Archive for the ‘Wildlife’ Category

Weekend in Kandy

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

After a good but difficult but successful first week of the projects, the volunteers and I went to Kandy for the weekend.

Lora and I were changing host families. So we took all our stuff and left our host family. We got a three wheeler to Atulugama and left a few bags at Lauren and Emily’s house. We collected Lauren and Emily and jumped on a bus going to Kegalle.

No seats at first but it wasn’t long before we managed to get some. Which was nice.

At Kegalle we changed buses and got a very crowded bus to Kandy. Note to self: travelling on a Friday afternoon is not a good idea, there are a lot of people going home for the weekend. Ah well, this gave Emily, Lauren and Lora a taste of the real Sri Lankan bus experience. Emily had been telling me earlier that she was surprised that the buses weren’t as bad as she thought they were going to be. This bus changed her mind a bit. :)

We got to Kandy and went to The Pub. The Pub is one of my old haunts. They do french fries and grilled vegetables and mango juice and tea (with separate milk) and it’s a pub (well, sort of). But you can get food with no rice, no curry, no chili. And you don’t get forced to eat it if you don’t want it. A welcome change from Avissawella.

We headed up to the guest house (Forest Glen, another one of my old haunts). Not the cheapest place in Kandy. But it is quite a nice place. And Indra, who runs it, is lovely.

On Saturday we had breakfast (no rice, no chili, no curry) and then wandered down into town. We walked around the lake for a bit. I tried not to be too rude to the people who were hassling us (why do I feel rude not talking to people who I don’t know who are just hassling me?) We stumbled across a practice session for the perahera which involved a few dance groups doing bits of dancing on the street behind the temple. That was cool. A bit of a flavour of the perahera for Lauren and Emily who will be back in the UK when it starts.

The others went to the Temple of the Tooth. I’m still avoiding it. So I went to the Dialog shop and then sat in the Queen’s Hotel drinking sprite and checking my mail.

They joined me later and the four of us headed up to the Randolee hotel. This is owned by our in-country manager and she’d arranged for us to have a meal there. Which was very nice of her.

The hotel is up in the hills around Kandy and has a great view. We had fresh mixed fruit juice. We had a lovely lunch. We sat in the foyer area watching the rain pouring into the pool. We drank tea.

When it was time to go they arranged a three wheeler for us to take us back down the hill. Back to The Pub then back to the guest house.

On Sunday morning we packed up and got ready to go. We watched the monkeys playing outside our windows. Awesome! We headed down to find a bus and went to Kegalle. From Kegalle we got a three wheeler to Pinawalla. Pinawalla is where the Elephant Orphanage is.

As soon as we piled out of the three wheeler we got accosted by a local guy. He said that the orphanage costs 2,000 rupees to get in and you can’t feed or touch or wash the elephants. He said that for 2,000 rupees each we could go to his place (nearby) where we could ride an elephant, feed them, wash them and see his spice and herb garden. Might be a good deal. Might not. But I said that we needed to check about ticket prices since we might be able to get discounts as we are volunteers.

Turns out that this was indeed the case, 100 instead of 2,000. The guy vanished pretty quickly when he realised he wasn’t going to convince us. I’d been to the elephant orphanage before and decided that I didn’t want to go again so waited out the front minding the bags for the others.

They saw them being fed and got to pat one of the baby elephants (do do do do do do do do do do, do do (ok, so the Baby Elephant Walk does work better as an aural thing rather than a written thing)) who was only 6 days old. The elephants were taken down to the river to be bathed. So we all walked down that way too. Well, all except me. Since I didn’t have a ticket I wasn’t allowed to walk down the street to the river. There was a barrier across the middle of a road and I wasn’t allowed through. Fine. I didn’t want to buy anything from those shops anyway. I went in search of coconut roti but couldn’t find any. So I just sat and enjoyed the sunshine and watching the people.

When we’d finished there it was a three wheeler back to Kegalle, a quick lunch and a bus back to Atulugama. We then got a three wheeler into Avissawella where Lora and I met one of the teachers who would take us to our new boarding place.

A very nice (if busy) weekend.

I love being on project, and the others loved it too. But it is very nice to be able to escape sometimes for some independence and some sightseeing.

Posted in Sightseeing, Sri Lanka, Wildlife | No Comments »

Mosquito Proof Clothing

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Before I left the UK I did some investigating into mosquito-proof clothing. Not only did I investigate, I actually bought some. 50GBP for a pair of trousers and a shirt – which is ridiculous money in my mind, well ridiculous for clothing but not so ridiculous if it turns out to be mosquito-proof. :)

And they didn’t have them in black so my mossie-proof clothing is the only clothing I currently own that isn’t black. But, important as fashion is to me, it is far more important for me to be mossie-proof. ;) So I succumbed and bought the non-black clothes (the shirt even has silly pink trim on bits of it, dear god).

