After just one night in Trinco we moved on to Kalkudah. Actually we intended to stay there for just one night but as many times before we stayed for two more nights in the end. The hotel was cheap but really good compared to its price and the only thing to critisize was the distance to the beach. We have been told it is just ten minutes walking, but it turned out to actually take something around twentyfive minutes. Unfortunately the weather changed as soon as we arrived at this part of the east coast. Before we came, it was sunny all day (at least so we were told), but with our arrival it started to rain. Nevertheless we took the chance to go swimming in the beautiful sea as often as we could.

On the first day we went to the beach in the afternoon, despite the clouds and the little droplets of rain and we met Timo and Salima again. Remember? We met them in Sigiriya some days earlier. This fortunate coincidence was actually the reason why we even considered to stay around Kalkudah for a longer time – besides the low prices and the nice beach of course. I liked the place more than Trincomalee, despite the fact that the beach here was more crowded than it had been in Trincomalee, because we met so many cool people here.

One of them was Louise, a French woman, we met on our way back to the hotel. We talked with her for quite a long time before we went on to get something to eat for dinner. We might see her again, because our travel plans through Sri Lanka seemed to align magically… she actually came from Trincomalee and she was in Sigiriya and Pollonaruwa before that and now planned to visit Arugam Bay, Ella and Adams Peak after Passikudah. Which was pretty similar to the route we had in mind. She also is nice company, although she is way older than we are. This was no problem whatsoever because by the time we met her, we were already used to meeting and getting along well with “older people”. That’s because most travellers (we met) were in their twenties or thirthies and we had not met a single same aged traveller yet but to be honest we did not expect that to happen any time soon…
We have been at the beach for the whole second day and after a long beach walk (I had gotten a little sun burn for free – mission accomplished), we jumped into the waves, which were so strong that it took a lot of effort to fight against them. Sometimes it even did not work and the waves pushed us as if we were little feathers floating in the air. Well more like crushing us into the sand than floating but… you get the idea.
Exhausted from our endless fight against the ocean, we went out of the water to rest a little and Rico went back to get his camera to shoot the sunset at the beach.

I sat down in the sand and enjoyed the peaceful silence, listening to the sound of the sea (silence should be taken metaphorically here). But the peacefulness has been interrupted rather fast by some local boys. Of course they wanted to take a selfie with me (what else? I am a famous man 😉 ), I did not expect anything else, but when they spotted that I had an ukulele with me they became really interested. More and more Sri Lankans came around until we sat in something that one could have recognized as an oddly shaped circle. At least six of them were gathered around me, listening to my music, taking pictures and even videos. It was a lot of fun, especially due to the fact that one of them brought a Djembe drum to our little jam session (actually that’s why you can call it “jam session” at all). In the end when Rico came back the boys had just started dancing. I was playing Waka Waka on the ukulele and together with the drum it was perfect for them to dance to the music in a crazy Sri Lankan way. I was happy that Rico came just in time to be part of and take some photos of this rather magical moment, showing how much fun all of us had. He even sang along, while taking pictures. There is no better way to capture the magic of a moment than catching the very spirit of it in a picture or video but see for yourself.

After we already thought we would not meet neither Louise or Salima and Timo again, we walked by a little supermarket talking about not having met anybody from the day before yet – and maybe you guessed by now what happened next – we stepped into Salima and Timo. Once more we had a nice talk and got some new inspiring ideas on how to run a blog and how to start with stock photography in a little restaurant where we enjoyed some plates of Koththu Roti – a dish we discovered in Kalkudah the day before and which turned out to be Sri Lankas national food. In the end we even got invited by them and once again we did not know how to thank people for their invitations, their generosity and their overall friendliness. Filled with joy, inspiration and gratitude we went back to the hotel once again.
The third day was a wasted day. It was as unspectacular as the weather, gray and boring, but we had toast and jam for breakfast.

Other than that we just sat around all day using the really good wifi of our hotel, working through pictures for the blog and watching YouTube and planning for our journey to Arugam Bay.