After more than a week of touring the country side of Sri Lanka, we had finally looped back to the bigger towns on its southwest coast. Galle is a coastal fort city built by the Portugese around 1500 and then took over by the Dutch and later took over yet by the British. Our hotel is right inside the old fort and it's been only recently converted into a three room small hotel. We chose to explore the fort early next morning due to the evening rain.
Galle and the whole southwest coast are in the wettest zone of the island. The monsoon came early this year and the news reported 7 people had already died from flooding near Colombo. We were both awaken during the night by the strong downpour. Luckily, the rain stopped by early morning which allowed us to stroll around the fort.
To our surprise, the streets were already very busy at 8 o'clock in the morning and there were especially many many brides and grooms everywhere taking wedding photos in traditional and modern dresses and costumes. We noticed here and in India as well that wedding is a big business. It's very elaborate and there are advertizing billboards everywhere regarding wedding planning and reception halls rentals!
The 120 km drive from Galle to Colombo would now take 2 hours instead of 5 hours because we've taken the only highway in the country joining Colombo and Matara. This is built with Chinese financial aids. If more highways can be built linking different parts of Sri Lanka, it would definitely help their economy by helping the movement of people and goods.
We visited the Colombo National Museum and it gave us a good summary of Sri Lankan history and consolidated what we had seen these past several days. Colombo is not the prettiest city and the constant traffic really cut down the appeal of this Port city. We then had the most expensive dinner of the trip: mud crab which shell is even harder than those of lobster!
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