Sunday, April 10th, 2022 – Pinnawala
Apr 14th, 2022 by rallyadmin
Saturday night ends with a rice dinner with rotti and beer on the beach in the dark. The fried rice is quite good and the rotti, a kind of egg pancake, is surprisingly good. The night, however, is just up and down.
The room ends up too cold and I can’t find the remote for the air con. Sleep, when it does comes, is a mix of jet lag, baggage worries and thunderstorms. The monsoon season is just starting on this side of the island and when the storms come, there isn’t really very much thunder but there are torrential downpours.
I finally give up around 7:30 and try contacting the airline and Expedia to get an update on my bag. Neither connects. I ask the girl at the hotel desk to call the number on my baggage claim form but that number doesn’t connect either. She even tries still another number that the hotel has for baggage claims. No luck.
The bag should be on the same flight I arrived on from Doha but I don’t have confirmation of that. I wait until a bit after 9:00 when the flight should have arrived to try again but no luck. Then about 9:30, Paul B sees me on the way back to my room and tells me that the airport has called to tell me that the bag has arrived and will be delivered this afternoon. Relief.
The Australian F1 race is on at 10 so we all, (well, at least the F1 nerds) huddle around Paul B’s Ipad and watch the race. The hotel doesn’t get Eurosport so we watch on the tablet. The good part is that Max Verstappen DNFs and Goerge Russell from Mercedes finishes in third behind Ferrari’s LeClerc and Red Bull’s Perez. Lewis Hamiton in 4th. Though not a particularly exciting race, it’s good to see the Red Bull arrogance have to deal with failure.
With the race over, the mob loads up the tuktuks and prepares to head out. I’m staying behind to wait for my bag and Dave P has volunteered to wait with me. It’s still raining and the departure looks less than inviting in the rain. With the rain slowly lessening the wait may not be a bad thing after all.
The mob finally gets everything loaded and slowly files out of the hotel parking lot. Pictures taken we sit back to wait for the bag to arrive..
Promptly at 3:00 PM the bag arrives in a delivery van. We have already piled our gear in the lobby so all we have to do is load the gear into the tuktuks and were on our way. Into the traffic. In the rain. Hoping to get to Pinnawala before dark.
As soon as we leave, though, the rain practically stops and within 30 minutes the road is starting to dry out. It only takes a few minutes to get used to the traffic and soon we’re leaving the city and driving through a less urban and on roads with less traffic. The roadside certainly isn’t the charming vista of the travel brochures but we’re more interested in catching up with the mob. Before sunset.
We end up coming into Pinnawala only about an hour behind the last of the mob. The boys are milling about eager to greet us and park us in one area of the area in front of the hotel. Unload the tuktuks and the hotel staff takes us and our bags upstairs to a very nice clean room. Everything has worked out well if not on the best schedule.
We go back down stairs for some beers in the little restaurant that is under the hotel only to find Clemo presenting us with brooms. WTF? It turns out the intention is mount the brooms on the tuktuks so that they can be seen in traffic. It turns out to be a brilliant solution to a problem we always have on these trips.
An hour or soi later, we head just a few meters up the road to a small restaurant for dinner. I loose my nerve and order the fried rice again. I’m not ready to dive into a proper curry yet. Plus, I can afford to lose some weight. Of course, the sheer number of beers is probably canceling any weight loss but it’s the thought that counts.
The beers keep coming. The amount of beers that these chaps can drink is near to legendary but when the raki (look it up) starts flowing, I call it a night. Back to the nicely air conditioned room for a good night’s sleep. It all did work out in the end. I had no doubt that it would.
Obi