Adventure of the month

Getting from one Sri Lankan beach town to another had been wonderfully easy. There were cheap public buses, which would normally be my first choice but there was also the Pickme app (aka Sri Lankan Uber) that offered a choice of taxis or tuktuks. For a couple of dollars, you could go town to town, door to door without ever having to worry if you had gotten on the wrong bus. I was getting spoiled. I was getting soft. All of it came to an end when I left the beaches and headed towards the southeast coast and its crazy abundance of wildlife. The further you go from the major towns and the beach area, the less likely you are to get a Pickme. I now had a choice: to pay full price for a taxi or figure out the bus system. Anyone that has ever traveled with me knows this is not a real choice. I tend to have more time than money and will almost always opt for public transportation. I could rhapsodize that this is about getting the local feel and becoming one with the people but let's

In an earlier post, I wrote about my unexpected road to Fiji. In short, I had used a voucher to buy a ticket to Nadi only to learn a month later that I would soon be moving to Fiji for four months. I was able to cancel my ticket and best example of a first world problem aside, now found myself with a voucher on my voucher. In deciding how to use voucher 2.0, I was applying my usual criteria in finding a new destination. It had to be a new country. Since I was going in December, it would have to either be in the southern hemisphere or have a very mild winter. It couldn't be too expensive to get there/ stay/ get around. And of course, there had to be fun stuff to do. The answer to the last part came to me not so much in a dream as in a dive bar happy hour. I was sitting at the bar, absentmindedly playing with my phone when the tv caught my eye. They were showing a nature program of some kind that featured amongst other things wild leopards, elephants and monkeys. I tried to fi