I was slightly sceptical about the stuff but was keen to see how it would work. The trials in the UK were positive. I wore them several times there and didn’t get bitten once – the fact that I didn’t encounter any mosquitoes is (in my mind) somewhat irrelevant. :)

I have now worn them in Sri Lanka, in mosquito-infested areas. And I can now say – unequivocally – they work!!

I’ve worn my normal clothes in Mahesh’s living room and in Sujith’s house. And I got bitten. I wore my mossie-proof clothes in Mahesh’s living room and in Sujith’s house. And I didn’t get bitten. Well, I didn’t get bitten on the bits of me that were covered by the clothes, the skin on my feet is a veritable dirty blanket of mosquito bites.

But the mossie-proof clothes work!

Oh, and I should mention they appear to be dog-proof as well. I have never been bitten by a dog wearing these trousers. Wish I could say the same for my other trousers. :)

Wonder if Craghoppers do a range of mossie-proof socks. Hmmmm.

48 Mosquito Proof Clothing

Before I left the UK I did some investigating into mosquito-proof clothing. Not only did I investigate, I acutally bought some. 50GBP for a pair of trousers and a shirt – which is ridiculous money in my mind, well ridiculous for clothing but not so ridiculous if it turns out to be mosquito-proof. :)

And they didn’t have them in black so my mossie-proof clothing is the only clothing I currently own that isn’t black. But, important as fashion is to me, it is far more important for me to be mossie-proof. So I succumbed and bought the non-black clothes (the shirt even has silly pink trim on bits of it, dear god).

I was slightly sceptical about the stuff but was keen to see how it would work. The trials in the UK were positive. I wore them several times there and didn’t get bitten once – the fact that I didn’t encounter any mosquitoes is (in my mind) somewhat irrelevant. :)

I have now worn them in Sri Lanka, in mosquito-infested areas. And I can now say – unequivocally – they work!!

I’ve worn my normal clothes in Mahesh’s living room and in Sujith’s house. And I got bitten. I wore my mossie-proof clothes in Mahesh’s living room and in Sujith’s house. And I didn’t get bitten. Well, I didn’t get bitten on the bits of me that were covered by the clothes, the skin on my feet is a veritable dirty blanket of mosquito bites.

But the mossie-proof clothes work!

Oh, and I should mention they appear to be dog-proof as well. I have never been bitten by a dog wearing these trousers. Wish I could say the same for my other trousers. :)

Wonder if Craghoppers do a range of mossie-proof socks. Hmmmm.

Posted in Clothing, Wildlife | No Comments »

Dog Bite Aftermath

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Here is what happened to me after the dog bite.

In the first post about it I mentioned that I went to the hospital and that they gave me the first rabies booster injection. And I think I mentioned that the doctor didn’t really look at the wound – certainly didn’t treat it but that when I went home, Suchintha’s mother helped me to dress it after I’d cleaned it. I also mentioned that I had to go back to the hospital to get the second booster.

So here’s what happened then.

I bought a larger dressing and removed the sticky plaster. The wound was about 3cm long, the width of a sticky plaster (they only come in one size in this country) is about .5cm. The length of the pad bit of a sticky plaster is about .5cm even if the length of the sticky plaster itself is about 5cm. So I needed a bigger paddy bit. This proved to be tricky. But I did get a giant (10cm x 10cm) surgical dressing and some micropore tape. The pharmacist assured me it wouldn’t stick. The phrase “my arse” springs to mind for two reasons. It stuck. To my arse. Well, the top of my leg.

I found another type of dressing a few days later which is like a sticky plaster but bigger (about 10cm x 20cm) which I thought was an improvement, though way too big, but too big is better than too small. The problem was that the pharmacy in Kandy where I got it seems to be the only one in the country that sells them. So when I got to Anuradhapura I had to Macgyver 4 normal plasters into one big one by carefully cutting the side sticky bit and then overlapping so that I had a big enough pad with no sticky bits in the middle. It mostly worked. :) By this stage there was only the occasional drop of blood on the plaster anyway, so it wasn’t bleeding profusely. Then the plasters came off. Yay! And stayed off. Yay!

On the Saturday I went back to Kandy hospital for the second injection (one injection, two sites, so they stuck half of it in one arm and the other half in the other). That didn’t take too long. But I did get sent from the injection room to the rabies room then back to the injection room where I had to wait for 15 mins (which turned out to be 1hr). But that was ok.

