When not to fall asleep on a bus

We arrived in Colombo around midnight on the Wednesday night and had to wait about forty minutes for Jim and Marg to arrive from Kuala Lumpur. Then it was all on to the mini bus for the drive down to Weligama some 180km south of Colombo. Just a couple of hours you would imagine but no, we were told to visit the wash rooms as it would be a four hour drive. The eight of us were rather tired from our flights from Melbourne and it was dark outside so most people dozed along the way but for some reason I couldn't sleep. Just as well as it turned out. Traffic in Sri Lanka is quite chaotic in daylight hours and not really a great deal better at night. We were sitting in the seat immediately behind the driver (I find I get a bit carsick if I can't see where I'm going) and I was surprised at how many people were out and about.

Anyway once out of the city the driver was hurtling along at about 80km/ph on what felt like two wheels on some of the bends. All the drivers in Sri Lanka rely heavily upon their horns, tooting to warn they are passing (and implicitly asking the vehicle they are passing to back off and let them in) tooting to say thank you and tooting in annoyance if the other driver disobeys the unwritten rules. We would frequently see a large bus or truck heading towards us only to see it swerve back onto its own side of the road at the very last minute, and there are stray dogs everywhere, including on the road - oh, and of course the occasional cow. Surprisingly, although we spent most of the next eleven days on a bus we only saw two accidents and those didn't appear to be particularly bad. However, we almost became number three.

Frank was dozing and I was looking out of the window when I noticed the bus was slowing down, which was strange as we temporarily appeared to be on a section of straight open road. It was probably about four in the morning and we weren't going through a town or village, so I was a bit puzzled until I noticed we were slowly drifting onto the wrong side of the road. At the stage Frank woke up and I told him I thought our driver was falling asleep. My voice must have woken him because he jerked upright and went back to his own side of the road. Back to 80km/ph for about half an hour and then a repeat performance. This time Frank yelled at him and I tapped him (hard) on the shoulder to wake him up. Thankfully he stopped shortly after to either get something to wake him up or to thank Buddha that he was still with us. Either way, we we finally arrived at our hotel around 5.30am (yes...after midnight!) after having stopped to ask directions several times and driving about 7 or 8km too far and having to turn around.

We all went to bed for about five hours before adjourning to the hotel pool to recover. Our room was quite nice, although we didn't have a view of the beach we did have our own small swimming pool and an outdoor shower. The shower was fine except you tended to get muddy feet getting back into the room.

After an early morning walk along the beach we decided to stick to swimming in the hotel pool as some of the locals appeared to be using the ocean as their bathroom, and we're not talking just bathing. It was very hot and humid and so we hid under beach umbrellas. Unfortunately they didn't provide as much shade as we thought and we had forgotten the doctors warning that the anti-malarial drugs would make us burn quicker :-(