An update

Well I have left my blog for far too long and with the prodding of my mother, (thank you and I love you) I will do my best to catch up from where I left off last year in Sri Lanka… Good grief it seems like an eternity ago that I was in Sri Lanka with Brian a friend and a guy I work with. Well I will not go through the whole story that I promised you, sorry. I will however give a brief overview of the rest of the trip as best as I can recall it.

Well we left off with Don Williams and we travelled towards Kandy to go see the Elephants. It was a great experience and one that was a bit strange as well. They call themselves Elephant orphanages, I am sure they do this so that dumb white guys will go and see them to support the elephants and help out keep these amazing creatures alive. In fact they are just another business that tries to get as much cash from you as possible with the lure of riding the biggest creature you have ever seen and do it as cheap as possible so that they can put food on their table at homes. I fully understand this and I did really enjoy the experience… for some reason though they put us two large men on one elephant which we found out was pregnant, I am not sure it was totally humane but we did it anyway and I do feel bad for the girl but hey I did give them 40 US dollars and I was wanting my elephant experience. We rode for 20ish minutes where we went up a hill through a swamp and finally finishing at a river where we could wash the elephant. They asked us if we wanted to be sprayed by the elephant but on closer inspection of the water and the poop floating downstream we decided to pass the very tempting offer. We then had to tip the mahout (elephant trainer) a few dollars for his time and effort for which we got some very cool photos of us beside the elephant. We were off now to head to the beaches of Sri Lanka. We had our driver and for the life of me I cannot recall his name…lets say John, a good Sri Lankan name. He told us that the driver to Una Watuna beach would be around 5 hours from Kandy. Time estimations in Sri Lanka are always cut in half by what I have found to be true. The trip that was supposed to be 5 hours which is a large amount of time was in fact closer to 12 in a non air-conditioned van.

We made it down to the beach and in the morning found ourselves in an amazing place with a beautiful sunrise to meet our hangover. I may have felt like death warmed over the view was spectacular. We also found out that day that the tsunami that hit in 2004 was directly on this beach. There were still signs of buildings that had been shifted off their foundations or stripped of everything but the concrete floors and posts. It was a eerie sight to see.

We made friends with a tuk tuk driver immediately and whenever we thought about going somewhere he was never more than a few seconds away from us. I am sure that it is a great business plan to be friend the tourists and make them feel comfortable and keep them close to you. He took around the areas and told us where the best places to buy Sri Lankan stuff were. (I am sure it was all relatives that gave him a kick back on our purchases, but hey when in Rome…)

We spent a serious amount of time watching the waves come in and out of the bay, I read a few books and had a beer or two. The food was fairly good and the fish was of course to die for. It was a very chilled time in Sri Lanka and although it was not quite what we were looking for it was a great time to check out. I am not sure I would go back there as I have many other places I would like to go but if I was ever looking for a place to totally unwind and read a book on a quiet beach, Sri Lanka would be one place I would consider.

The one regret

Well if you are a facebook friend you may have seen that I have said I finally have a regret… I have been told by my parents, friends, self help books and other sources to live life without regret as it has made me the person I am today. For the most part I agree with that statement but now as I am getting closer to my mid-30s I am realizing that my body is starting to let me down. This being said I am now regretting not taking care of my body better in my younger days. There I have said it, as much as I have loved the contact sports I have played in my youth I do wish I would have stopped earlier and taken up activities that do not do so much damage to one’s body. My body, with all its aches has given me moments of extreme pain in the last 6 months and a realization that I will struggle for the rest of my life with joint pain and arthritis. I have been fortunate to be living in a hot climate where the pain on my joints has been kept to a minimum but still I have days where I struggle to walk up right. I do blame myself, the extra caloric intake has not helped matters nor the lack of stretching and core work to keep my body strong. I have lured myself to a belief that I will be able to stay strong and healthy with little effort. I guess it one of the life lessons that we learn and our elders, parents and siblings try to teach us, with poor results is that we need to take care of our bodies more than we do. Now I am not going to go granola, hippy or whatever you want to call it but I think that Tim McGraw did say it best when he sang the song “My next 30 years” is that

“Oh my next thirty years, I’m gonna watch my weight
Eat a few more salads and not stay up so late
Drink a little lemonade and not so many beers
Maybe I’ll remember my next thirty years

My next thirty years will be the best years of my life
Raise a little family and hang out with my wife (have to find one first…)
Spend precious moments with the ones that I hold dear
Make up for lost time here, in my next thirty years
In my next thirty years”

Lets see where this takes me…

To infinity and beyond...Part 1

Well dear readers, I am back to tell you what has happened to me in the last few months of my life. LOTS... I am guessing you want details as well so I will start from Christmas and see where the path down rabbit hole of typing and a wandering mind takes me.