One of the other interesting consequences of the dog bite was antibiotics. The doctor didn’t say anything about antibiotics. But Suchintha’s sister’s husband is a doctor. When he heard about the bite, he asked if I had been given antibiotics. I said I was on Doxycycline (which is a broad spectrum antibiotic that was prescribed as an anti-malarial), but he said that wasn’t enough. So he suggested another one. Suchintha’s mother had some sample packs in the house so I dutifully started taking antibiotics twice a day (plus my anti-malarial, plus some panadol to help with the swelling and the pain). Suchintha’s brother in law said he thought that the doctor had probably been so excited treating a foreigner that he forgot to mention the antibiotics. Which seems a pretty major thing to forget in my mind and a pretty feeble excuse for being overwhelmed. But, I had my own personal medical team helping me out so I was ok. :)

And the final piece of annoyance was my trousers. But I took them to a tailor in Kandy. I needed to get them taken up anyway. Which was lucky. Because the bit they cut off the cuffs they used to mend the rip. Which they did in a day and charged me a very reasonable sum of money for it. So I now have trousers with no holes (except the important holes that you need for getting into the things and sticking your feet out the ends).

And now, the injections are done, the antibiotics are finished, the wound has healed, the trousers are fixed, I can sit down comfortably. It’s all good.

I saw the dog a few days ago and it didn’t bat an eyelid at me. It seemed completely unconcerned by my existence. So that’s also a good thing.

Here endeth the dog bite story.

Posted in Clothing, Health, Problems, Sri Lanka, Wildlife | No Comments »

Mosquitoes

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

If I were able to type the rudest words in the world, in any language, they would not even come close to doing justice to my feelings towards mosquitoes.

Seriously, there would need to be a slew of new rude words invented specifically to describe the annoying, little blighters (feel free to replace ‘annoying’, ‘little’ and ‘blighters’ with your favourite rude adjective, adjective and noun) and my feelings towards them.

I am from the waist down almost one single mosquito bite/scar. I am scratching in places it is impolite to scratch in (like the kitchen). I am scarred and red and sore and irritated (both senses of the word).

I am getting a lot of exercise from the “ow, slap, I’ve just been bitten” contortions that involve trying to slap bits of you just before you feel the sting by which time it’s too late. I’m also getting exercise from the “grr, itchy, don’t scratch, must scratch, how do I reach there anyway” gyrations. And the human body and mind being what they are, as soon as either dance begins, I then feel imaginary bites and itches on parts of me that were perfectly fine until I started irritating them by scratching at bites that don’t exist.

And the flies aren’t exactly high on my list of creatures towards which I feel nothing but positivity either. There is a really rather irritating one that has been flying around my head for the past two hours.

Ratnapura seems to be much worse for mosquitoes than Kandy was. And my insect repellant is about to run out (I have a new shipment that should be delivered shortly, depending on whether it has been posted yet). I may need to try buying some here and seeing if it works.

So while I love this country and everything about it (even the bits I hate). I really do just hate the mozzies. I don’t even love hating the mozzies. I just hate them. Like I said there aren’t words rude enough!!

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Wildlife Update

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I have encountered some new and exciting wildlife since I moved my base of operations to Ratnapura.

Ranjith killed a rather large (and apparently poisonous – though not deadly) centipede thing.
Ranjith chased a scorpion out of the kitchen – photo on my flickr photo page. Wa!! A scorpion!!
Wasana caught a tarantula in half a coconut shell (coconuts really are the most useful thing in the whole world).
When I’ve been out in various rivers bathing I’ve found I’ve had to keep moving so that the fish don’t nibble me. It’s almost tickly – but not quite. :)
There was one river bathing experience where we saw a snake swimming across the river. He seemed quite small but still freaked me out slightly.
There was another case when we just walked down to a river and apparently scared a snake as we walked past. I saw something move but couldn’t have said what it was. The guy who was with us said it was a snake.
We saw lots of monkeys in the Peradiniya Botanical Gardens when I was back in Kandy. Some of them were really very tiny and some of them got really quite close to us (it seems they like meringues).

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The one thing worse than seeing a big spider in the shower

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Is not seeing the big spider that you know lives in your shower! At least if you can see it you know where it is.

I have shared my bathing and sleeping facilities with spiders, geckos and frogs so far. Scary, cute and cute (in that order). Photos of these on my flickr page.

I’ve also seen: cats, dogs, tiny squirrels (about half the size of the ones in the UK), lots of birds, cows, bats (possibly my new favourite animal), butterflies, beetles, roosters, a dragonfly, a goat and a monkey!!! It wasn’t so much buttling (Simpons: Das Bus episode – desert island – monkey butlers – I’m on the lookout in case Sri Lanka is the island of the monkey butlers) as trying to open a rubbish bag – but it was a monkey just the same!

I haven’t seen many of the animals that are on my animal sighting checklist (a few friends, a pub, a pen and my journal) but I have started a list of those that I have seen.

Posted in Sri Lanka, Wildlife | 1 Comment »