Still on the island. It’s just so chill! Said goodbye after breakfast to our young friend from Belfast, who’s out here digital nomad-stylie, working from two till ten every day, otherwise just enjoying herself. She was on a Zoom meeting last night – we wondered what her clients made of the palm trees and Bob Marley warbling away in the background. She said her boss was initially sceptical, but she’s keeping up with the work, so no-one has a problem with it now.
With certain misgivings, bums still reeling from the shock of yesterday, we decided to head out on bikes again. Our hosts are at pains to stress that the bikes are not the best, on account of the appalling roads/tracks, but as a cyclist it pains me to ride a machine that clearly hasn’t seen an oil can this century, much less grease. Pedals and handlebars are physically hard to turn, everything protests continually. Having said which, if you push the pedals you go, hey ho.
First on the agenda, The Tree. And wow, what a tree. Originally brought by Arab traders back in the first millenium, baobobs have found life congenial here, and this one has grown into a behemoth. You could hold a Tory Party conference inside the trunk. No idea how old it is, but the signboard said it’s the second largest in the Northern Province, and has been calculated to hold 215,000 litres of water. A new fascinating fact for you. Don’t thank me, it’s what I do.
Then back on the bikes for another bruising, and lengthy, trek to item #2: Queens Tower. We had no great expectations, which proved to be just as well: though old, dating back to the Dutch occupation, it was a squat and unremarkable construction of coral and limestone – in very good nick, given its age, to be fair – whose most interesting feature was the doggies taking shelter from the sun. Happily, the juice bar we’d expected to find at the watchtower yesterday turned out actually to be here, and we were able to enjoy a ‘mixed fruit’ juice – a combination of aloe vera and cactus fruit, which is what makes it that ravishing pink.
Then for the even more brutal – because this time into the stiff breeze all along the coast, before turning inland, where there’s only the horrendous rocky surface to battle with – ride back to base. After a modest lunch of deep-fried vege rolls, we headed home, en route encountering a cheerful young feller who (like every second person you speak to here, it sometimes seems) has a brother in London, and who, on hearing we’d come back from Queens Tower gave us a look of astonished ‘On those?’ admiration, which somewhat assuaged the agony of our tortured rear ends.
And so to a well-earned rest, with tea and cookies and the local doggy, who seems to have taken a bit of a liking to us. Sweet!
For a finale, Virle got to do something she’s been wanting to do since we got here: watch and help out with some cooking. Preparing tonight’s meal, with the women in the little kitchen here, she sliced aubergines, chopped onions, and watched as the women prepared a meal for ten on a couple of wood-fuelled burners. In truth she didn’t learn quite as much as she’d hoped – all spices were in unlabelled jars (many home made toboot), so though she could see how much they put in, she couldn’t actually see what was being put in. One thing she learned for sure: Sri Lankan cooking involves a lot of oil and loads of salt. As I said, ‘That’s what makes it taste so nice.’ Still, it was a great – and dare I say it, genuine – experience, of a kind you don’t get on most tourist maps.