12th March

Charlie's sunstroke

Charlie had quite a rough night last night as his sun-stroke was worse than we had first thought. Luckily there'’s no work today - just the journey in the van South to Ampara.

Photo-swap

Before we left I went to the I.O.M. office in Batti to swap photos of the shows here - they have taken some great pictures for which I'm really grateful. I can't put them on the web yet, as the file sizes are bigger than ours and don't download very easily. We'’ll get some up on the web when we return to England and have a chance to play with them.

The journey south

The journey South was uneventful, and we arrived at our new accommodation in 2 hours. I feel we may be being ripped off as far as van fees are concerned - we were expecting to pay about 3,500 rupiahs but were actually charged 5,000 rupiahs! It only cost us 10,000 rupiahs to travel from Colombo to Trinco - but maybe we were just lucky and got a fantastic deal there. Oh well, the budget generally is standing up well, as the accommodation and food are cheap. It would be great if we could travel on the public buses, but they simply don't have room for all our equipment.

In the wild?

Our accommodation here is set away from the town of Ampara, in woodland - it's very pretty but is still being built. It feels as though we are staying in the wild! The room is nice and has air con, and Marion (Colombo I.O.M..) says the food here is excellent!

Well-planned timetable

After arriving, we met our translator from I.O.M., called Razeen. He seems like a nice person and we thanked him for what appears to be a very well planned schedule. We have 2 shows a day. The morning shows start at around 10.30 while the afternoon shows start at about 4.30. The distances between venues are quite large, but there still seems to be time to eat, rest and recover between programmes . . . on paper at least! Fingers crossed!

We've just had our first meal here. It was indeed very tasty - and also very, very spicy! I shall have to be careful!