Colombo Day 2

MICHAEL:

Today we were in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and I had to decide if I was going to participate in the included tour or not. We have been here several times before, and there really isn’t that much to see. Our concern was that the included would be redundant, but it turned out that it really wasn’t. We left the port, the largest port in southeast Asia, for a brief tour of the city, and our first stop, a fusion Buddhist temple. It’s called fusion because it’s a conglomerate of Buddhist customs from Chinese Buddhism, Sri Lankan Buddhism, Malaysian Buddhism, and a bunch of others. 

Al Alfur mosque 

Avukana Buddha statue 

The temple we stopped at looked like a combination Buddhist Temple and thrift store. I know that sounds funny, but the temple has received gifts from all over the world and most of the temple property, maybe 20 rooms or so, was simply housing all of these gifts. The gifts included anything from cash all the way up to Rolls Royce automobiles and they are all displayed in rooms dedicated to the particular category of gift. It was very very strange , and it had to be worth a fortune.

Replica of Borobuder Temple

From here we went to the Independence Square, which I had seen before, and a few other stops that I had also seen before, but all in all it wasn’t a bad tour. The only problem was that it was brutally hot.  Sri Lanka is an interesting country. It’s very poor and they have suffered from significant inflation, but they seem to be out of it now and buildings are going up all over the place.

BEVERLY:

I stayed on the ship except for 15 minutes when I ventured out onto the dock to peruse the shops that were just steps away from the gangplank.  It was just too blasted hot to stay out much longer than that. When Michael got back from the excursion, we spent a delightful afternoon down at the spa pool.