Our last full day in Sri Lanka wasn’t billed as down time but we chose to make it so. There was an optional whale watching boat trip but me and modestly sized boats do not get on well at the best of times and I suspect that, given the Indian Ocean rollers constantly crashing on Koggala beach, this would have been considerably worse than the best of times. This is one of the world’s premier locations for the mighty Blue Whale but, much as a sighting might’ve been exciting, nein danke. For those skipping the boat trip, there was talk of the stilt fishermen again, this time at sunrise, followed in the afternoon by a trip into the town of Galle. Some quiet time doing our own thing seemed more appealing.
We began our relaxed and leisurely morning attempting to capture those Indian Ocean rollers breaking and crashing onto the beach. I’d picked a high vantage point looking down from the grounds of the hotel, while Francine positioned herself on the beach itself. My long exposure attempts didn’t really convey any power so I think they’ll end up in the bin. Francine did somewhat better, with a mixture of slightly blurred movement and frozen breakers.
The hotel grounds were occasionally criss-crossed by chasing Indian Palm Squirrels (Funambulus palmarum). They were very cute little chaps and I reverted to type by abandoning landscape and trying to capture them. One of the wandering hotel security guards, seeing what I was doing, began spotting the squirrels in the palms and trees and pointing them out to me. With his help, I was able to get one shot that shows why the squirrel is also called the Three-striped Palm Squirrel, together with another close-up of one peeking out from behind a tree, which could be of almost any squirrel but I rather like it. What friendly people the Sri Lankans generally are.
We wandered along the front, eventually back to where we had been photographing the stilt fishermen on the previous evening and a little beyond, on the look out for any locations that might prove useful as sunset vantage points this evening. Try as we might, we really didn’t see anything that grabbed as foreground interest. So, rather than make life any more difficult, we ended up back in the hotel grounds trying sunset shots from there. Here’s an impression from each of us of Koggala sunset; these effectively marked the end of our trip to Sri Lanka since all that was left for the morning was a bus ride to the airport for our return flight.
We don’t have a ridiculously early start tomorrow morning; it’s a 07:30 departure.
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