Landing in Sri Lanka

My apartment in Negombo

Sri Lanka is an island nation of South Asia. As such, the only ways to reach Sri Lanka is either by a boat or an air plane. There are quite a few countries connected to Sri Lanka through air plane routes. Regular flights are operated between Sri Lanka and neighboring countries of Maldives, India, Bangladesh etc. and also south east asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia etc.

My flight from Chennai landed in the Bandaranaike International Airport. Nearest town, Negombo is about 6 km away. A taxi from the airport to the hotel / beach resort neighbor hood (Lewis Place) was 1500 LKR.

It was 4:00AM in the morning and the manager of the hotel I walked in was sleeping. He was woken up with the help of the taxi driver. This hotel was full, so he took me to another one where I could get a room for 3000 LKR per night. Later that day, I found an apartment close to the beach with kitchen, bathroom and terrace for only 1500 LKR per night. Thinking that this could serve as a base to travel around in Sri Lanka and come back to rest, it was rented for a month. Thus I completed my landing in Sri Lanka.

Haze

In June 2011 I went to Malaysia. That was my first time traveling abroad. Also, first flight in 18 years. It was three and half hour long flight from Dhaka to Kuala Lumpur.

The plane flew over a thunders storm near southern Thailand. It was dark by then and the sky was covered with cloud all around. With every thunder strike a chunk of clouds would light up, then the flash would propagate to adjacent chunks. Like a ripple wave of luminance on the cloud cover. Watching this thunder storm was my best memory of that flight. I could not get a good photo of it with my camera.

The second most beautiful thing I saw was the hazy horizon. It was an hour before sunset and we were flying over Myanmar. I could see the famous blue haze around the horizon which astronauts often see from earths orbit as a strikingly beautiful blue lining around the planet.

When I was 13 years old, I wanted to be an astronaut. I had memorized the entire chapter on our solar system from the school text book. I had seen photos and read about the blue haze against the pitch black darkness of outer space. I knew the scientific explanation of how diffraction of sunlight in our atmosphere causes that beautiful phenomena. I dreamed of being able to see that when I grow up. But I had decided to give up this dream soon after realizing the reality I was born into.

I was only a couple of weeks short of my 26th Birthday that day. While watching the blue haze I realized that although the dream of being and astronaut was given up, that which inspired dreams inside me have always been there acting as a major driving force in life.