 Having now got a little bit more acclimatised to the weather and the hot food I am starting to settle down a bit more in Colombo. The work is long and hard and the poverty has hit us all much more than we thought. The horrendous lengths that people will go to for money, often for drugs, is mind numbing and highly distressing. A beggar with no arms came to the van I was a passenger in and stood by my window. He had a bucket for you to put money in. However, after a week of constant begging and being harassed for money because seen as a rich tourist, I had to say no.
I was upset that I had the heart to do such a thing, but I found out the next day off a friend that the same man had laid on the railway track to chop his own arms off because he knew it would get him money for his heroine dealer to inject drugs into him. Another tactic of begging that is hard to ignore is the women who carry sleeping babies whilst asking for money - in this heat no baby would be able to sleep. These parents inject their children with tranquilisers to make them sleep and then have an average life span of 12-15 years. Seeing a baby whose tranquilisers have worn off as it wakes is highly distressing and makes you wonder why and how these people are so poor. Enough of the bad stuff; this country is also one of the most beautiful places on earth. I went to a city called Kandy with some other volunteers for a weekend break. The owner of the accommodation for tsunami workers sorted out a couple of guys to escort us and show us the sights for a measly 13,000 rupees (£75). I achieved one of my ambitions in life and rode an elephant. It was awesome. We also saw a herd bathing in the river right by a restaurant where we stopped off for lunch. In the morning we had monkeys sat on the balcony of our hotel; they stole one of the other volunteer's flip flops and tried to get my shorts, but I'd had the foresight to tie them to the balcony to dry.  | | Richard with the elephant that he rode |
In Pinawala, central Sri Lanka, there are two elephant orphanages. One is a tourist destination that looks after only a couple of elephants. It was here that I managed to fulfill the ambition of a lifetime and rode on the back of one. As the sixty-year-old giant trudged along I had a beaming grin from ear to ear and we all got too many photographs. Further down the road is an orphanage that had a two week old elephant which would not leave its mother's side. Another had had its leg blown off when it was used in mine clearance.
We ate at a restaurant overlooking a river just as a herd came down to bathe and cool down from the afternoon sun. Many of them were running and splashing like children in the water, others were jousting with their trunks and some lay in the water lifting their trunk to breathe or spray water over themselves. We met another group of volunteers who had been working for one of the elephant orphanages and one of them told me about how they were riding elephants when they came across a broken down tractor. The elephant keeper and tractor owner exchanged words in Sinhala, the keeper said something to the elephant and it proceeded to push the tractor and trailer to give a jump start. One of the extraordinary things you have to get used to in this country. | 
