Day 26+27: Colombo, Sri Lanka - Off to the south, chasing the sun...

Unbelievable how quickly time flies. We are already in Sri Lanka and right in the middle of summer here.

Because here, temperatures are above 20 degrees Celsius all year round.

But stepping outside the airport, seeing the first palm trees, and immediately having sweat beads on our foreheads is somehow part of a vacation like this.

And even though it was already very warm on Monday morning, we took a little tour of Colombo, the capital.

Our first destination was the train station, as we wanted to buy train tickets for our journey the next day. But we were told that reservations were not possible and we should just come back the next day shortly before the train leaves at 8:30 am.

Of course, typical German planning in advance doesn't work that way...

We followed the recommendations of our Lonely Planet travel guide and started our tour with a walk through a neighborhood near the harbor, although there wasn't much exciting to see. The highlight was a very cozy and modern tea lounge (also recommended by the guidebook), where we ordered an ice-cold tea smoothie and a beautifully decorated chocolate cupcake.

Funnily enough, almost all the other guests had the same guidebook on their table (- at this point, we can highly recommend Lonely Planet guidebooks, very well developed and with lots of interesting information!).

Afterwards, our tour took us through the former slave quarter. This area is surrounded by two lakes and used to be almost completely surrounded by water. When the Dutch still owned the city, they kept their slaves there.

Today, you can find many small alleys with simple colorful huts, with clotheslines hanging in front of them, and you can see that life mostly takes place outside on the street.

In the background of the small huts, the city's large and modern buildings rise up.

After leaving the neighborhood and arriving at the lake, we followed the shore, took a short break on a small green island, and then visited two temples.

The second Buddhist temple looked more like a huge antique shop. Buddha statues were set up everywhere, surrounded by old furniture, collectibles, and some monks dressed in orange.

Here, we also received white cloth towels that we had to tie around ourselves as skirts to cover our legs.

We spent the rest of the day in the air-conditioned hostel, also to roughly plan the route for the coming days. Since we have two weeks in total in Sri Lanka, we haven't planned everything exactly yet, but we have an idea of what we want to do and book the hostels gradually.