Haputale - Sri Lanka

Locations covered : Haputale, Idalgashinna
Trip dates : 21st and 22nd July 2012

It's been a while since I wrote on this blog. Having fled from the British winter as soon as possible, I'm currently back in Sri Lanka for the Christmas holidays. It's been only a few days doing nothing but catching up with the all the sleep I lost at uni, and I'm sort of bored already. So I thought of updating my travel blog with a couple of trips we had in Sri Lanka last July.

So our first trip was to Haputale, which is about 180 km away from Colombo in the hill country. Our plan was to spend a night at a holiday bungalow named "Blackwood View" in Haputale, and to visit a few places around. We started late in the afternoon from Colombo, and got to the bungalow about 5 - 6 hours later, after stopping at a couple of places along the A4 for food. The Blackwood bungalow is only about 3 km uphill from Beragala, perched on the steep slope on the right hand side of main road. It was completely dark when we reached Blackwood, and so we couldn't enjoy the breath-taking view that the owner said it had. Had to wait till morning to take a glimpse of the wonderful scenery, a landscape so serene for which I'm not going to bother finding adjectives. The pics below would explain it all.

It is said that that 5 out of the 9 provinces of Sri Lanka can be seen from the terrace of the bungalow. The images on the left were taken facing south, so panning from left to right in the view, one could see the Eastern, Uva, Southern, Sabaragamuwa and Western (if you squint, I think :P) provinces respectively. 

Unfortunately, it wasn't the clearest of days, but still, the Udawalawe reservoir was slightly visible from the bungalow. Yes, the Udawalawe reservoir from Haputale. It definitely was one the best panoramas I had  come across. The bungalow was also built at different levels, following the natural steep slope of the terrain, thereby giving glamorous views to almost all the windows.

Next, we visited the famous Adisham Bungalow, which was built by Sir Thomas Villiers in 1931. The house has been well preserved with all the furniture, paintings etc., and has been converted to a monastery by the Sylvestro-Benedictine congregation of the Roman Catholic church. 

See a couple of photos of the bungalow on the right. Unfortunately they didn't allow us to take any photos inside the bungalow. Later, we returned to the Blackwood bungalow after visiting the Haputale town. 

It was dark again when we got to Blackwood, but long-exposure shots couldn't keep the view away from me for long. See the pic below for a 30 second long shot, exposing quite a lot of details from the plains below. 

Although a lot of lights are visible in the photo above, we could only see about a handful of the brightest ones to our naked eyes. The bright white light on the left of the top image is actually the Mahinda Rajapakse International Cricket Stadium in Hambantota. The first ODI match of India's tour of Sri Lanka was going on at that time; a high-scoring match where India won by 21 runs. Ok so without getting carried away with the cricket, I should say that I was truly surprised to find out that the bright light was indeed the stadium, which was around 50 km away from the bungalow. Even more interesting were the bright orange glows visible behind the hills on the photos. After quite a few suggestions as to what they would be, we finally came to the conclusion that they were caused by forest fires on the other side of the hills. We knew that there were hundreds of hectares of forest being destroyed by the man-made fires in that area. Pity. 

The next morning we had a good hike uphill towards the Haputale town, while enjoying the wonderful view of the plains below. Afterwards, we visited Idalgashinna, which is a small town situated a good 500 meters (1600 ft) above the Haputale main road. Folklore has it that the area gained the name because of the coconut ekel-like (idal) trees (gas) that were present in the area. The winds from the southern plains blast their way through the summit of the mountain, causing most of the trees to shrivel and become bare and stick-like. Hence the name, they say. The views kept getting better and better as we made our way to the top of the mountain. Let the photos below do the talking.

We also visited the Idalgashinna railway station, which is one of the highest stations in Sri Lanka. The stations is also said to be one of the very special buildings where the rain water falling on to the two sides of the roof end up in two different rivers. Since the station is right at the summit, the water from the northern half of the roof flows northwards towards the Mahaweli river and meets the sea at Trincomalee, whereas the water from the southern side of the roof feeds the Walawe river and falls to the sea at Ambalanthota. Interesting thought really.

We had a small chat with a station master, and got permission to walk through one of the tunnels on the railway line, after making sure that there were no trains due for the next hour or so. First time I ever "walked" through a railway tunnel. Later, we took a different route to Haputale instead of returning the same way, and also continued the tour to Diyatalawa before returning back to the bungalow. And then it was the long, somewhat sad, journey back to Colombo. Back to real life. 

That's pretty much it from Haputale I guess. Catch you on my next post. Bye! :)

Melbourne - Australia

Locations covered : Melbourne, Buchan Caves, Mt. Baw Baw, Twelve Apostles
Trip dates : 5th to 18th July 2012

Now this is going to be interesting. I'm writing this post about one of my previous trips while being in the middle of a journey right now. I'm on the way to the UK from Oman to start my final year at Cambridge, currently blogging at a good 40,000 ft above ground.

