Traffic chess

On the 10th of August we had to check out of our jungalow in Mirissa.
We had booked a room in Weligama for four nights. With only 50 metres from the surf beach the room seemed amazing but we were both a bit worried about the noise, as we were next to the main road.

Traffic in Sri Lanka is worse than Bali.
It takes noise to appreciate the silence, or what is it they say?

Well, it can get very noisy. Push bikes, tuk-tuks, scooters,motorbikes, cars, tractors, busses,... literally everything is on the road at the same time and most of the time the white centre traffic line is more for decorative purpose.
... Rules? I’m not sure anyone respects or knows them. But everyone uses their horn!

The busses and trucks generally are the worst. They are constantly “tooting their way” through the streets to alert people to get out of the way.
The zebra crossings are for decorative purposes as well. The only time anyone really stops is when cows or stray dogs come jumping in front of you - and this happens more often than you like.

Traffic is like chess - move where you can (...just to make it clear, I can’t play chess so I decided I would not drive in Sri Lanka).

It is hard to put it into words but just crossing the main street could sometimes have me waiting up to 5 minutes.
There is a lot of police, but they mainly target people driving motorbikes without helmets.
We had heard you could get a fine for not stopping at a pedestrian crossing. Next time we saw one, Chris stopped and we almost got bumped into by a car.

Chris has done pretty well driving in these conditions. I think he most enjoyed it when I had my visor down and couldn’t see what was happening in front of us.

The room we got was part of a hostel and café. Kasun (the manager) had closed the kitchen during the off season but was fine with us using it. This meant we could make our food and had a fridge to cool some beers.

We checked into our new room and went for a surf. For the first time in almost two weeks we were able to walk to the beach with our boards.
Surfing that day didn’t go as planned... I gave up pretty quickly as I could feel my shoulder and neck start aching again.
Good thing was, I could walk back “home”, have a shower and wait for Chris. (What I really did; dump my board in the room and got a coconut on the beach.)

I was quite disappointed and frustrated. My neck was sore, I

had taken my board out 5 times and still hadn’t caught one wave yet.

That night while having a beer on the beach, we did some research and booked a back/shoulder massage for the both of us.
The massage was quite nice. I prefer the Balinese massages, they are a bit firmer and less oily - this arjuveda massage felt more like rubbing in oil than massaging muscles (but that’s probably what it is?).

I didn’t think it did much but fell asleep straight away when we got back into our room.