Day 12. Nuwara Eliya

 

We got up this morning fairly optimistic that we’d be going today; it was very windy overnight but the rain had stopped. However our guide had been to the police station and the one place in town with Starlink satellite internet and over breakfast he reported that it’s still not safe to travel. Very disappointing as it means we won’t get to Yala at all, which was our chance for another safari and to see leopards. But that may well not have been possible anyway, we have no idea what infrastructure is intact.

Luckily the hotel isn’t running out of food. Apparently the problem is that the same staff have been working for many days now, as they can’t get home and other staff can’t get in. We’re also unable to pay for things as we don’t have much cash and the ATMs and hotel credit facilities are down, so we are relying on the guide’s personal cash reserves. That means we’re spending as little as possible.

As the weather is better the group went for  walk around town at 10am. It varied between rain and patches of sunshine and there were a lot of people out and about.

Some streets seemed almost untouched while in other places fences had been knocked over and the ground was thick with mud. Only about one in five shops were open and in a few of these they were sweeping or shovelling out water and mud.

The rest of the day was much the same; watched a movie and read.

Luckily the group we’re with is pretty good. There are eight of us, since the woman broke her ankle early on at Dambulla and she and her friend went off to Colombo. Apart from me and Lynn there are two other couples and two women travelling by themselves. We all get on pretty well. So we chat and exchange news when we bump into each other around the hotel, and have our meals together which are pretty cheerful and entertaining.

The news this evening from our guide was that Kandy, where we stayed before this, has been badly flooded. The round from here to Kandy was being cleared but then the ground under the road collapsed and buried a village down in the valley. There are two other ways out of town and they will also be impassible for several more days. The government is prioritising flooding and other life threatening dangers over clearing the roads and Colombo will presumably also be a focus, as the flooding there is continuing and threatening to contaminate the water supply.

So we accept we won’t be able to do anything in the coming days and the question is whether we’ll be able to get to Colombo in time to fly out. As we look to be cut off for longer it is also becoming more important to contact people at home; some waiters told a couple in the group it’s possible to get signal from a hilltop, so we might try that tomorrow or try to find the Starlink terminal.