Important Travel Tip regarding clean toilets

One of the down sides of travelling in Sri Lanka is access to clean toilets. Us guys can easily do it outside behind a tree but when you are travelling with females and little kids this becomes even more important. In fact access to clean toilets is so important to me I pay nearly double the market price for Ceylinco VIP insurance just so that I can access the VIP rest areas which are situated in about 8 locations throughout the island. But fortunately I don’t have to do so anymore.

Because I have learnt that every food city outlet throughout the island has a very clean toilet on offer to visitors who patronize their outlets. I was originally told of this by a friend and then I have visited at least two outlets where I found visitors toilets which are extremely clean. Thanks to the extensive food city network now access to a clean toilet is no more a problem wherever you go in this country.

I must raise my hat to the management of Cargills for being so thoughtful my sincere wish is that those who make use of these facilities will at least buy something from these outlets as a gesture of appreciation. 

A not so funny humorous perspective…

I was on the road to Wilpattu with some overseas visitors. We had stopped in the heart of Puttlam town to buy some provisions. When I heard giggles in the background. It seems my visitors found the name board of a store funny. I looked at the board they were referring to and for the life of me could not understand what was so funny. It was another regular “dealer board” as we call it in marcom jargon with a name of a paint company dominating it and the name of store spelt out in small lettering. I was wondering if there was some kind of typo  - as it is bound to happen in Sri Lanka – which made them find it funny. There was nothing I could see. After much probing it came out they thought that the brand of paints which was advertised “Asian Paints” was extremely funny. After all no one would had a brand of paint called Negro Paint or Chinese Paint or Caucasian Paint for that matter. I could see where they were coming from but to be honest I did not find it as amusing. However I could not resist telling them that they called it Asian paint because the only colors were on offer were shades of Brown and Yellow. J

Sri Lankan Ingenuity at its finest aka as Poor Man’s zoom.

Sri Lankan Zoom Lense

I kid you not this is a true story.

At first even I thought this kid was crazy when he was holding his phone against the viewing lens of a pair of Binoculars.

I saw this strange sight as I was spending a couple of days (yet again) in the warm embrace of the Master Campers crew in their camp site in the middle of the Uda Walawe jungle. Our visit has started well. The moment we drove into the camp site we were able to see a baby elephant and its mother drinking water on the opposite bank of the river virtually a stone’s throw away.

When I saw this site I knew things were about to get even more interesting.

It was not a sophisticated phone. In fact it was a cheap Chinese phone. Because the young man who owned it was not a sophisticated person. He was a poor young laborer who did most of the hard manual labor on the campsite. But he was not poor in ingenuity.

When I made enquiries about what he was doing he said he was taking a picture of a rare bird which was a Black dwarf king fisher. The bird was so far away I could not even catch a glimpse of it.

But amazingly see how the picture turned out.  I know the quality  is not the greatest but I don’t think any one would believe that this picture was taken by placing a camera against a pair of binoculars.

Pure Genius.

This is how the pictures turned out.