Day 2: Unawatuna, Sri Lanka

Yes, Unawatuna. That's Sinhalese for you.

On the second day of our travels, we got up and ate a regular Sri Lankan breakfast: coffee and tea; fish, potato, and dahl (bean) curries; hoppers (fried eggs in some tape of pastry bowl); stringy hoppers (some sort of rice/vermicelli/noddle-like carbohydrate); and juice.

We then took a 15 minute took-took ride to Unawatuna, a small bay town that is also on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. We stayed at a place called the Full Moon Resort, but don't be fooled by the "resort" in the title. The hotel and restaurant were owned by Italian management, allowing me to eat a quite tasty eggplant parmigiana, and our room was complete with A/C and mosquito net. The water here was the clearest that I've ever seen, and not too rough for swimming, but we spent a lot of time sitting on the beach. Our room was literally 20 feet from the water's edge! At one or two points, I'm sure I feel asleep...so, we spent most of our day just lounging.

After dusk, we went for a walk to admire the hotel lights. Because we were right on the bay, all of the hotels/bungalows' outdoor cafe lights were reflected by the water. Pretty cool. The only undesirable part of that was the incredibly loud music being blared from the bar next door to our hotel, not exactly romantic.

The following morning, we awoke again to move on. After a quick breakfast with real pork products (just for measure), we walked out to the main road. On our way, we saw the typical stray dogs and a gigantic scorpion in a 1-foot deep drainage gutter. Maybe six inches is not exactly gigantic, but it was a SCORPION! Kind of awesome.