Last Thursday we went to the southern part of Sri Lanka, Galle, for a children's festival, where we explained what Emerge was to school children who came for the festival and had them make bracelets and cards. All of the children we had were girls ages 12-14 and they traveled in groups for three different sessions for the day. Some groups did music, some did activities, one even was doing origami!
I stayed in a unique hotel with outdoor showers connected to the rooms and lush plants everywhere. It was across a small street from the beach, which was absolutely beautiful...
This was my view for dinner that evening at a table on the beach with my toes in the sand. It was fantastic. I had a spicy fried rice dish with chicken.
The next day I had a driver to go back to Colombo. We went to the Galle Fort first. It's an old Portuguese fort built hundreds of years ago and still standing around a peninsula.
This was the "prison", basically a pit with walls...
And there were many old buildings within the walls, including this old Dutch Protestant church (first the Portuguese and then the Dutch and then the British came to Sri Lanka for trade purposes).
I also went to a marine archaeology museum, where they had a lot of cool things they had pulled up from sunken ships around the island including soda bottles, old foreign coins, Chinese and Thai pottery and European dishware as well. This was an example of an old, traditional fishing boat the fishermen used to use. They sat or stood on the top and then the open rounded part at the bottom is where the fish were stored after being caught. The people didn't actually sit anywhere "in" the boat!
On the way back we also stopped at Kosgoda, which is a turtle hatchery. They pay fishermen to bring them turtle eggs when they find them, rather than sell them on the black market. Then they rebury them and wait for them to start hatching. When they do, they take 90-95% of the baby turtles to the ocean to start their lives! The other 5-10% they keep for one week for educational purposes, as groups of people and children come to see the hatchery. The picture below is a baby green sea turtle only 3 days old! If you were careful, you could even pick them up and hold them!
They also have a couple of turtles that they can't release in the wild because they're afraid they will die. One has only 3 flippers as the 4th was caught in a net and broken. This one was born with only half a shell, so they've started feeding him a special calcium rich diet and the shell is starting to grow on his back half.
All in all it was a great last weekend in Sri Lanka!
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