Off to Secret Island this morning – the island that’s on all the maps, and isn’t actually an island. Quibble quibble quibble. Nice man offered to ferry us over, and having read that we should expect to pay 2,000-3,000, which did seem a bit bonkers for a 100 metre ferry ride, we were pleasantly surprised when he proposed 1,000.
The ‘island’ proved to have an excellent beach, and plenty of breakers, and we had a fine frolic in the waves. Bit of sunbathing, then off to the Buddhist shrine at the northern end, which proved to be unremarkable but very enjoyable in a low key way, with a jolly custodian in full Buddhist monk regalia.
Just behind the shrine, we found a place on the rocks to eat our snack lunch, which proved to come with cabaret – a monitor lizard, which came slinking over the rocks.
After lunch, as expected, the weather started closing in a bit, and we decided to head a little way up the coast to a port town called Beruwala which was said to have a bustling fishing port and a fine mosque. Caught the bus, got off in town, and had to walk a mile or so through the scrappy end of town before we reached the mosque, which looked fairly imposing, but to be honest not all that.
Oh well, we thought, we’ve come this far…so we went up to the entrance, to be greeted by…dah-dah! the first genuinely unpleasant person we’ve met in Sri Lanka. He gave us a surly scowl (the exact opposite, we agreed, of the Buddhist monk we’d met this morning) like something the cat dragged in, made it very clear we were not welcome in the main body of the mosque, and showed us to a small side room, which we were allowed to peer at through the window. Inside was some kind of decorated…something, which we subsequently discovered was the burial place of a revered scholar. And that was that. Then he demanded money, unsmilingly, almost aggressively. Well, bugger that – we haven’t even seen anything. “Give him a couple of hundred,” I said, and Virle rooted around in her bag, bringing out a couple of hundreds, which he viewed with disgust. “This is small money,” he complained. Ok, we’ll keep it. And we left.
Then back home, where we had a beer in the riverside pub where we ate last night bevfore coming back to the ranch for a home-cooked meal, which turned out to be absolutely stunning – seven or eight different dishes, each more delicious than the last. We gamely ate about three-quarters of it. Won’t need to eat again till the middle of next week. Phew!
