Villa Don Hendrick, Tangalle

Yesterday we spent the day in the pool in the sun, semi-cold drink in hand. As you can imagine, we are now beet red and had to take some Tylenol at bed. I’m just hoping it evolves into a nice tan. 🙂

We are staying at our favorite place of all so far: Villa Don Hendrick. There are only three bungalows– a lovely teacher from Singapore staying in one, us in one and the last unoccupied. This is the off season, but you’d never know with the sun and beautiful weather we’ve had.

Tangalle is small, but bustling and just a ten minute tuk tuk ride away. We go in each night for dinner. The day before last, we also hired Adjith, our tuk tuk driver, to take us around to the beaches and local sites, then lunch. He was wonderful. We visited Wewurukannala Vihara temple complex with its 50m Buddha, the tallest in Sri Lanka. There were a couple of people milling about, the temple attendants selling tickets for entrance (.90 cents) and a couple of tourists, but we largely had the viewing to ourselves. I bought a ticket for one of the buildings being restored. The inside was stunning with a huge reclining Buddha and statue after statue of Buddhas and supplicants. We didn’t explore more, but just admired from the outside. We skipped the 500 steps to climb the outside Buddha. 🙂

We sleep comfortably without air conditioning– the nighttime breeze is soft and cool. We run our ceiling fan and keep all the windows open to let the air in. And open means, really open. There are no screens or curtains, just a few bars to discourage intruders, rogue monkeys and peacocks. The only small concern would be a cobra coming in, but the nightwatchman patrols periodically looking for just that issue (and anything else that could come up). We don’t walk in the jungle growth around the property, so all is good on the snake front. We have a couple of monitor lizards that we see leisurely cross the lawn. And the peacocks wander and sometimes scream like a cat in distress. We get fireflies at night above the mosquito netting. They are beautiful to watch at night as you go to sleep. Surprisingly, we don’t get many insects in the bungalow, even though we are entirely open to the gardens and the wildness out in back of us. However, I did have some staring contests with some kind of very large proper bug by the shower, next day on the wardrobe — 3 inches and stunningly long antennae.

This is a peaceful, beautiful place. We would stay a month if we could.

More of Tangalle:

I’m going to post a page of videos from each stay in Sri Lanka, so that is forthcoming. 🙂