I am currently at my desk in my office and a game of dodge ball is being played in the gym next to me, it is a distraction but one game that I loved for a long time and students play it with wreck less abandon. Great fun even for the students who try not to take part in PE even they don't want to get hit.

So, back to Christmas...we were trying to sort what to do for the break was I to stay in Dubai and spend another holiday with people I worked with and although last year was nice have a disjointed holiday season? Well a few friends got talking and all of us were in the same boat and we all agreed that spending Christmas in Dubai was not going to work well and we needed to get out. We had a small dilemma in the fact that we were all tight with cash and did not want to spend a fortune on the holiday. We looked online for a bit and realized we could get to Sri Lanka for under $350.00 so we booked. side note to get to Vegas last summer I paid 450, so we thought it was a great price. We finished school and the next night we were set to head to Sri Lanka. The next day I spent lounging by the pool, chilling out and finally packing as the flight was to leave at 10pm that night. I got packed called up Brain and told him to make his way over to my place as we could have a few drinks before heading to the airport. Well I did my routine and checked my passport, all good there. Checked my luggage, all good and whatever I did not have i figured I could buy in Sri Lanka so I felt good there too. ok, so now where are the tickets...where would I have put them....hmmm turn the house upside down and can't find them anywhere....crap they are at school. No real concern as they are E-tickets and I can print them again. Get online and start looking at the tickets in my e-mail account and look at the flight time, yep 10 pm... look at the date...ummm crap it is the next day. Brian was already en route to come for a beer and head to the airport....Crap. Well I called the airlines and they tell me the flight is overbooked by 5 and the chances of getting on the flight that left that night were slim but if we went to the airport we could wait and see what came about. By the way we thought we would be smart and hire a driver to come pick us up from the airport in Sri Lanka and gave him the date that we THOUGHT we were coming in and he was ready to pick us up landing that night.

We get to the airport and get to the ticket agent and I put on my polite voice and tell the nice Sri Lankan man my story and that I knew it was my fault but I would love it if he could help me out. Which he replied since I was being so nice and was not demanding to get on the plane as the people before me had stated he would hold our tickets and see if anyone does not show and he would try to get us on the plane. we now had a 3 hour wait to have everyone check in and see if there maybe 2 spots for 2 Canadian men to come to Sri Lanka that night. We were in good spirits and were laughing about the whole situation. The whole time we are waiting there were 10 more people that walked up to the counter to try to do what we were doing and they all had to sit behind us and see if they could get on as well. I will stop here to thank my parents for giving me the gift of manners and being polite, some of the rude things that were said to get on the plane only got the person turned around and flat out told to go home as the flight was overbooked. THANKS MOM AND DAD.

I know the anticipation is killing you so I will let you know we got on the plane and we even got a emergency exit seat and the nice gentleman behind the ticket counter was actually holding them for us because he knew if we could get on the plane that it was designed for Sri Lankans to fly and not big white guys. This was a cheap flight but it was also a great adventure and we had not even left Dubai yet.

We arrive in Sri Lanka with little issues, the crazy thing on the plane was that they did not serve booze on the plane but allowed you to bring duty free on the plane and open up said drinks while sitting in your seat. We get picked up and go to the Intercontinental hotel in Colombo where we went straight back to bed as it was 5am and we had been awake since early the day before. We spent a few days in Colombo seeing a few things, driving around and having every person that was selling something on the street trying to ripe us off blind everywhere we went.

The last night we were in Colombo we went into the hotel pub where we listened to live music and had a few beers. To my surprise two small Sri Lankan men started playing Some broken hearts never mend by Don Williams. This song has been etched into my mind by my father playing it over and over again on any long trips that we did when were we kids and I think I was the 3 person in all of Sri Lanka who knew all the words to the song. We talked to the band afterwards and found out that they bought the CD in Switzerland and they loved it so much they taught themselves how to play the songs. Funny how you can travel all over the world and there are always small reminders about what really matters in life, family...

In the next blog we head to Kandy, Una Watuna Beach...and the last few months of Dubai life.

I will try to get it out soon.

Pictures to come soon too.