written by David
One of the places I wanted to make sure we visited in Sri Lanka was the Singaraja Rain Forest park. It seemed to be an opportunity for adventure-- just the right mix of new sites and scenery. After reading the information about the park, Nadine decided that it was indeed the perfect adventure—for Anna and I. She was afraid of the leeches and decided to spend the day doing the far more dangerous adventure of shoping.
So Anna and I visited the park on the third day we were in Sri Lanka.. To get there, we went north via taxi (van) from Galle for about 66 kilometers which is not far, but because the road wound through the mountains, so it took three hours. The traffic situation is not like driving down Interstate 94 in Minnesota. The road is single lane traffic and due to slow moving trucks, little three wheel vehicles (tuk-tuks) and the occasional tractor, it was at times teeth-clenching when the van was passing a tuk-tuk and a truck was coming from the other direction.
“We’re going to die”, Anna muttered more than once.
“Yes we are” I said in my best calm father voice, “ but not today. “
Despite the thrill of the ride, the drive there was quite nice. Wonderfully lush green scenery of jungle, rice paddies, tea plantations. It was the perfect eye -feast after living in the desert for 5 months. Once we got to the entrance of the park, the road became more pothole than road so we had to switch to riding in a tuk-tuk. The driver was quite good, but I was glad I did not have a bad back. We eventually got to the park and we were off on our trek.
Vinny, the guide, wanted to make sure we saw everything so he lead us at a brisk pace. Although we were in a rain forest, the trail was packed dirt and quite easy to walk on. I had read there was not too much wildlife to be seen, but I was a bit surprised at the lack of bird noise. Initially, the biggest animals we saw were foot-long lizard and some large millipedes. Later on we saw a 6 foot snake and a couple of monkeys.
We crossed a river and to a visitor center where Anna discovered her first leech. It had been on her for a bit and when she pried it off, her ankle bled quite a bit. By the end of our walk, she totaled 21 leeches. I found 2 leeches, but later in the van, Anna noticed that I had blood all over my shirt. I had had a leech on my inside elbow and at sometime dislodged it and the blood got onto my shirt. I also had one on my ankle I didn’t know about and the bite later became a bit infected. Nadine had made the right decision not to travel with us.
At the visitor center we were joined by two couples of Russians. After travelling with them for abit, and finding them a bit noisy, I think the Russians have replaced the Americans as “ugly” travelers. Anna described them as “wussies”. Needless to say, we weren’t impressed.
We didn’t really have a destination in mind so Vinny suggested the 5 waterfall walk and we blithely agreed. Up the mountains we went. Gone was the packed path and we wandered through a trail made of rocks and tree roots. This trek could have been a real ankle twister and of course, not having the ADA handicapped accessible law, there were no handrails. Occasionally, there were steps cut into the hill, but they were few and far between.
At the top of one difficult hill climb, Anna paid me a nice.
“Hey look Dad, you outlasted the 20 something Russians.”
The most awesome part of the trip was viewing the water falls- one beauty after another. We had to wade streams and climb over boulders to get to them, but we were rewarded with incredible sights and sounds of water. The last one had a wonderful pond and I went swimming – a great way to cool down after our sweaty 3 hour hike.
Now it was time to start back and it being the rain forest of course it started to rain – a warm soaking rain for our last hour of walk. We got to the restaurant and had a nice meal of soup and sandwich.
We had one last adventure while returning to the van. It was now getting dark and we were driving down a mountain road with huge potholes in a tuk tuk that had a headlight about as strong as a large flashlight. Once back into the van, the drive back to our villa was downhill and our driver was passing vehicles in the dark with not much idea what was coming around the bend. At one time he was passing and he turned off his lights to see if there were headlights coming from the other direction. We passed a tractor and the headlight he was using was a flashlight. Thankfully, we arrived safely. And as I thought, this was not the day we were fated to die. Nadine was happy to see our leech scarred bodies returning tired but happy.
