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hotel near the Colombo airport
Saturday, July 12 2025
location: room 327, Hotel Suisse, Kandy, Sri Lanka
This was our last morning in Sri Lanka and the last at the Hotel Suisse, and it definitely felt like the staff assigned to us were phoning it in. The coffee came by infrequently at best, but, since I would spending hours on a bus today, that was probably for the best. After breakfast, Gretchen and I returned briefly to our room to get our stuff just as a group of macaque monkeys came through, followed by a spectacular metallic-blue sunbird in the flowers just outside our window.
The bus ride from Kandy today took us to the vicinity of the big Colombo international airport, which is technically in the beach city of Negombo. Along the way, we stopped several times for bathroom breaks, including at a place with a nice western-style coffee shop just across a bridge from which one could see more roosting fruit bats than we'd seen in any of the previous trees. In that coffee shop, I got some sort of vegan cappuccino. It wasn't great, but it might've been by the standards of Sri Lanka (the only other cappuccinos I had had here been made by Sri Lankans who looked to be teenagers).
Our ultimate destination was the Camelot Beach Hotel, which was within an easy drive to the airport. A vegan lunch had been prepared for us there, and I was hungry. Unfortunately, I happened to find myself in the "last seat" at our long table, meaning the person to my left (John, the nice Australian from Cambodia) was the first served and I was the last. Some screwup meant that the last few soups of the first course came out much later than the first ones, so I sad there feeling increasingly grumpy. (I was seated near Gretchen's parents, while, because of the way seating worked out, Gretchen was six or more seats away.) When my soup finally came, some sudden movement I made caused a small amount to slosh out, something that Gretchen's mother felt the need to tell me. I was in a very foul mood at that point and, in mid snap at her, I reigned it in. There was nothing to be gained by saying mean things to my inlaws, no matter how richly deserved.
I ended up rather liking the lunch, something that surprised Gretchen when I told her later. This confirmed a semi-formed idea developing in my head: that I'd been allowing Gretchen's negativity to influence how I felt about things, particularly the food, which clearly bothered her a lot more than it bothered me. (In truth, people in relationships do this to one another all the time, affecting their taste in all sorts of things ranging from music to pasta shapes, so there was nothing unusual afoot here.)
The main reason our final destination was a hotel was because some of us had flights that were leaving much later than others of us. Those who would be leaving tomorrow actually had individual rooms in the hotel. For a group of us who would be leaving this evening (this included Gretchen, me, and her parents), a single hotel room had been booked for us to share as a "freshen up room." The first thing I did in that room was take a massive dump, leaving me feeling fresher even if the room's freshness was diminished.
The Camelot Hotel featured a nice pool and a beach. We didn't really check out the latter, but we set up for many hours in chaise lounges beside the former.
The pool of the Camelot Beach Hotel features a pair of square islands in its shallow southern end, and on each of these had been a cozy round piece of lounge furniture with a roof and enough walls to provide privacy. These had initially seemed like the place to be, but they were hot inside from having faced into the tropical sun. After we'd rejected them, a group of people who appeared to be Muslim used it them as the backdrop for numerous photographs. But then some staffers came out and removed the furniture from the islands (they were super light and easily carried) so they could do what they were tasked with doing, which wasn't clear for some time. They'd brought a string of decorative lights, which they used to accent one of the islands using tape and even caulk. But then there'd been some confusion or miscommunincation and they switched to working on the other island, only to return to the first. They were doing this for about two hours before they'd finally set up a single island to host a table with a white tablecloth and two chairs, evidently for some very special couple who would be dining there tonight. At around dusk, that couple took their seats and would've appeared to be having a very romantic evening (would he be dropping to a knee to propose?) were it not for the fact that they seemed to be more absorbed by their phones than they were with each other. To the extent they seemed to be interacting, it was to be in photographs. Occasionally others would show up to snap pictures of the both of them.
In keeping with Sri Lanka's live-and-let-live attitude towards wildlife, a pair of red-wattled lapwings arrived and the male even waded in the shallow end of the pool with little concern for the people strolling past. There were also a couple dogs and at least one cat on near the pool, though at some point one of the dogs decided something was amiss on a balcony for one of the upstairs rooms and started barking incessantly, sort of the way Charlotte does, though nobody seemed to find this either alarming or annoying. (By contrast, earlier in our vacation our neighbor Roseanne had sent Gretchen a series of irate texts about Charlotte's barking, though she calmed down a bit when Gretchen replied that we were traveling "in Asia.")
