Reillys on Tour

... Dalek. Hi all, Many things I am capable of but, as I discover, many things are unwise. Lisette and I were woken at the princely time of 1:50 am and tumbled out of bed, into clothes and into the blackness outside. The plan, such as it was, was to climb Adam's Peak which is either the fourth or fifth highest mountain in Sri Lanka (Asanga and the Lonely Planet are still arguing the toss on this point). The plan was to reach the summit and watch dawn break from the top. Also, Adam's Peak famously casts a shadow the shape of a roughly equilateral triangle just after dawn breaks which we were also hoping to see. Climbing a mountain in the dark is less fun than you might imagine. There's a lot of stumbling, wheezing and general bitter self-recrimination as to why you ever agreed to doing this in the first place. There's also a fairly worrying amount of losing the people you're travelling with as well. In the event we did finally make the ascent, reaching ...

...no - as it turns out I'm *all* woman... (thanks to the good Professor) Hi all, First up, thanks for your emails - apologies for not responding in kind but I've just recently (within the last half hour) been re-introduced to the world of "pre-broadband". Internet connection in Kandy is pretty much approximate to to internet connection in England in the early 90's. Maybe slower. And so each keystroke has alas become rationed for today. Following about 12 hours of monsoon rain Sri Lanka has returned to levels of frankly dangerous heat and humidity. Even Lisette (bearing in mind her boundless enthusiasm for heat) has declared that it's "a bit much". If you'd like to paint a mental picture of me at present you should imagine a man in a sauna, fully clothed and eating curry. I'm hot. I've been to Happyland. Happyland, it turns out, is a spice garden on the way to Kandy. We visited it yesterday and were greeted by quite a s...

...and this is The Great Escape - I'll come back to that.... Hello Folks, Lisette and I have headed off for one of our adventures - this time to Sri Lanka. Unlike our usual approach to holidaying (buy tickets, catch plane and pray) we have decided to deviate. We are "on a tour". The tour started somewhat inauspiciously. We arrived after a 12 hour flight at 3 am on Valentines Day in Colombo. We were met by a man bearing an "Adventure Company" sign who bundled us into a van together with our fellow tour-ees/tour-ettes. All were pretty shattered at this point and pretty much hoping for instant bed. Not to be. Our tour guide (Asangha) drove us for quite some time and we were in some pretty ropey neighbourhoods by the time he confessed that he may have taken a wrong turn at some point. However, by 4am we were delivered to a hotel. The good. The bad: hotel was pitch black and it soon became apparent that we did not have reservations. The group mood d...