Day 6: January 24

For breakfast we tried an annona. It’s very unusual. Tasty, very sweet. Inside there are soft creamy “berries”.

After breakfast we went to Jungle Beach; I had read about it at home, and they said it was nice there.

The road down to the beach was a dirt track with boulders, and I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to get back out of there on the moped, so I suggested to Volchy to leave the moped and walk. That’s what we did.

The beach turned out to be very nice, just very crowded. But that was compensated by a beautiful bay with no waves and almost transparent water, which is a great rarity for Sri Lanka (unfortunately, I forgot to take photos there :(().
We went to the neighboring bay 500 meters away, and it wasn’t nearly as cool there.

When we got tired of lying on the beach (and that happens to us quite quickly) we decided to head to Galle; we wanted to walk around the fort.

When we got to our moped, it turned out that someone had stolen our helmets (we just hang them on the mirrors like everyone does here). We were still wondering whether the locals leave their helmets here — it seemed to us that they often do, and we decided to do the same. At the same time, several problems came up: we had to buy new helmets. But how do you get anywhere without a helmet — the police here heavily fine everyone who rides without helmets.

And then we saw a security guard. He was guarding mopeds in an improvised parking area at the end of the dirt road, which we had not reached by literally 50 meters. Volchy saw a pile of helmets under a palm tree, and we wanted to ask the guard what those helmets were (ours definitely weren’t there, but we were still curious).

The guard said they were the helmets of the guys who had gone to the beach. I told him that we had left our moped a little higher up and our helmets had been stolen. Surprisingly, he understood me (Sri Lankans speak English almost universally, but at a very primitive level, and when you try to explain something more or less complicated to them, they understand nothing at all).

The guard was surprised and thought for a moment. Then he asked us to wait and ran off somewhere. After a while he came back with our helmets — he said he had found them in the jungle along the road….

So it remained a mystery: either there is some kind of mafia here that makes people pay for parking (but we didn’t even know there was a parking area down there, and parking costs pennies). Or someone simply steals helmets and dumps them in the jungle, then in the evening takes them away and does something with them. We gave the guard 200 rupees in thanks for finding our helmets (even though he may have been in on it with the thieves, otherwise how could he have found them so easily and so quickly in the jungle). But of course the guard definitely didn’t steal them, and he looked quite upset and surprised when we told him about the theft, so maybe he had nothing to do with it. He didn’t even ask for money; Volchy decided to thank him on his own. Happy that the situation had been resolved, we set off.

On the way we stopped at a local restaurant opposite the bus station in Galle; for some reason the prices there turned out to be the same as in tourist places (or maybe they have a special menu for tourists, because we noticed that all the locals came in and ordered food without a menu at all). But the kottu was cooked very tasty and not spicy, just very salty :) We were completely stuffed from one portion of kottu.

The fort in Galle is nice. Inside the walls there are narrow streets with pretty houses, little restaurants, and souvenir shops. It very much resembles some small European seaside town. We walked a little along the fort walls. It was hot to stroll through the streets, and tuk-tuks and mopeds rush around there. So we decided to head home.

In the evening at sunset, we swam at our beach. Volchiy kept looking for a turtle, but never found one.