Week Fifteen. Hitching Through The Mountains.
The morning after the full moon I set off with an energetic French boy called Max. We had met a few days earlier and got to talking about how we were both craving some solitude and adventure. When we realised we wanted to travel a similar way we decided to set off together for the first couple of days.
So early in the morning we walked along the seaside road. Our destination was the town on Ella, up in the mountains, surrounded by tea plantations. The way there was by bus, around a five hour journey, but it was adventure we craved and so we decided in the early morning light to stick our thumbs out and see how far we could get jut hitching a ride.
Hitch hiking is still a fairly new concept to the Sri Lankans most people didn’t understand what we were trying to do, but as the day went on it got easier and easier to convince people to let us ride in the back of their trucks, tractor or the occasional car.
The feeling of sitting in the back tray of a truck with nothing but sky and mountains surrounding you is near indescribable. On the road I felt a freedom I had not felt in so long and there was grin spread permanently across my face.
Being out on the road felt like home. At every new stop Max and I would consult the map, each time there was a quicker road to get where we were going and each time we choose the longer route. Instead of 5 hours our journey took us one and a half days that felt more like weeks.
Taking the long way meant getting to experience a side of this beautiful country that I would otherwise see. Cruising through tiny villages that hardly ever saw westerners, watching them laugh at us with our back packs lounging in the back of trucks and tractor tailors on top of tea bags and piles of wood.
There was such a beautiful openness and honesty to the people we met and shared rides with a willingness to connect and it was that connection with their undisturbed culture that I was craving.
We met farmers and workers, a furniture salesmen, a tea plantation owner, so passionate about keeping good tea in Sri Lanka, A government/mafia man who we stopped with for an hour to drink coconuts while he showed us pictures of himself at his office and drove us to see the billboard with his face plastered upon it.
We got turned away by a monk for a place to sleep and so continued on into the night, making friends with some men a a town who lead us to the creepiest hotel I’ve ever spent the night in. I could write pages and pages of every adventure but instead i have just filmed as much of it as I could.
There is really nothing quite like heading into the unknown and seeing where the wind (or some crazy Sri Lankans) will take you.
