Colombo, Sri Lanka

We had a quiet Christmas in Colombo. Everything was closed (and it was a Friday so the Muslim shops were mostly closed too). There was no traffic on the roads at all. This worked out for us, as we wanted to spend a day walking about the Colombo Fort area to see all the old colonial architecture.

There's a lot of old buildings in Colombo Fort crumbling away; gentrification is under way and restoring the glory of the buildings. The Fort area is contained and smallish (we walked up and down every street in about two hours) and it's easy to see most of the area developing into a tourist destination like the old town in Galle. While in the Old Dutch Hospital yesterday (a smaller version of the Distillery District in Toronto), we made reservations at the Ministry of Crab a local institution, for lunch on Dec 26.

Walked though the markets in Pettah, saw the largest banana market I've ever seen. We had a hankering for sushi (some of the highest rated restaurants in tripadvisor were Japanese, and Colombo's on the ocean).

The only restaurants open were those in large tourist hotels, so took a tuktuk to Yu Mi in the Taj hotel. The sushi was okay; fresh but a little bland. The Japanese tea was very good, served in a proper teapot and cups. Anyways the sushi hit the spot.

As we were walking home, another couple waved to us from inside the Taj. It took us a few seconds to place the faces - they were also guests at our hotel.

Relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. Our room had a great covered porch area with seating and overhead fan. Very nice for reading or having a beer. (The beers had been delivered earlier to our minibar cause Christmas is a dry day by law in Sri Lanka).

Around 15 minutes to sunset, took a tuktuk out to Galle Face Green to watch the sunset. The boardwalk along Galle Face Green is very popular with locals at sunset and it was even busier being a holiday. The sunset was nice. It was just the sun and the ocean but no subject like boats or islands so I didn't post any pics.

Had dinner at the hotel again. It has great ambience and the kitchen is highly rated. We figured we'd have lunches at other places, and then dinners here every day. It's more relaxing not to have to take tuktuks after we'd cleaned up, and the kitchen was very good at our hotel.

...

Ministry of Crab day! We started at the National Museum close to our hotel, which was great. It was more interesting because we'd already seen most of the ruins documented in the museum. We spent about 90 minutes going through.

Took a tuktuk to the Ministry of Crab. Most of the tuktuk drivers we took today remarked about it being the 11th anniversary of the tsunami that killed over 40,000 people in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004. Dec 26 is now National Safety Day, but I'm not sure what that entails.

We arrived early at the restaurant, but were able to get seated. It's quite a production here. We ordered a small chili garlic crab each (600g), garlic butter clams to split as a starter, homemade ginger beers, and freshly baked kade bread.

Got our bibs and ginger beer.

The clams were excellent, perfectly cooked (Heather is very particular about her seafood).

Next came the crabs. Served in the shell, with lots of sauce to dip the kade. Mmm good! (Not as good as the king crab we had in the market in Santiago, but very good). At first we thought we may need to order more clams, but there's plenty of meat on the crabs here and we were stuffed by the end. Heather couldn't even finish hers and I had to help :)

For dessert went to nearby Heladiv Tea, which had excellent tea and dessert, and lousy service.

We were both stuffed. Took a tuktuk down Galle Rd to Barefoot, a local fabric store that Heather had been wanting to check out. Souvenir shopped, and then walked towards the hotel checking out the stores (in particular looking for the Cashew Corporation shop - cashews are a big crop here). Didn't find the cashew place, and ended up walking all the way home, just as well after the big lunch.

We were still full at dinner, so just ordered some smaller items and called it tapas. Also had a few drinks (Heather tried their arrak cocktail, I had some Lion Lagers) as the bar was able to serve today.