This trip was a fairly long one, so I'm going to split my write-up into two posts. I will cut down on the details and will focus only on the important places we visited. Ours is a family that you'll rarely find at home on weekends, and over the past few years we've got into this habit of visiting a new country for every summer vacation. This time, it was Australia.

Wonderful landscape on the way to Buchan caves

We arrived in Melbourne on the 5th evening, after a short transit in Singapore. Neglecting all the jet lag, we started our mini-trips in Australia the very next morning. We first visited the Buchan Caves, which is about 350 kms East of Melbourne. We followed the Princes Highway upto Bairnsdale and took the Great Alpine road from there.

Formations in Buchan caves

The Buchan caves were an amazing natural attraction. Though I have been to a couple of caves around the world, the Al Hoota cave in Oman and Divaguhava in Sri Lanka, the natural formations inside the Buchan caves were unparalleled. Although it wasn't a cave with large open areas, it was long and housed a large variety of stalactites and stalagmites. We took a guided tour of the cave that lasted about 1 hour, going through the cave, ducking at places with low ceilings, and finally emerged out from an opening which was about 500 metres away from the entrance. The cave was well lit up, as seen in the photos below.

  

The so called "Bacon" stalactite

Ok, location update, I just arrived at the Doha International Airport and my connecting flight to Heathrow has been delayed. So here I am, blogging amidst the crowd. Nice way to kill time actually. Right, back to my Aussie stories...

Mt. Baw Baw

Our next major stop was Mt. Baw Baw, which is one the few places where you can find snow in Melbourne during the Winter. Yeah, Winter is in July in the half of the globe. Though I had had more than enough experience with ice and snow in Cambridge and in Boston, it was the very first time that my mother and sister were going to have a first-hand experience with natural snow. Mt. Baw Baw is a popular ski-resort and it was already full of activity when we reached there. One could rent skis and other equipment from the centre, and have a go at skiing or snowboarding even if you have had no prior experience at all. We later learnt that Mt. Baw Baw was hosting a festival to celebrate "Christmas in July" on the same day. People in Australia and in other countries located in the Southern hemisphere have this special day where they do all the activites associated with Christmas, in July, instead of in December, simply because they don't get any snow in December. Where's the fun in Christmas without snow? :) So we spent the entire day on top of Mt. Baw Baw and returned home after a lively fireworks show in the evening.

A very lively Mt. Baw Baw

On the way to Warburton

The next day, we went to the Bodhivana monastery in Warburton. It's a very peaceful place where the residing monks practice meditation in the forest behind the temple. There was an alms-giving given by a group of Buddhists on the day that we went, and I realized that it was a fairly well-known temple where many people come to worship.

Bodhivana Monastery in Warburton

A massive tree in the rainforest gallery

Later in the day we visited the Donna Buang rainforest gallery located in Yarra Ranges national park. The gallery provided a very unique experience of the rainforest by allowing us to walk on carefully designed stairs and walkways, taking us in different heights ranging from the canopy to all the way down to the forest floor. 

Our trip was oddly structured, since we mainly visited places which were away from the city during the first few days. We finally visited the city on the following Monday, starting our tour from the Melbourne Museum. We spent a few hours venturing through the various sections of the museum. 

Melbourne Museum

City Circle Tram

Later, a couple of my school friends joined us on our tour of the city. We hopped on the City Circle Tram, which takes people around for free, and went further into the city centre. Our next stop was the Melbourne Aquarium on Flinders St. Nothing special there apart from the penguins.  Next, we had a walk around the Crowne Plaza area, had lunch, and then also went into the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

Inside the Aquarium

View from the bridge near the Crowne Plaza

Wrong turn : Country road

After visiting some family friends, we started our road trips again on the next day, but this time, it was westward of the city. The destination was the Twelve Apostles in Port Campbell, situated about 230 kms away from the city. The plan was to get there along the Great Ocean Road which promised magnificent views of the coastline, but thanks to the bad weather and a capable pilot in the vehicle, who gave us directions using the GPS, we managed to somehow *miss* the obvious Great Ocean Road. We found out later that we had taken a wrong turn from Geelong, and hence ended up in a road that went through the countryside that went towards Colac, rather than going to Torquay, from where the Great Ocean Road starts.

We were a bit too late when we realized our mistake, so we continued on the country road according to the GPS. In fact, the GPS had provided us the shortest route to the Twelve Apostles, which doesn't happen to be along the Great Ocean Road. However, this new road didn't shatter our dreams; it was a great ride that made its way through a picturesque countryside and also meandered through a fair bit of forest. A while later, we ended up at Apollo Bay, where we joined the Great Ocean Road and managed to see the sea after quite some time.

