Kandy, the Klub Kup and Khristmas

OK, so I’ve been a little lax in keeping this thing up to date. So here goes.
The train to Kandy left at 3.35pm and we had to check out of the glorious Galle Face at midday. Cue a couple of tortuous hours spent sitting on the verandah reading a book. A wonderful way to spend our final hours in a wonderful hotel. That and another trip to the factory shop to score some more shirts and another suit (Cerruti this time).

The train arrived about half an hour before the departure time, giving us plenty of time to settle in. At first, we thought we might have got it wrong – this was supposed, after all, to be the jewel in Sri Lankan Rail’s crown, the first class non-stop express between the island’s two main cities. It didn’t look like any jewel in any crown I have ever seen. The carriages were at least 50 years old, the promised air conditioning was four ceiling mounted fans that didn’t work. The toilet, well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. Can you imagine it? Actually, it was worse what you just imagined. This was first class. Second class seemed to consist of wooden benches in cattle-car conditions. Third class was basically clinging to the outside of the train.

Our seats, however, were worth every rupee of the £1.80 they cost us. We were facing backwards, but with a big window from which to watch the receding tracks.

Rachel travelling first class. We had lots of really good photos of the train on Rachel's camera but she lost it. Again.

It mentioned in our guide book that the train could be “a little bit bumpy”. In the same way as Hitler might be said to be “a little bit naughty”. I have been on tamer roller coaster rides. There were stretches of track where we were leaving our seats (vertically) twice every second. I feared I could feel my internal organs pureeing. I don’t like roller coasters. And I didn’t like this very much either.

This was the closest I was able to get to a level photograph due to the roller-coaster-like properties of the train

But on the calm stretches of track, it was beautiful. Farm and paddy land gave way quite quickly to mountains. Looking backwards down the track, we noticed that there seemed to be a surprisingly large number of people appearing from the undergrowth in our wake. It turns out that the railway tracks are also kind of public footpaths – there aren’t that many ways through the mountains.

The journey took close to four hours. Dusk came about three hours in, bringing flocks of what looked like massive gliding birds, but turned out (in true Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom fashion) to be fruit bats. Huge, massive fruit bats. Fruit bats the size of small geese.

It was fully dark by the time we reached Kandy, and the collection we requested from the hotel didn’t materialize, so we just jumped into a cab/minibus and off we went. The Queen’s Hotel is owned by the same people who own the Galle Face, and though not quite as old (built in 1895), it is every bit as colonially charming.

The lobby of the Queen's Hotel

At first it was a bit of a culture shock – after the Galle Face, it was, shall we say, unrestored. The room was spacious enough, with lots of dark wood and high ceilings, but there was little there – no bath (and the shower was…old), no room service, no booze in the minibar. Though there was a phone, there was no internal directory. The check-in clerk had reeled of a list of different numbers we might find useful, but there was no chance we were going to remember them.

A sign in the bedroom

The view from the bedroom window

We got used to the comparative lack of luxury fairly quickly though. To be honest, I had kind of fallen in love with the place after a couple of hours. Particularly the bar attached to the hotel, the Pub Royale which was resplendantly Victorian and...just wonderful.

The bar at Pub Royale

We ventured out into the dark and rain-slicked streets of Kandy to find that pretty much everything was shut. This was at about 7.30pm. Turns out it was Poya – the monthly full moon festival where they celebrate the full moon by shutting everything. We ended up eating at Pizza Hut.

The town of Kandy

Over the next few days, though, Kandy showed itself to be quite a lot livelier. Though it is Sri Lanka’s second city, it is tiny. It has three major streets, a lake and the temple of the sacred tooth (one of Buddha’s teeth is said to be contained therein). Tiny, but busy. We took a day tour of the region with the taxi driver who had picked us up at the station, including visits to the elephant orphanage (a field with lots of elephants in it), an elephant-poo paper factory where they make paper from elephant poo, a tea factory (my favouritest, favouritest place – it smelled utterly wonderful and I spent a small fortune on different kinds of tea) and the Kandy botanical gardens, which were beautiful and had some wildlife.

