that was ages ago.

So, you know, I have too much time on my hands! ;) So I conducted a quick survey this morning, going to 25 blogs at the top of my blogroll (my blogroll is ordered according to time of latest posting) and looking through their archives for their first post. I put the month they started out and the year separately. This is not a scientific poll or anything, the sample size is too small. But it was fun looking at the results nonetheless!

Here's the date of first posting, categorized by year:

(Ignore the parchment-like colours. I did some shtooopid image manipulation on them to make them look old! lol)

I also categorized them according to month:

So, in conclusion, more people tend to start blogging at the start of the year than at the middle of the year. The explanation that I've come up with is that the start of the year brings many changes: New schools, new places of work, etc. and this leads to bloggage! :O Anyway, should do a proper survey someday with all the blogs on Kottu or something... :)

***

I also wanted to get rid of these two photos that I've had but didn't get a post to tack them onto. They're vertical panoramas (stitched together from multiple images).

***

I shall finish off with this. I had to, absolutely HAD to, include this in the post...

A Softer World: 539

I hope you'll excuse the randomness! ;)