12 Apr, 11am
altitude; 11,000 m over the Gulf of Tonkin, between Bankok & Hong Kong

Having been unable to locate the clichè originator, I am forced to save my can for another worthy cause & admit that, as things stand, all good things must come to an end. We are now just an hour out of Hong Kong & the comfortable, though constricting, life that we call our day to day existence.

After breaking free of the Colombo~Hikkadua bike race for the terminally insane we arrived in Mirissa at about 10 to 2 in the afernoon. This was quite an achievement; we had estimated a 1 hour window (1~2 pm) to the guesthouse we had booked and, after giving ourselves up to the maelstrom of the Galle road, had actually hit it. Our guesthouse was equally surprised; they had already let their rooms & had only one left available.

Our conversation with the guesthouse owner was not a very constructive on & ran something like;

Me; Hi, we booked 2 rooms for tonight under the name James

Guesthouse lady (with fixed smile); We only have one room available

Me; But I booked 2

Guesthouse lady; We only have one room available

Me; I don't understand, I phoned 2 days ago & talked to you. We agreed to take 2 rooms & told you we would get here between 1 and 2 pm. Here we are, what about the rooms?

Guesthouse lady; We only have one room available

Repeat until blue in the face.

This was going nowhere so we resolved to find another guesthouse & leave them to fill the one empty room. If I had thought for one minute that they might fail to fill that room then I may have taken some solace in exercising my rights as a discruntled consumer thus but they had probably filled it before the conversation ended.

This is actually fairly common in small hotels as they deal only in cash & so have no way to take deposits by phone. One of our number suggested that they could have at least warned us that they would not hold rooms but, working in an industry almost as cynical as the hotel biz, I opined that a comment like that would just leave the average customer calling the next place until they found someone who would tell them what they wanted to hear. Buyer beware, expect no meaningful commitment until you lay down some green.

All this left us in a bit of a predicament; it was Easter weekend and all the big places were already full. We were a little concerned that we may not find rooms at all. Sleeping on the beach tanked up on arrack might be OK for the hippies, but we're adults for God's sake; besides, I needed a power point to charge me pod and phone from.

We were very fortunate to find, just next door, a guy who had a little plot of land with a couple of bungalows on it. Both were available. He had no generator which was a little worrying for fan power during the night (turned out to be no problem - the brown out was over before we were) and the water from the tap smelled a bit, but we were only staying for a night & he knew where to get non-alcoholic relaxants so we accepted his offer.

Having secured accommodation, we trucked down to the beach & found the local seafood resteraunt of repute. Here started my fruitles persuit of Sri Lankan crab. Assume that everytime we ate for the next two days l asked for crab and that everytime I asked I was told No. Jumbo prawns were good enough to warrant a second serving, though.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the search for Nivana through liberal application of alcohol & ended in a somewhat ad-hoc backgammon tournament back at base.

More on the trip home later

Bomber out