Mirissa is a tourist destination, small
village by the sea with a nice beach. You get the goods and bads,
that come with that. It's laid back, its cheap, but its harder to
find what you want and Tuk-tuks charge here typical overprices from
foreigners. Sadly PickMe didn't find any tuk-tuks or cars from here,
so I needed to pay the tuk-tuks the foreigner price.
The Mirissa beach.
Beach is nice. The western part (on the
right side) has waves for surfers and eastern part has lower waves,
so if you don't like them, you don't have to be swimming in waves.
When I went there, right after I had
arrived to Mirissa, the storms were coming. I didn't really mind that
so much (I am on vacation and I am used to these showering rains in
Asia during my previous trips). I went to check the lunch at the
beach restaurant (“Suna Dewli” or something like that) and sit
down to the plastic chair, under the plastic roof on the beach.
When I got my foods, also got the
rain. The plastic roof almost kept the rain and I could finish my
lunch at that table, but after eating I moved to open space, under
the restaurant. Oh I enjoyed the restful moment, seeing the kids
running at the beach and mothers trying to catch them. A big local
guy from the restaurant, went swimming while semi-wild dogs of
restaurant/beach followed him to the water – this was probably
quite a sweet sight to women on beach, like the lady on the table
next to me. I actually think she did photograph with her cell phone,
while the guy came from the sea with dogs following him. ;)
I kept sipping the sprite I ordered
and reading The Way of Tea – enjoying my mundane existence once
more.
The hotel.
Riverside Cabanas is not that big
hotel. It's located besides a small river (at least its not that wide
in this location). And on the other side of the main road, than the
beach is. So its kind of further away from the beach, but its really
not that far away. Of course it could be nice to have a direct access
to beach, but this hotel has a nice touch and feeling.
Now that I am writing this, my
original reservation would be ending today, but last night I reserved
the room for two more nights, because I like it here. That probably
tells a lot. Well the crazy heat in these beach sites is quite
something to me (and probably for many scandinavian people), but I
have started to take daily naps during the hardest heat.
The Whale Watching trip.
Trip was kind of nice. It costed 4000
LKR (+ 200 LKR for tuk-tuk back to hotel, as only the pick up from
the hotel was included).
Main point being, that neither of
these two boats (they said that there were 6 boats in total going out
that day to see whales), that were sailing close to each other, found
any whales. So that was really disappointing. The heat is quite much
on the boat, but gladly I was wise enough to get a seat from the
lower deck. I would have been fried on the top floor. I did get sun
burn to my arms, as forgot to add sun block to them. Legs were fine,
because remembered to take care of them.
Blue whales and sperm whales live in
20 nautical mile area, at the site where we traveled. There is one
more whale type that randomly travel trough this same area, but then
of course you need to be very lucky to see them during the trip. It
was about 6 nautical miles from Mirissa harbour to get to that area,
where they live.
Those creatures are so huge and it
would have been so amazing to see even one and to even be so lucky to
get a picture of it. They are on the surface only for half a minute
or something like that and come up to the surface once in 15 to 45
minutes (that is when they have to come up to breath). But sadly we
didn't. We saw dolphins on three occasions. On first two occasions we
get to take some pictures of them. Third time it was so small group
and they dived deeper when the boat got closer to them. Second
occasion was a group of 300 to 500 dolphins and that was a nice
sight.
I have seen dolphins from a catamaran
trip with my wife, in Spain (Costa de Sol). I think this was a bigger
group, but on that catamaran trip, we were able to follow the
dolphins for a long time and it was really easy to take video and so
many photos of those lovely creatures.
I ended up sleeping for maybe ¾ of
the return part of the trip – I think they poured some sleeping
powder into the sweet tea that was offered in the beginning of the
trip. ;)
Then a couple on their honeymoon came
down from the top floor and a Sri Lankan tour guide, sitting besides
me was their guide. They were here for one week and were originally
from Switzerland. We shared a lot of our experiences from Sri Lanka
and asia with each other. They have had a great, going around this
island in a week. They suggested a hotel (something like Pakshan)
from near the Sigiriya site, which they clearly loved a lot (hotel
and Sigiriya).
There was a very good deck guy
handling the lower deck. He aided me a lot to stay on feet while I
was focusing to take pictures of the dolphins. It's actually not that
easy to stay on two feets, while boat is little rocking, you try to
focus the objective of camera to dolphins and still see the whole
picture, where the next dolphin is going to jump. Couple of them did
really do really nice jumps, with a jolly turn-arounds during the
jump. But that was so random, that it wasn't possible to catch a
picture of them. I asked about a fishing trip from this deck guy and
he said he could do it for about 16 000 – 17 000 LKR (about 113 €).
Am I happy about the whale watching
trip? Yes, I am. It was nice trip and got to see dolphins. If there
would have been rough sea, it might not have been so good – but
well maybe then if we would have seen the whales. If I would have got
seasick, then it certainly would have not been worthy of the effort.
Wrote this during my breakfast at the hotel lobby (Tuesday morning, 5.4.2016).
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