Day 29 - Soursop, Mangostiene and Nelli

Lovely night sleep again followed by a leisurely breakfast that we did ourselves, we had toast and marmite, watermelons and porridge! Home comforts! Nihal kindly offered to give up a few hours of his holiday today to show us around the local markets in Kandy which was very kind of him, he came to our guesthouse around 10am and then we walked into town with him, into the markets. It was packed again in town, there were clothes markets with all the beautiful fabrics for sarees, bag shops and tacky tourist stalls. Nihal wanted to take us to the fruit market to show us all the unusual fruits, we got to taste a few and bought a bag full of watermelons, pineapple, limes, star fruit, mangoes, mangosteen, soursop and bananas to feast on later, we did not buy any durian which is a stinky cheesy fruit that apparently tastes nice but we didn't want to brave it! Catherine bought a bag and Jess bought a batik wall hanging and we bought some green leaves called betel leaves which you are meant to give to the elders on new year, Nihal told us about them and taught us how to say happy new year so we could give them to the lady at our guesthouse.

After strolling back up to the guesthouse we said bye to Nihal and then got into our swimming stuff and headed to a hotel round the corner which has a nice pool overlooking kandy, unfortunately it started raining as we got there and there was a storm so sun bathing didn't last long! We came back to the guesthouse showered and relaxed with our books and a Gin and tonic!

At about 7ish, Ross, Matt and Beckie the students from Edinburgh arrived, so we had drinks to catch up with them and the lady had cooked us dinner, rice and curry ofcourse followed by ice cream. We stayed up playing cards and games and brought in the Sinhalese and Tamil new year with a few sparklers!!

Also there is the cutest little boy staying here called jack, he's only about 7 and he's English, he's travelling with his dad, he's a bit of a wildlife fanatic and whenever he finds anything like a slug, a frog, a toad he shouts for us to come and see, he's also pressing flowers that he finds around Sri Lanka, so cute!