Day 3: January 21

We didn’t go for a swim on the beach in Kalutara because the beach somehow ended quickly and the road turned onto the main highway. It’s chaos here again, just like yesterday. We were stopped by the police. The usual situation — they asked for our licenses and started telling us that they weren’t international and didn’t work in Sri Lanka. We said that our licenses were excellent and that they worked all over the world. And that we weren’t going to give them any money. They hesitated a bit more, kept peering around and looking for something, but then they gave the licenses back and we drove on. There are loads of police here.

We arrived in Morgalla. And all the hotels here are $40 and they don’t bargain.. We had already decided that we wouldn’t find anything cheap here; we were heading to the beach to swim. And on the way some guy called out to us — “Rooms, rooms”. We stopped. Volchiy says — did it sound to you too like he was shouting “rooms”? Yeah, exactly. We went to take a look. The house renovation was in full swing. They showed us into a spacious apartment. They said they’d clean up in an hour and it would be beautiful. They agreed to let us stay for $15. And it turned out the ocean was only 50 meters away! Beautiful. In the evening you could even hear the ocean roaring. By the way, they really did clean up — washed everything, laid out a beautiful white bed. So it became really nice.

While they were tidying up our room, we went to the beach. We bought a light green mat with elephants there. On beaches, it’s somehow really inconvenient without one.

The beach in Moragalla turned out to be very decent. Although there were waves, they weren’t that big and you could swim. And it was clean here too! No fishing boats, cows, or dogs. It was as if someone was cleaning the beach.

In the evening we walked along the beach.
Then we went looking for food. Today, food was not on our side. We ordered kottu again, just like yesterday, at a little restaurant along the road. We asked for it not to be spicy — they brought it extremely spicy. After India, I’m afraid to eat something like that. We asked the waiter to bring another one, saying this one was impossible to eat because it was so spicy. They brought another one — spicy and also oversalted. I couldn’t eat it, and Volchy somehow ate almost all of it.

On the way, we bought supplies of water and cookies at the supermarket. I really wanted not to buy cookies somehow. But so far I can’t manage it.

We also ate the fruit we bought yesterday at the supermarket on the way today. The little watermelon turned out to be very bad. The big yellow mango was a complete failure, the worst mango we’ve ever eaten — it seemed edible, but with some strange chalky aftertaste… The papaya — our last fruit ended up in the trash right after we cut it open — inside it was pale and hard as a cucumber, and tasted like unsweetened pumpkin.

So far, fruit isn’t going very well either. We’ll try buying it not in stores but at markets.