Horton Plains, Safari, and The Bus (1 of 2)

Here are the details from 2 weekends ago, late, but still funny.

We went to Horton Plains, which is a national park with some waterfalls and this place called World's End where you can see a nice view of the valley and take some great pictures. (Random interruption: the guy next to me at the internet cafe is looking at porn and it's kinda disturbing.) We all met in Panadura because it's a central meeting point. It also means that I have to travel 2 hours before we even leave for the place. We meet up and leave an hour later than planned, but that's expected. Anyway, we begin our 7 hour drive and have to stop and ask for directions after 20 mins. We turn around (Bright eyes!) A little later we start playing mafia. It's fun for a while, but we keep playing anyway, even after the 17th round. We get lost and have to turn around. More mafia. We stop again and ask for directions. It begins to rain. "How much time till we get there?" "2 hours." 4 hours later, we arrive at our hotel. We have some beers and eat dinner. More beers. We have to be up at 5am the next day so we can get to the park early enough to see the view at World's End. We go to sleep. We all wake up. Some of us look like death. We get all of our stuff on the bus. The bus won't start. We wait. Then we need to push start the bus. At 5:30 in the morning. There's video and pictures somewhere of us all pushing this bus in a tiny parking lot trying to get it to start. 45 minutes later the bus is ready to go. We leave for the park and spirits are high. We get lost twice for almost 2 hours on the way to the park. We do finally get to the park around 9:30. The hike wasn't too bad and there are some cool waterfalls, but not much wildlife. When we finally got to World's End, it was completely covered with fog. I have some pictures of the fog. Apparently we only missed (mist, haha) the view by a half hour. We hike back and are ready for more bus riding.

During the trip to the hotel for the night, we stop to eat at this extremely Sri Lankan town. This would be like stopping at a little gas station in the South. That place has never seen outsiders and they don't like our kind. Also, the bathroom looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it was built. It was also the only one in this town. I actually was curious to see if there was a cleaner one, so I asked almost every shop. Only one bathroom. After eating we drive another 6 hours to our hotel. More beers and dinner. I had a nice chat with one of the new girls, Milly (nickname from Emily). We talked for a while, she's a lot of fun. I'll reference her in the next post with having Broflovski's disease. End scene.

That night one of the guys, Gentle Ben, got a call from home saying that his dad is really ill. He ended up flying home and is still there now. He and his family could use any prayers.

The next day we went on a safari at another national park. We rode in jeeps, which was cool. My stomach hurt a lot this day. Thankfully we were in open topped jeeps or else I may have been accused of sneaking biological weapons into the car. At the park there were lots of elephants, which was cool to see them in a more natural habitat. They did get kinda pissed when we stopped and a few looked like they wanted to charge our jeeps. It was totally okay though because our 110 pound, 60 year old guide waved his hat and yelled. We saw lots of birds and some deer in the distance and even some jackels (sp?). There was a dead deer on the side of the road that was pretty gross. (You know that thing in our backseat, it's not an air freshener, it's a dead rotting deer carcas.) There are some pictures from the safari on the page now. The safari was pretty cool and made up for a lot of the bus disasters.

The Emergency Treatment Unit was pretty cool overall. There were some lectures from the Australians at the end, so those were educational. I'm now in the mini-operation theatre, which is any operations that don't need general anesthetic. I'm sure I'll have some stories from there, hopefully not of me fainting. The nurses have a pet name for me that means "white boy". It's very cute.

Sam and I are going to the gym, so I'll have to do post 2 of 2 tomorrow hopefully.

America.

-Kurt