Wednesday, April 13th, 2022 – Arugam Bay
Apr 17th, 2022 by rallyadmin
The hotel in Battaciloa was certainly a shock after the Suisse Hotel in Kandy. No air conditioning and a ceiling fan the may have been salvaged off a retired British hydrofoil. This is the darkest and dampest room I stayed in years. The only upside is that it was on the ground floor.
As I head out for an early morning walk, the hotel owner meets me and offers a coffee. “Go to beach? Go to road and turn left and down the road to the beach.” The locals are just getting up and moving about. The beach is empty. It’s a broad sandy expanse with tall palms separating the road from the beach. It’s very peaceful early in the morning.
Back the the “hotel”, the mob is moving. A pastry seller comes buy as we are loading the tuktuks. A sweet muffin and then the tuktuks convoy heads out.
It’s fairly long drive to Arugam Bay but the road is along the coast and flat. Beach on the left. Rice paddies on the right. And not too much traffic.
About halfway to Arugam Bay, there is an open stretch of beach with a collection of relatively new graves with headstones. This is the area that was hit quite hard during the 2004 tsunami. The damage here was nowhere near the damage closer to Indonesia where the earthquake that generated the tsunami occurred but absolute table top flatness of this area still caused local devastation. These graves are the few reminders of the terrible day.
By mid-day, it’s gotten hot on the road. Fortunately, there’s a nice breeze off the water and the sun is high enough that the cab of the tuktuk provides some shade. This would be brutal on the mopeds that we rode in Southeast Asia.
Just short of Arugam Bay, we come up to a petrol station, without the usual kilometer long wait queue. We get in line (there is till is a queue just a shorter one) and Clemo and Paul F head to the station and to see if the “tourist line jump” technique is in play and if it will cause an international riot.
Surprisingly, the answer is no. There are too many motorbikes and though they are in a different line, they have been waiting much longer than the tuktuks and cars and they are rightfully worried that the station will close before they get their allotted petrol. It’s sa good thing that the predominant religion here is Buddhism. The standard western religion wouldn’t require so much patience.
There are no armed guards but though there is a substantial amount of jockeying for position in the line, err, mob of motorbikes, everyone seems to be cool about the situation.
The word goes out that the are filling 2 containers separately so we go up to the walkup line and we do get ushered in as “tourists” and line jump the locals with no reaction from the locals. As we stand there, Stewie comes down an alleyway behind the fuel pump that we are waiting at and comes in to join us. That does elicit a response. Whistling, yelling, horn blaring. Until the manager holds up his hands to stop and says a short sentence in Sinhalese. The locals immediately calm down and the fueling proceeds.
We get back to the tuktuks with our containers and they open another line solely for the tuktuks. Soon we are fueled and on our way again. I wave goodbye to a local young man that I had been chatting with and then later traded WhatsApp links with. On the road again.
In just a few kilometers we enter the “Aragum Bay Tourist Zone” according to a road side sign. A few more kilometers and we arrive at the hotel. Right on the beach. This could be a very comfy rest day.
Obi