Apollo Bay

Another 100 kilometres later, we arrived at the Twelve Apostles. Totally worth the long ride in bad weather. For those who don't know, the Twelve Apostles are actually a series of limestone rocks in the sea which have been eroded over time. No point describing further, let the photos speak.

The Twelve Apostles

After that it was just the return journey back to Melbourne, which was obviously less exciting. The photo of the city at night below was taken  while we were passing the West Gate bridge. Please excuse for the image quality, but it was the best shot out of the ones I took. 

Ok, I think this is already too long for a single blog post. Since our next road trip was to Canberra and Sydney, I think this is a good place to stop for now. I'll continue about our adventures in Australia in my next post. 

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I finally boarded my (delayed) connecting flight from Doha, and somehow made it to Heathrow, and then to Cambridge, nearly 20 hours after I left home from Muscat. Yeah, travelling is fun. :P Bye for now. 

Toronto - Canada

Locations covered : Scarborough,  Toronto, Niagara-on-the-lake
Trip dates : 14th to 17th April 2012

I basically had nothing planned for the long weekend which came with the Patriots' Day vacation. But like I mentioned in my previous post, I needed to make the most of my short stay in the US. I looked up for places to visit in the US itself, but having already been to New York, Washington etc.., I was out of new places to visit. Since the holiday was only 4 days, I could not venture too far out of Boston. I had previously planned to go and meet a few of my friends in Toronto during the Spring break, but I could not make it because my Canadian visa was delayed. This time, with the visa in hand, I realized that it would be best to go and pay my friends a visit as promised, during these four days. I took an Air Canada flight from the Boston Logan International Airport to the Toronto Pearson International Airport on Friday night, and thus begins my tour of Canada...

Toronto skyline with CN tower

Staying with friends meant staying up late, and staying up late at night meant late starts in the morning. On the first day, my friends showed me around downtown Toronto, and then took me to this place (I don't recall its name) where the Toronto skyline could be seen clearly across the waters of Lake Ontario. 

Toronto skyline

The photos on the right were taken there and I included them here to share the majestic view with you readers as well. 

Rogers Centre and CN Tower

Later, we went to the vicinity of the famous CN tower, and also had a look inside the Toronto Blue Jays' stadium (Rogers Centre). We had a walk around city and also visited the Toronto Union Station. Since it was a bit late, we decided not to visit the CN tower on that day, and went back to my friend's place in  Scarborough. 

Inside the Blue Jays' Stadium

Toronto Union Station

On Sunday, since everyone was devoid of committments, we decided to visit Niagara-on-the-Lake. The original idea was to visit the Niagara Falls  itself, but since I had already seen it from the US side and taking into account the distance and travel time, we decided to go see the ship locks in the Welland Canal at Niagara-on-the-Lake.  

Ship lock on the Welland Canal

It took us a few hours to get from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is about a 150 km drive. We arrived at one ship-lock on the Welland Canal, and were lucky to witness the entire process of a ship passing through the lock. Note the difference in water level between the two photos below; it shows how the entire ship is lifted so that it can sail out of the other end of the lock. The whole process took about 30-45 minutes.

Ship entering the lock

The lock is being closed and the water level is raised to lift the ship

Abandoned ship

On the way back from the ship locks, we also stopped to have a look around this abandoned ship which was clearly visible to passers-by on the highway.

Later in the evening, after arriving in Toronto, we visited the world famous CN Tower that defines the Toronto skyline. The view of city at night from atop the tower was breath-taking, and the view of the ground some 140-odd floors below, through the glass floor was no second. We also visited the revolving 360 restaurant, which is unique in the sense that it completes a full rotation every 72 minutes, providing diners with views of the entire city below them. Amazing experience indeed. 

The following morning, we visited the largest zoo in Canada, the Toronto Zoo. It provides a different viewing experience compared to other zoos I've visited, because the zoo has taken a commendable effort to accommodate the animals in an environment that is similar or close to their natural habitats. See below for some snaps I took inside the zoo.

 

Animals at the Toronto Zoo

We spent almost the entire day walking inside the zoo, and gladly covered all of its sections. After an interesting bit of drama to get out of the Zoo's car park, which I will not go into details here, we returned back to my friend's place. My short holiday was also coming to an end, and considering the fact that some of us may not meet for quite a long time again, we decided to throw a beach barbecue in the evening. But this beach didn't belong to the ocean, rather, it was the beach of Lake Ontario. 

And that brings us to the end of my adventures in Toronto. I flew back to Boston the next day to resume my uni routine as usual. I'm extremely thankful to my classmates from Sri Lanka for putting up with me for those few days and showing me around. :)