Sri Lanka - Kandy to Ella and back to Colombo

Happy to be out of the hospital cell. Missing "Big Fucker" and the frogs though. My Mums birthday is the day before mine and I spent that in the hospital which would have been awful but I convinced myself that one of the frogs was her reincarnation. More just to have something to talk to than any other real reason. I like to celebrate her life in some way each year, usually by heading to the sea which is where we scattered her ashes; she died of cancer when I was 19. I couldn't make it to the ocean but I managed to find a flower (broccoli floret... close enough) and flushed that down the toilet; it's the thought that counts.

We obviously didn't do much for my birthday on the day I got out but whilst sitting downstairs having lunch I decided to run back upstairs to grab some things from the bedroom. I went up the outside stairs and accidentally went up one too many floors and ended up on the abandoned top floor. I'd stepped back into a bygone era with clawfoot baths, and old turn of the century furniture and crockery.

My friend was convinced I was going to fall through the floor and land in the bed of an important diplomat just as he was praying to God (a la Robin Hood Men in Tights).

As I still wasn't well we decided to take a private car from Kandy to Ella which cost us 10,000 rupees (~$100 Australian). Not bad considering the amount of time it took us to get there. We stayed at the Hotel Heaven's Edge which was expensive and definitely not worth the expense. There was no air conditioning and the hotel heated up quite a lot due to the untainted floor to ceiling windows throughout. The view is nice but there was only a couple of people running the entire hotel that I could see. I definitely wouldn't go back there.

We booked a train from Ella to Colombo the next day and didn't pay too much attention to what the tickets said. We ended up in the Observation Cart at the front of the train so the view was amazing and the scenery through the mountains was incredible. Unfortunately, although the distance to Ella is only about 260km it was to take us 10 - 12 hours to get there. With no stops we could get off at and no food on the train except in the top class carriage behind us (this carriage also had air-conditioning and wifi). There were people selling homemade pastry and other things through the windows at the stops but each time we tried to get something they'd always run out of everything but the prawn things (not seafood fans).