Sri Lanka - Negombo to Kandy.

Click here for photos of Negombo to Kandy

Well, our Sri Lankan adventure has come to an end and what great fun it was! After a total of 12 hours waiting around in airports (don't talk to ME about navel gazing!) Juliette and I finally met up and were swept off to our digs in Negombo. After a few days of chilling on the beach, we took the train inland to the town of Kandy. There were 2 classes on the train; second and third and the difference between the two is the presence of seats in one and the need to hang off the side of the carriage in the other! We got chatting to a guy called Kamal who we eventually spent the rest of the week with as our driver. He first demonstrated his usefulness by helping us to get seats on the train. The technique involves choosing the correct position on the platform, not actually letting the train stop before you leap on board and then physically shoving people out of the way. It's a good job we met him as we shy, retiring English folk aren't used to behaviour like that! The train journey was fantastic. After leaving the suburbs of Colombo we travelled through green, lush countryside. The train track climbed higher and higher until we were looking down into jungle-filled valleys and up to amazing rock formations. We sat next to a mother and her 2 daughters who cheerfully shared their food, as we did ours. A lovely introduction to the friendly locals!

Ju and Rosa on the road again

The holidays are coming thick and fast and I'm off to Sri Lanka to meet me old pal Juliette for a week. We decided that we should try and meet somewhere that was geographically in the middle between the UK and Singapore. After some inspection of the atlas, it turns out that that's Afghanistan. Not fancying anywhere on the axis of evil at this time of year, we've plumped for Sri Lanka instead!

I am currently mid-way through my journey on a 6 hour stop-over in Kuala Lumpur airport, Malaysia. I feel that immigration standards are slipping as there was not even a small pretence at getting anyone to fill in a card on arrival! I am currently sitting in something called the Plaza Premium lounge, where for a small fee you can put your luggage where someone won't run off with it, use the internet and eat as much over-cooked rice as you can manage. All in a room the size of a broom cupboard! We are promised a much bigger area once we have gone through immigration and can even enviously watch people through the window moving around in their large space not knowing what to do with themselves in all their acres. It's a heady thought and one that's going to keep me going through the night...

Were we always this unfit?

Click here for photos of Rinjani

One of the main reasons that we took our holidays in Indonesia was to get the chance to climb the volcano on the island of Lombok: Rinjani. This is the second highest volcano in Indonesia and is apparently of a similar height to Mount Fuji. It's still active and was throwing rocks around as lately as May 2010. However, the crater now sports its own lake from which another miniature volcano peak is rising - it's this that is the active part. We took a 3 day and 2 night tour which started in the town of Sembalung on the East of the mountain. This area is very fertile and there is everything growing from coffee beans to strawberry plants in the tropical sun! The first few hours was relatively easy as it was through savannah, but then the real slog started. We ascended around 1200m to the rim of the crater to be met by our ever-smiling porters who carried all food and camping equipment in bamboo baskets strung on a pole over their shoulders. To make us feel even more unfit, they race up and down the mountain in flip flops and only seem to stop for cigarette breaks! The view into the crater was breath-taking and worth the blisters. The other 2 members of our group (2 French brothers; Emmanuelle and Aureliene - great fun!) elected to get up at 2.30am and make the final ~1000m ascent to the summit proper, but we were more sensible and stayed in bed and got up at a more leisurely time of 6.30am to watch the sun rise - very romantic. When our 2 travelling companions had returned to the rim, we then set off on the next 5 hours of our walk (can you see why we didn't go to the top?!). Down in to the crater itself and then a visit to the hot springs that flowed out of it helped to ease aching muscles...and also made some improvements on the smell we were starting to generate. I thought that the hike up the other side of the crater to the opposite rim was going to defeat me, but the sheer determination to not be one of the hikers who cries at some point in the trip spurred me on! Again the view of the sunset setting over a landscape in which you are the highest point was breath-taking. That evening we sat around the fire with our guide and porters and chatted and laughed - even though we didn't share that much language in common. We even tried the local Indonesian chili sauce (sambal) that the porters gulped down in huge quantities, although it caused Emmanuelle to cough so violently that he managed to get a grain of rice wedged in his nose!! The next day was all down hill, which was possibly worse than the up, but it did allow us to look rather smugly on the people who were only just starting off on the long slog up. We were dropped back at our hotel in Sengiggi where we lay around the pool for a couple of days - mostly because our legs wouldn't let us get up or walk sensibly!

A hair raising boat ride back to Bali (I was seriously considering stuffing my passport in my underwear so they could identify my body although Matt was taking a slightly more optimistic approach and rubbing sun cream in so that we wouldn't burn whilst waiting to be rescued!) allowed us to finish our holiday in the resort of Sanur.

A lovely 2 weeks away and my walking is almost back to normal...

Gili Trawangen

 It's such a good name that I can't resist having it as the title! After Bali we took a boat over to the 3 islands collectively known as 'the Gilis' off the NW coast of Lombok. The boat from Bali to Lombok and the Gilis takes around 2 hours but the boat was seaworthy and even had life rafts - an improvement on the boat we had on the return journey, but I'm getting ahead of myself... With nothing to do but lie on the fine, white sand and splash in the turquoise sea that is mostly what we did! We did walk around the largest of the 3 - Gili Trawangen - which took about 2 hours. If you walked reeeeeally slowly. We also went snorkelling and even saw turtles, but they're hard to photograph without getting your camera wet!

Bali Hai

 

Click here for photos of Bali 

It's school holidays again, which means it's time for the Fradleys to vacate the country. For our 2 week holiday we decided to visit the islands of Bali and Lombok in Indonesia. We started in Bali on a laid back part of the South coast called Petitenget. A short distance along the coast is the resort of Kuta, which is where you hang out if you're young, drunk and Australian. A bit like an Antipodean Benidorm. So we didn't go there. We did visit the island temple of Tanah Lot and honed our skills in not buying many identical souvenirs - well we were in Indonesia!!

After the coast we headed inland to the town of Ubud. Ubud itself is mostly tourists and locals trying to make a living with the entertaining call of, "Taxi sir? No? Well how about tomorrow?" However, not much effort leads you out into paddy fields and we spent a lovely evening watching the sun go down over lush, green fields of rice with a large glass of Bintang beer in front of us. It also made the walk back into town in the dark more interesting! A highlight of inland Bali was a cycle tour of 25km - all downhill! It starts up near the slopes of one of the Balinese volcanoes - Mount Batur. It is still sporadically active and the sharp line delineating the burnt ground from the untouched ground from the last eruption is startlingly clear. On our journey we passed through small villages in which the children would run out to High Five us as we cycled along. We got to visit the compound of a Balinese family (temple in the NE corner, pig in a sty, Iron Maiden poster on one of the houses!), help to plant rice in a paddy field (presumably any self-respecting farmer would dig it all up and start again after we'd gone?), watch coffee being roasted and the highlight of the tour - a cremation party who were on the way to dig up someone who'd been dead for 5 years so that they could then burn them! Some people get no rest...