Some (small) consolation!

I got an email yesterday from the lovely Canadian lady I met in Sri Lanka. L was asking if I had any news of our guide, Prasana, or our driver and his assistant. Sometimes when you go on these trips the guides give you their mobile phone number in case something happens but not this time. As we were heading back to the airport Prasana pointed out where the three of them lived  - the driver, his assistant and Prasana himself - (in the suburbs of Colombo) so I can only hope and pray that they and their families are safe.

This morning I was reading more details of the atrocities - it's so heartbreaking when the names, faces and stories start coming out - when in today's news they showed a picture of the one, "failed" suicide bomber whose bomb failed to detonate. He was pictured in the lift in the Hotel Taj!!!! And to think I had sent up a silent prayer of thanks when I realized that the hotel I stayed in on my first night had not been hit! It had been targeted but the bomb hadn't gone off! Like I mentioned before, if I am going to be alone before the start of a trip I always stay in a good hotel in order to feel secure, and to think this delusional, spoiled, brainwashed jerk had actually tried to hit the Hotel Taj!!! And it turns out this was the guy who had actually studied in the UK!

The staff at the hotel were unfailingly polite and helpful so I can only offer very small thanks to the powers that be that they were spared! Of course, that then meant that another poor couple ended up being killed by this jerk when he blew himself up at a small guesthouse nearby! Fate works in mysterious ways doesn't it - I'm just so sorry for that couple who happened to be "in the wrong place at the wrong time"!

Hotel Taj

After the end of our trip there was the possibility of extending the trip by taking a week to go snorkelling in the Maldives. Now I booked this trip when I was fully expecting to still be working and since I didn't have the leave (and most likely wouldn't have been able to afford it anyway), I chose to fly home straight after Sri Lanka. L and T, the Canadian couple, booked the add on, as did "Miserable Pete" and L was telling me he was a complete pain in the butt, as he had been on our leg of the trip. Unfortunately, people assumed he was with them (that's what I thought when I first met them too) and he was just as ungracious (and racist) as he had been with us!

She said he wasn't able to climb down the rope ladder from their boat into the dingy so he couldn't go snorkelling (hallo, you booked yourself on a snorkelling holiday in the Maldives!), then he burnt the tops of his feet and was totally ignorant in his behaviour towards the staff who tried every which way to make his stay better! In fact, he was the guy that was not ready for the bus on the first day (they had to wake him up), who, while we were all piling onto the bus to go into Ngombo, sat down to have his breakfast!!, and who we then had to double back and pick up on our way out of Ngombo. He didn't like rice (again, halloooo, you're in Sri Lanka!), he obviously didn't like people with dark skin (that's what made his living in South Africa such a puzzle to me), and then to top it all he realized he had left both his electric shaver and his iPad somewhere but didn't know where. Prasana tracked it down to our first hotel in Ngombo and on the way back was able to arrange a taxi to meet us in a layby on the way to the airport so he could get his stuff back!! Then he didn't feel he should have to pay the taxi driver (!!!!) because "he had only forgotten these things because they had hurried him up on the first day"! I tell you, there is always one on these trips but you would think that if you can't manage the physical side of it (or don't like "foreigners") wouldn't you think twice about booking with a company called Explore?????? I don't know, contrasting the experience I had with the lovely people of Sri Lanka and this guy's behaviour makes me want to scream!

Anyway, now that I've got "Miserable Pete" out of my mind, I'll have to start writing up my "diary" of our recent short trip to Cinque Terre - although I'm not sure even beautiful Italy would manage to please someone as thoroughly miserable as "Miserable Pete"!