Last day in Colombo.

Forgot to mention last night's meal. If you had asked me before whether peanuts, chicken and mango were likely to form an acceptable flavour combination, I would have been sceptical. However a wrap containing diced chicken and mango in a lightly spiced peanut sauce was spectacularly good.

After a very good breakfast, we walked northwards to the Fort district, dallying by a lake to watch water fowl and Sri Lankan couples coyly snogging behind umbrellas. A passing Hindu temple was sufficiently garish to extract R500 from us, and thence via an old Dutch hospital now revitalised as upmarket eaterys to the railway station. Here we found an information office that offered to arrange all of our forward travel as far as and including the cultural triangle as a combination of train tickets and car with driver for GBP260 all in. Probably too good to be true!

Back via tuk-tuk (R250, Meter? What meter? Says meter taxi on the outside but no meter on the inside!) Good fun though.

Today our first impressions of Colombo were confirmed. Very clean and impressively un-smelly for a tropical city. Well organised and with a lot of development going on. Looks like a nascent Singapore. The people seem very pleasant and welcoming and we could walk the streets with the only hassle being occasional requests from passing tuk-tuk drivers to patronise their vehicles.

Back to the hotel and a swim in the rooftop infinity pool. Then a stroll in the park, past hundreds of paintings on display for sale, mostly large multi-panel images belonging to the local exuberant ( and possibly post-exuberant) school of art.

View of the swimming pool with the Laccadive sea beyond.