Little England

You wait decades for a tea plantation to come along and then two come along at once...

I've mentioned how civilised Sri Lanka is, well Nuwara Eliya raises the game with its golf links and its low humidity and its race course and its country estates and its afternoon tea on the lawn. They've turned colonial guilt into a tourist attraction.

I've finished Sri Lanka at Negombo a fishing town sort of near Colombo. I say I'm in Negombo, I'm not, I'm near it. I paused in Negombo on the way here to have a smell of the fish market but didn't stay for long.

I've headed south to an unnecessarily plush eco-villa squished between a beach and a lagoon. So plush. It's got the biggest pool I've ever seen. So plush. Course number five (alone) of the six course a la carte dinner was substantially bigger than any other meal I've eaten in Sri Lanka. So plush. The en suite bathroom is bigger than most of the hotel rooms I've stayed in.

As an aside, the bathroom is also sort of outdoors, which allows for al fresco pooing. I assume that this is to give high-end travellers the full South Asia travel experience without the indignity of having to ask the driver to stop the bus.

Kandy Kingdom

I know it makes me a horrible person but I had real difficulties taking a place called Kandy seriousl. As soon as I realised I was staying in Cinnamon Citadel in Kandy Kingdom then the poor town had no chance.  It was like I was staying in a level of a computer game unfortunately that meant I treated everything with roughly that level of respect.

I went to Tooth Temple in Kandy Kingdom. As temples go it was pretty good, and it takes only very minor changes to the name to get a good alliterative, candy-related name to fit my video game nonsense. There were a lot of references to King Kandy throughout, which didn't help the seriousness. So when it came to the point where they shut down the city for ten days each summer to parade a tooth on the back of an elephant, well...

I saw some Ves dancing. Apparently that's a thing. Imagine if Ronald McDonald put on all his mum's jewellery and then improvised a dance show after spending too long on a crosstrainer.

I also went to Gobstopper Gardens. That's not their name but they were chock full of fruit bats so I wrang dry the pointless joke that has clearly run its course. I don't know, I go to the prettiest City in Sri Lanka - a Unesco-protected pilgrimage site - and all I do is make Wreck-it Ralph jokes. Hashtag Keeping it highbrow.

I hit up two more of the big Sri Lankan Unescos on the way to Kandy: Cave Temples of Dambulla (Some Buddhas in a hole - m'eh - It's like Pindaya only with worse caves and less Buddhas) and Sigiruya.

Had you heard of Sigiruya? I hadn't. Apparently it's known as the Eighth Wonder of the World (but then so was Andre the Giant). It's a big old rock in the middle of nowhere. All round the rock is the ruins of a fifth century fortress, which in itself is pretty cool. You climb (by which I mean queue) up the side of the rock past some frescoes (good) and some really old graffiti (erm...) before getting to the top of the rock where there is more ruined fortress up in the clouds. And that is all kinds of awesome.

How had I not heard of that?

Island of Dragons

The first thing you notice about Sri Lanka is how very civilised it is. People are considerate. Drivers obey traffic laws and let each other out. There's really not much rubbish. It's mighty refreshing.

The next thing I noticed was how big the cashew nuts are. They are like arthritic fingers. To be honest, I was too blown away by the sense of order to notice much else.

I landed in Colombo last night - too late to see anything - and left early this morning - too early to see anything - so basically fobbed off the largest city and not quite capital (come on, admit it, you thought Colombo was the capital rather than Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte) in favour of the countryside.

Travelled half way across the island today to Habarana to tick the freckled, ginger elephant box as soon as possible. Saw about a hundred of them (yay) but they had covered themselves in mud so you couldn't see their freckles (boo, elephants, boo).

Ukko's Dart

I think I'm the victim of institutional spicism. I feel certain that people are making my food deliberately unspicy to reduce the risk of me melting on them.

The alternative blows my mind - maybe Indian people don't eat their food that spicy.

Or maybe I bring it on myself a bit. If I'm ever asked "mild, medium, spicy?" I generally say medium even though I think the correct answer is probably going to be spicy. Just because the evidence shows differently (it's been five months since I've eaten something that I'd class as "too spicy"), does not mean that my preconceived ideas about Indian food (based on years of getting broken by Madrases in the UK) are in any way altered. I just assume that if I ask for it spicy I'm going to get spiked by an Ukko's dart and spend the rest of the evening gurgling hallucinations.

I'm aware that I've referenced dystopian fiction that you've not read. Here's some more:

Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler
So a reactionary, right-wing quasi-militant campaigns to be president on the basis of fear and xenophobia under the campaign slogan "Make America Great Again". Nope, this dystopian fiction is way too out there. Something like that would never happen.

The Last One - Alexandra Oliva
More apocalyptic than dystopian. Most I've enjoyed a book since at least Station Eleven. Read it. Read it now.

The Blue City

Turns out The Blue City is way more blue than The Pink City was pink.

Let's rewind. I can't start there. I bloomin' loved Jodhpur and I can't quite put my finger on why.

Not sure if it's because of the ridiculously imposing back drop - there's a massive red rock in the middle of town with a big old fort on top.

Not sure if it's because it pretty much hits my romantic idyll of what an Indian city would look like.

But I loved it.

There were plenty of reasons to dislike it too. The sheer wilful incompetence of the AirIndia check in staff didn't help the trip start on apositive note. No tuktuk driver took me where I wanted to go for the price I should have paid. And I got bitten by something that made my hand swell up - don't know what but I now have fat knuckles. But I liked it. Liked it a lot; with its blueness and its rocks and its fort and its desert. The fort is crazy impressive now, when it was first built in the middle of desert nowhere it must have blown the proverbial minds.

In GetInMyFace news, they flavour their lassis with saffron in Jodhpur. That's a thing. Get in my face saffron lassi.

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In other news I tried to get a culture fix by going to Kingdom of Dreams, which is the closest thing Gurugram gets to a tourist attraction. I think it's fair to say that the production values of London theatre has given me unreasonably high expectations. I think it's also fair to say that Beyond Bollywood failed to meet them. Still it was colourful.