It Weren’t Half Hot, Mum

A breeze soothes my face as I drift into another sun drenched dream, I can hear the chatter, chatter of some locals above the waves that caress the shore and then she prods me in the rib. ‘Let’s go out tomorrow.’ This is Sri Lanka, there are no island tours where you all sing Gin Gan Goolie and drink copious amounts of alcohol whilst a hairstylist from Scunthorpe tells you how she once saved three wild cats from a dustbin and then nearly miscarried because she caught Toxoplasmosis from their faeces.

 

Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi on Pexels.com

In Sri Lanka you book a taxi. That evening we invited ‘Elvis’ the taxi driver into the hotel (and you thought he worked in the chip shop) to discuss our trip the next day. Elvis informed me that we would need to depart the hotel at 05:00 in order to see the baby elephants being fed. Now no one would call me an animal lover, nor indeed and animal hater. I guess I’m an abstainer, I’m like that with a lot of things. Take Homosexuality for instance, I don’t have a problem with it, if that’s who you are, fine, best of luck to you. I just don’t need to participate. So I explain to Elvis that we are on holiday and 4:30 only exists once a day. He tells me what a beautiful sight it is and I tell him that I’m sure David Attenborough  has it covered, we agree on 06:00, reluctantly. The morning doesn’t start well when believing I need to pass a little wind and pooh my pants. Fifteen minutes later we are in Elvis’s taxi and heading out to the Elephant orphanage. If you’ve never ridden an Elephant its fairly easy once you get on it and surprisingly they purr? I managed not to pooh on the elephant, but I did get mugged by the children, but that’s another story 🙂