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The nice thing about Colombo is that you can get out of Colombo in about 20 minutes. This poya we went looking for some mythical bike trail from Thalangama to Kelaniya. We didn’t find it, but we did find a lot of green, and trees, and mud. Sri Lanka is really a small miracle. You can get completely rural via bicycle.

Thalangama is near Athurigiriya, which is strangely one of my favorite places. Sometimes I drive around late at night just because. I’ve been in every direction, but I usually end up in Athurigiriya. There’s a spot where the road opens out and you’re surrounded by paddy fields. It’s nice.

We ended up biking around there, pretty much the exact place I go. If you go in it gets rural pretty fast. These bloody bloggers I went with got winded on every hill but we eventually got to one of those paddy islands.

My friend had this idea for a hotel. It’s an island hotel, except in a sea of paddy. These places already kinda exist. What we biked into was not a paddy island as much as an isthmus. There were some guys at the entry, eating manioc and pol sambol.

We were following the sun cause we didn’t know the trail. Thanks to Halik’s genius we ended up proceeding by carrying our bikes directly across a paddy field. This was fine except the trail began degenerating into mud. I tried jumping across one with a bike on my shoulders and ended up falling on my knees, ruining my fresh white trainers. Should have known better than to wear my dancing shoes.

Took them off and waded through knee-deep mud. Got across and washed our feet in the irrigation ditch. Walked through someone’s backyard farm, scared some dogs and got back on the bikes. From there, of course, we slowly rejoined civilization.

Ended up biking back past Parliament, checked out the war memorial. There are thousands of names, and they left room for thousands more. Glad that part of the wall won’t be filled. People gather on the lawn to play cricket. Sat and watched them for a while, dozed off a bit. Colombo’s not so bad sometimes.

Posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 in Colombo, Photography, Sri Lanka, travel.