the sweet...sweet... taste of freedom....

there is something mysterious about travelling......

         maybe is because we travel to places which are outside our usual environment or comfort zone....
         maybe its the people we meet...unique people with stories to tell and amaze..
         maybe its the journey....the time we spend on the road...the singing, the food, the people we travel with....

                                          or maybe its all of this put together.....

Quite recently, maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago, some of friends from work and I went on a outing to Galle.

Galle is about 119 kilometers away from Colombo. It quite a unique city with a lot 16th Century dutch architecture thrown in...

Coming back to the story.., There were about 30 or so people (in one huge bus capable of seating around 60 people comfortably..) with me....and the best bits of the trip was not actually in our final destination, but on a few places we stooped on the way...

first...after leaving Colombo at around 7.30am...( 1 hour later than the planned time..) and 1 1/2 hours on the road with light traffic, i got up asked the driver to turn right on to a very narrow road leading in the direction of the beach. The people on board were all confused, but i asked them to savor the suspense... and then, just 2 or 3 mins of driving brought us to a big sign board which read: "Kosgoda Turtle Hatchery"..

Yup...a turtle hatchery...and surprisingly, most of the people had never been here....so it was my time to shine. I took tickets to everyone there ( for locals its just 25 rupees per head). And then we met up with the guide they had provided for us. And let me tell you, its an experience....the hatchery does quite a job according to our guide. According to him, the female turtles leaves the eggs after burring the eggs she laid in the beach.  and most of the time either because of fishing boats docked in the shore or because of natural predators, only 1 or 2 survive to grow old ( and very very old at that).




so what the hatchery does is that it pays fisherman if they bring in eggs of turtles they find on the beach. This may sound like a bad idea. But its a idea which works. When the eggs are brought in, the eggs are taken care of from hatching to releasing to long-term care. The hatchery releases the baby turtles when they reach an age of 3 days....this pattern is only different when an albino turtle is concerned. As the turtle is purely white in color, therefore makes easy bait to sharks....

An albino turtle. They are long-term residents of the hatchery as in the wild they become easy targets... 

(Part 1 complete..).

The Animal Prison of Sri Lanka

Well frankly, after I went to the National Zoo of Singapore a few years ago, I was under the assumption or the the illusion that in any zoo around the world, even though its wrong to cage animals, the animals are given enough space to live/move around and the enclosures mimic each animals natural habitat. And then I went to National Zoo of Sri Lanka, my illusion was shattered.

Concrete and steel....that was da zoo made of. the cages, i wont say enclosures, were so small compared to the animal that dey were practically just lying dere...
the hippopotamus cage had like an inch deep of water, the lions were in dog cages. its was literally a prison.
i swear i'll never go to that god forsaken place. someone has to do something about that place...i already sent a letter of complaint, but seriously if someone doesn't do something, those animals are gonna just die there.

The interesting life of who???

well....let me just start off by saying that I'm from South Asia...so basically I was one cursed from birth with, not one off those names that goes on forever and ever, but a name that is rather difficult for people in countries other than mine to pronounce...so that is why, when I was working at a part-time job with a Czech boss, he came up with D. Simple...easy...and well..anyone who has studied the English alphabet can pronounce....and yes i know...I'm not the first person to come up with this very unoriginal nickname but we cant all have unique nicknames can we...so Shut up and learn to share...

So that brings us to why i thought of writing a blog....the thing is I always believed that my life was boring. I live near my school, so for the last 10 years or so, life has been just Home-School-Back Home-and again School (there is also some basketball practices thrown into that mix)...but what I found out was that when I was telling how I spend a lazy Sunday morning to a friend, he/she finds it rather interesting...so then it me...is my life really subtly interesting???
Sadly, the answer is no. In fact my life is rather monotonous. but people still find my stories/memories interesting...so u can be the judge of this phenomena now.....