The early bird...

After yet another sleepless night we were both very grumpy.
We got up and went for a walk down to the beach at sunrise. In a way I’m happy our Indian neighbours started making noise at 5 am, as otherwise we wouldn’t have seen the local fishermen bring their boats in after a night out on the sea. Chris had to give them a hand with pushing one of the boats back onto shore.

We talked to a local tuk-tuk driver and asked him if the surf at other spots would be better. He assured as that Pottuvil would be bigger and so we grabbed our boards and went down the sandy roads we had to abandon the day before.
Arriving at the Pottuvil beach break we were more than disappointed. We had been in A’Bay for 3 days now and these conditions were worse than Secret Harbour in summer. The driver said he could take us to a break further down the road - but both of us not expecting much more there either - decided to stay and save another 10bucks on tuk-tuk fees.

Every now and then a few waves would come through and both of us paddled into the lineup. I gave up quicker than Chris. The local surf teachers pushed their pupils into literally every wave - not leaving any for us. The Israelis here are renown for not respecting the priority rules in the water - in our experience (or more Chris’s) no one here does.
After not even an hour we were back in the tuk-tuk going home.

We assessed the situation, there were no waves, we were cooking our cash on tuk-tuk drives, bad food and bad accommodation. Chris was getting “sick of driving up and down the main road a hundred times a day”.

So after breakfast we packed up again. When checking out, the guy from the hotel (that had been very friendly before) tried charging us for 3 nights, as we initially had said we would stay for at least 3 nights. I was fed up with people being after our money and made it very clear to him that he would get what we had agreed on per night and not one penny more.
Organising a driver to take us to Ella seemed more difficult than we thought (maybe because of the Friday prayer?).

Public transport in Sri Lanka is dirt cheap, unfortunately as we have our surfboards we can’t use it. So we have to rely on taxis big enough to fit the coffin.
The people in Arugam Bay tried charging us way more than we had read online and in the end we opted for the cheapest version - a tuk-tuk.