March 2, 2020
Just getting there
HIKKADUWA - In cycling, where you end up is less important than how you got there, what happened on the way. How many times have you been asked where you started that day and not been able to remember?
We are some of the last true travellers, people for whom the journey is more important than the destination.
Well, today was the opposite of that. We wanted to ride 60 or 70km along the coast and beyond the first half an hour there was only the one road - the main highway to Colombo. Well, OK, there was also the motorway, the one we crossed yesterday, and we'd foolishly hoped it would take the weight of the traffic. But the coast is a succession of tourist traps and that is where the suicidal buses, the tuk-tuks and the delivery lorries go.
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The result was a day not to enjoy but to pass, an episode of getting somewhere without the usual pleasure. We had hopes for the fort on the peninsula in Galle, held successively by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. But the best bits of cycling are the cycling and what you see along the way and what you find in guidebooks rarely survives comparison.
Strolling along the fortress wall was pleasant enough, the town below us on one side and the white-topped waves falling to land on the other. There were statues to depict the era of slavery and there were abandoned gun emplacements, including some large and modern enough to hold off the Japanese last century. We're glad we went but we were tourists like all the others, ticking off another sight seen, another duty fulfilled.
We rode on and then, the traffic building up in late afternoon, we stopped at a faux-hippie place with cabins and joss sticks, which we disgraced by being clearly the oldest people there.
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