When I'd spent enough time playing Spelling Bee, I went up to the freshen-up room to retrieve my work-issued laptop, took up a seat on the edge of the indoor dining area (which opened up via a missing wall to the pool area) and did some more work on hardening my ESP8266 Remote Control system against the kind of attacks that it is unlikely to ever face.
After dark, Gretchen and I decided we wanted drinks, though it took awhile to flag down someone from the bar. Not surprising, I ordered a "gin tonic," while Gretchen ordered a lime juice. Not long after we'd consumed those, it was time for us to go to the airport. By then it was just Carly, Myra the patchouli lady, and Gretchen's parents at the pool. We wished the first two goodbye from a distance (which was great, as it meant we didn't have to hug Myra and be covered with her scent during the next 20 hours spent flying in airplanes). We did hug Gretchen's neutral-smelling parents goodbye, thanking them for our Sri Lankan vacation, which they had paid for.
Not surprisingly, Jiva was our airport driver, driving that same left-side-drive Japanese-market Prius we'd ridden in two and a half weeks ago. I asked whose car it was, and he said it was his. There was at least one other mystery we needed to clear up about Jiva, and, through some clever questioning, we managed to. We'd been curious how it was possible for Jiva to have an eighteen year old son when he looked to be in his early 30s. But then Jiva had said something about moving from the mountainous south-central part of Sri Lanka to Colombo back in 1995. "You must've been pretty young!" I exclaimed. He agreed that he had been, 21 in fact. That would make him 51, much older than we'd thought but plenty old enough to have an eighteen year old son. Jiva said something else interesting, that since living in Colombo, he doesn't like the climate in the Sri Lankan mountains of his youth, specifically the temperatures of 23 degrees celsius. I did the conversion in my brain and got to around 74 degrees, which, to me, seems like the perfect temperature. But was it too hot or too cold? He hadn't initially said. It turned out that for Jiva it was too cold. (He must've really been suffering in that fancy movie theatre back in Colombo.)
The security checkpoints in the Colombo airport didn't seem especially rigorous and for some reason we had to go through them even before we had our boarding passes, which normally one needs to get before going through a secuirty checkpoint. But the guy doing the initial screening seemed to understand our predicament and just waved us through.
But then we had to go through another security checkpoint at our actual gate after we'd filled our water bottles. This seemed absurd, but there was no way we could get fluids through that. So we stood there before joining the line chugging our water while some Australians behind us were chugging the energy drinks they'd just bought (not a great choice before boarding a plane). But then it turned out that there was no problem with fluids in our carry-on luggage at this particular checkpoint.
Once we passed through the checkpoint at the gate, we were released into a glass-walled waiting room where there was nothing to buy, no water, and not even any bathrooms. We referred to this (and other such waiting rooms) as a "fishbowl," and it seemed like bad airport design, because one of the few interesting things one can do while waiting for an airplane is shopping, something we could only do online (and thus not in Sri Lanka).
The Emirates flight to Dubai was unusually empty, and not only did we have an empty seat between us in that three-seat row just behind the two-seat row near the jumbo-jet wing exit, but those two seats in front of us were also empty. We immediately started watching movies, as on this four or five hour flight, there was was too little time for taking drugs to encourage sleep. This might've been when I watched a documentary Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary. My familiarity with the Zombies comes entirely from a couple CDs given to me by old former-boss Linda back in 2000 or 2001. One thing I didn't know about the band was how completely ripped-off they were by their managers. For example, according to the documentary, they played a residency to a repeatedly sold-out stadium in the Philipines and, in compensation, only got several hundred pounds each night to split among themselves.
Just before our final lunch at the Camelot Beach Hotel. The two closest people to me whose faces you can make out are Danielle from Australia via Cambodia and Gretchen's father. Behind the latter is the Indian social media director of the touring company. Click to enlarge.
The aftermath of our final lunch. That weird penne curry was pretty good, as you can from the orange it left on my plate. Click to enlarge.
A male wattled lapwing in the pool at the Camelot Beach Hotel. Click to enlarge.
The female wattled lapwing on the grounds of the Camelot Beach Hotel. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen with the sunset at the Camelot Beach Hotel. Click to enlarge.
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