Ahangama on the southern tip of Sri Lanka, is home to the 7th Sky Idyll but in order to enjoy mr Ratners little surf paradise you must first brave the 5 hour mini bus drive from Colombo, it’s not a journey for the faint of heart. The most shocking thing about the trip south, hugging the west coast was that i saw no-one maimed or killed. Utter chaos on the road prevails with a distinct pecking order. Buses and lorries at the top of the tree, moving down to minibuses and cars, and at the lower end you have tuk tuks, horse drawn vehicles, bikes, pedestrians and dogs. Nearly all the road is a single highway and the pecking order enables the larger vehicle to run anything below it off the road, either by overtaking at speed in the face of oncoming traffic or overtaking a vehicle that  is already overtaking and cutting in violently to avoid a larger oncoming vehicle. Cows seem to hold the trump card in all of this mess, nobody wants to kill a cow.  Then there’s the beeping, it’s constant,  i considered an idea that drivers like bats, were using sound alone to navigate. I thought passed my mind that the only thing that could make the drive more dangerous would be if it was dark and raining, at that point, night fell and the heavens opened.

Apparently bus drivers are paid by the passenger, hence the need for speed, the driver of my minibus reveled in his stories of passengers been killed as buses try to beat trains at level crossings, tuk tuks being squashed between buses, how the drivers add a bit of petrol to their diesel to aid acceleration.  Strange in a country where everyone else seems to move so slowly. Things are going to change though, A Highway is under construction, some sections are already complete, but as yet unopen. This did not detter Indi a tuk tuk driver from Weligama, he had already given a nearby section of it a test drive, It’s the first time he has ever been able to drive so straight and so fast, just him and the unfinished highway.