The Geragama Tea Factory

Tea leaves before...

...and after.

Elephants at the elephant orphanage

Some of the local wildlife

Some more of the local wildlife (monkey in a wig)

Fruit bats

In total, we were in Kandy for three days, which felt about right. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to tour the ancient cities (another 2-3 day tour), but that’s a reason to go back next year, right? We got a cab from Kandy direct to the airport (faster than the train) and home we went. The duty free shopping in the departures section of Bandaranaike airport was a bit disappointing – the arrivals duty free sold guitars, cookers, fridge-freezers, you name it. I suppose it might be a bit difficult to get a duty free washing machine onto the plane though.

Overall, we loved Sri Lanka – the hotels, the history, the (seemingly) genuinely friendly people, and we will definitely be going back next year some time.


After Sri Lanka, we had an interlude of two weeks at school before the start of the Christmas holidays (or December Break as we have to call it). The day after we broke up was the final of the FIFA World Club Cup in Abu Dhabi, for which I had managed to procure four tickets. I was a tad trepidacious about the whole affair – the tickets had not been posted so we would have to drive into the centre of Abu Dhabi to collect them and then find our way to the park-and-ride facilities and so on. It turns out I really need not have worried – it was as easy as fruit-filled baked goods. We (myself, Rachel and two friends, Marie and Harry) collected the tickets with no fuss and discovered that we had been allocated parking at the stadium (presumably because I must have been one of the first people to buy tickets) so we got there with plenty of time to spare. The stadium itself is a masterpiece in reinforced concrete that speaks volumes on the subject of 1980s municipal architecture.

The Zayed Sports City stadium

Stadium interior

I liked it, anyway. The first match we watched was the 3rd/4th place playoff between Atlante of Mexico and the Pohang Steelers from South Korea. Pohang won on penalties, but the standard throughout wasn’t much above the bottom reaches of English league football.

We arrived quite early

The final was between Barcelona of Spain and Estudiantes of Argentina. The standard was much higher, as you might expect with players such as Lionel Messi, Xabi, Carlos Puyol, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Juan Sebastien Veron on the pitch. It was relatively slow starting, though a thrilling finish saw Barcelona win 2-1 in extra time.

Barcelona fielded a very young side (boom boom)

The week after we got back, it rained for the first time since we arrived. It rained quite hard for about 3 hours. The result was near catastrophic – there are no drains on the roads in the UAE, so the whole country seemed to have flooded.

Our apartment building suddenly had a moat – we were unable to drive into the car park on the ground floor.

The road outside our apartment

Christmas was a week later. It seemed a bit flat, though most of the shopping malls had some sort of Christmas decorations up. Many people bemoaned the lack of snow and cold as not being Christmassy enough. Having watched the news reports of the devastation being laid waste to the UK by freezing temperatures, I can’t say I would swap weather, however unChristmassy it might be. It was 26 degrees on Christmas day. We went round to Harry and Marie’s flat for Christmas Dinner which was extremely pleasant. I’m still considering returning to the UK next Christmas though, if I can afford it, of course.

Other things:

New Year’s Eve was spent in the desert at a camp that promised unlimited food and drink. The food had run out by the time I got to the front of the queue and the drink had run out by 1 a.m.. We had a pretty damn good time though.

January the fourth was the inauguration of the Burj Khalifa (that which used to be called the Burj Dubai and now officially the tallest building in the world). There were lots of fireworks. We saw them on the way to a restaurant to celebrate Rachel’s 30th birthday. My wife is officially exactly 30 years older than the tallest building in the world. As an aside, the local paper put what has to be the most positive spin I have ever seen on the recent global financial crisis. Thanks to the crisis, it said, no-one would be able to afford to build a building taller than the Burj for many years to come. There’s positivity for you! Happy New Year!