Averagely Adventurous

In the morning, we explored Kandy and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. The city was beautiful and busy.  There were remnants of the festival the night before, as well as people already camped out for tonight's show.  Beads and jewels littered the ground from the elephants and dancers, and we saw elephants near the temple eating a big helping of leaves.  Inside the Temple was very full.  The locals leave daily offerings so all food and flowers we saw were fresh and bright.  Some places also had bits of fabric tied around a coin, a way to make a wish for good health for others.  This temple had no live monks living there, but an active caretaker who is held in high regard and given special garment in recognition of their work.  The temple housed old texts and paintings of the histories, even a small museum of artifacts from the previous kings and pictures documenting the history of the area.  After surviving a bombing from religious radicals as...

We usually enjoy exploring a country on our own; finding places we want to see and maybe doing a small tour here and there.  However the transportation in Sri Lanka would make that very difficult, with public transport being too slow and Tuk Tuks being impractical for the distance we wanted to cover. So we booked a 3 day tour that would take us to the cities we wanted, ending near Yala National Park where we booked a safari for our last full day. Our driver picked us up early that morning and we were surprised to find out we had actually booked a private tour (even better!).  Our first stop was Dambulla to visit the cave temples.  First, we had to climb 200 stairs to reach the top of Dambulla Rock, but it makes for a great view! There we quickly stowed our shoes and donned proper attire to enter the series of caves. Inside the first cave was single giant statue of a past Buddha. Our guide explained you can tell when the buddha is 'resting' versus 'past living' by lookin...

Pedro had a great opportunity to practice spaying cats and dogs on his own, up to 30 surgeries in experience.  And the program happened to be two weeks located in Sri Lanka, outside of Colombo.  Not wanting to pass on this opportunity to do solo surgeries, and exploration of a new foreign country, Pedro and I decided he would stay an extra week.  Then I would join him for a holiday. Pedro finished up on a Friday and I was flying the next day to arrive Sunday morning, planning on exploring Colombo before the next few days of multicity tours. Unfortunately, when I arrived to the Edinburgh airport over 3 hours early for my flight, the airport was in chaos. See, this was the line to GET in line to check in...which was about 3 flights behind.  After some sitting around listening to the disarray, I learned they had a technical issue that led to manual check-ins only. Soon workers were going through the lines asking for flight numbers and pulling people out of the line to m...

We planned to revisit Montserrat to explore a bit more, but unfortunately I got worse overnight.  Fever, chills, and horrible coughing had us up have the night, with me having no energy to go anywhere the next morning.  Pedro went back to the pharmacy to get more medicine and cared for me all day, in the hopes I'd feel better for our tour today. Luckily, with my fever broken and strong foreign cough sweets, I was able to leave the hotel (walking slowly). But I was looking forward today, I was grateful he made me rest because I did not want to miss going back to La Sagrada Familia and see his reaction to it.   Our tour was guided through the church, with access one of the towers.  It being Three Kings Day, we had one of the last slots before the church closed early.  Three Kings Day is almost the equivalent of Christmas Eve, we saw many traveling with presents (as the Three Wise Men did).  I know this has been under construction since 1882, but last tim...