The Albatross
Friday 16 August 2013So today we’d organised, “A day walk in the Knuckles Ranges”, a stunning range North West of Kandy. It is beautiful with tea plantations wrapped around steep hills and bush. For some reason by the time it hit our guide for the day it became translated as “They want to climb the 5 Knuckles”, a series of hills which look like a closed fist and sit at the southern end of the ranges, and give it its name. Now climbing the Knuckles isn’t really a problem, but the time it takes is. By the time we’d picked up guide (1 hour) and got to the start point (another 2 hours) we’d burnt through most of the cool morning weather as it was now 9:00am, and most importantly a hell of a lot of time as we had to be back for the festival in the evening, It was also only now that we realised that there had been some sort of cock up and it was too late to fix it.
(On a side note there were great walks out from our guides hotel which would have given a beautiful 5 hours walking, we then could have had a late lunch and made it back for a shower and the festival at leisure).
So we headed off, it was very pretty, initially walking up a road running through a tea plantation then climbing up the first knuckle. We hit some forest which was very pretty, the gloss taken off by thousands of leeches who came at you in waves if you stopped. Tuna wasn’t overly impressed, but the trouble was when we stopped to pick them off our boots more would leap at you.
We never made it all the way to the top mainly because our guide wasn’t very fit and kept stopping (huh, this is your job). Eventually we got back to the car, but realised we wouldn’t be back to the hotel ‘till at least 5:30pm at very best. Apart from a very light snack, we’d last had some food at 6:00am and were somewhat peckish. There was now no way we could shower and have food and get to the festival, so it looked like not getting dinner till midnight when the festival closes. A few phone calls later and we had managed to shift our seating till tomorrow night. Excellent the pressure came off.
A shower and dinner were most welcome. Asleep by 8:30pm, we didn’t even hear the festival.