Sri Lanka It's Happening

November 5, 2006

Early morning on Friday, I set off to Kandy to attend the wedding of a very close friend. The ceremony itself started at 9.45 Am but I had to be there early cause by daughter was to be the flower girl. The star at a Sri Lankan wedding is not the bride but the photographer. The wedding ceremony is conducted not according to the wishes of the bride but the whims and fancies of the photographer.

One such whim is to take hundreds of photographs in rediculous poses. And for those photos, the flowergirl has to be there. Hence the reason for an early start. After leaving home at 4:30 we reached the Kandy city just after six (despite the pothole). Going from the city to the Earl's Regency where the wedding reception was held took another solid one hour. If you think Colombo has a major traffic problem you should try Kandy.

The return trip was a nightmare. We left Kandy just before 4:00 and that meant we avoided the city traffic. It was pouring buckets but my e39 just purred and I had a lot of fun overtaking in the rain when everyone else was running scared. Then we reached Pasyala and that's when the terror started.

Just before we reached Pasyala, a Friend who left before us called to say traffic is being diverted from Nittambuwa and it took him in exceess of four hours to get home. Like everyone else were asked to turn left onto the attangalla road by the police who had closed off the Kandy road at Pasyala town. So turned and we waited. Then we moved forward a hundred meters and waited again, the process was repeated about 20 thirty times before we reached the next town which I think was Attanagalla.

Now there were two roads that we could go by and I took the wrong turn. It turned out to be a good thing, cause after a long winding drive through treacherous roads, we finally hit the Kandy Road again at Balum Mahara. And the traffic was still crawling.

By this time, I was so tired I was going real slow (less than 40km/s). Then all of a sudden we ran into a clear bit of road and I floored it to overtake a row of vehicles. Immidiately I felt much better and returned to my usual style of hell of leather driving, even then it was past 9:30pm when we finally got home.

Posted by raditha at November 5, 2006 5:47 AM