Ella - Sri Lanka

The popular train journey from Kandy to Ella, which I took with an Italian woman, took 7 hours past mountain ranges, through tea fields, valleys, small villages and lakes. After the 6th period in the 3rd grade, however, I could already feel the pressure ulcer coming and wondered how the locals endured the death-defying, hour-long bus and train rides. The answer came to me in the form of the teeth of an estimated 75-year-old senior woman with around 6 teeth. She smiled at me with her modest set of teeth as big as her degenerative facial muscles would allow. Little red lumps could be seen between the teeth, which were rolling around in the mouth in a red liquid. I've seen the sight since the first day in Sri Lanka and at first I thought that the people had fallen so hard that the splinters of their teeth had mixed with the seeping blood in their mouths. However, it turned out that these are not collective fractures of the lower jaw, but a folk drug. Many people here chew the berries from a descendant of the fire thorns. This has a sedating, euphoric and quite addictive effect. The plate-sized pupils, the increased salivation caused by the drugs, the resulting large red spit stains on the sidewalks and streets and the apparently smashed inside of the mouth are seen here as often as cigarette smokers in Germany. And it's not just the old grandma sitting completely drunk on the train, but also the bus drivers on the bus. But in order to do justice to the bus rides here, I'll come back to them again in a separate blog entry.

I had certain expectations about Ella as I had always heard that it was the first southern place to go partying. That's why I was a little disappointed when I only met three other people in my hostel, with whom I wasn't 100% on the same wavelength, but nice people nonetheless. In the evening I sat in the common area of the hostel and continued to immerse myself in Stephen King's book. A Colombian woman joined me and we chatted very pleasantly for two hours about God and the world.

The next day the four of us rented two scooters and headed off. After a beautiful viewpoint from which you could see the entire south of the island, we went into a cave. Armed with headlamps, we trudged and climbed for an hour through huge cave systems to cool off in a large cave lake at the end, while the bats circled above us with their sonar sounds. After a slippery climb out of the cave, we then hiked to a huge waterfall, which further up was divided into several smaller ones, so that we could jump seven meters from one waterfall pool to the next one below or down a stone slide created by water erosion over thousands of years could fly down. In the evening we played a game of pool and went dancing a bit, although we didn't really like the party and everyone was pretty exhausted after the long day.