Monday 14th May 2012 - Colombo, Sri Lanka

My return flight to the UK is 10th June and since I booked it I pretty much always had the intention to extend my stay until the end of June or beginning of July. My visa expires on the 24th May though so extension or no extension, I still needed to extend my visa. My mission today was to try and sort this out and extend my visa before I continued travelling around the rest of the country to save me coming back to Colombo unnecessarily. So in the morning my first step was to call my airline to change my flight. I was pissed when they told me that all the flights in the whole of June and up until 21st July were sold out. That would mean I would be leaving in three weeks :-( I was not happy and was not willing to accept this fate and was frantically brewing different ideas up in my head.  In the meantime though I headed towards the Immigration and Emmigration offices to extend my visa. What a bloody nightmare!! I have never known such disorganisation and chaos. Upon arrival at the offices the first thing you notice is the pure and utter madness! There are at least twenty rows of people sitting on the steps outside the building. There are so many other people trying to sell you things, tuk tuks beeping and drivers shouting to get your attention. I instantly felt stressed!  When you first walk in the entrance it is weird because rather than traditional and conservative type offices that you would expect to see at such a place, you are instead met with loads of food stalls and phone representatives.  You have to go through hundreds of people either standing around watching the people go past or join the crazy hustle and bustle of people walking in one direction but looking in the complete opposite - meaning you are being barged in all directions despite desperately trying to step out of the way - and believe me you really want to move out of the way because the crazy temperature means that everyone's skin is wet with sweat! The building has like three storeys - each floor as crazy if not crazier than the last. My floor was the top floor so by the time I went through all the madness of each floor and arrived at the visa floor I was hot, sweaty and very irritable. This feeling was worsened by the lack of direction and clarity on where you are supposed to go or what you are supposed to do. All I saw was a room jam packed with people - some sitting on chairs in a waiting room-type format and then others were hustled around a counter, others queued along the wall around the outside. I was surprised by the lack of non-asian people given my impression that this way a place to extend tourist visas but actually this is also where people file for residency visas etc.   I saw a sign saying something about taking a seat and waiting for your number to be called. Number?! What number?! My mission was now to get a number! I stood around like such a lemon asking people where they got their number but everyone looked at me with blank faces not understanding a word I was saying!! Then my saviour came! A local that spoke English telling me to go to the  counter (pointing in the direction) get a form and then hand it in where he was queuing. Thank god. I then walked over to the counter and asked for the form where I was told I would also need photos. Could this get any worse?! My visa was due to expire on the 24th May but my return flight to the UK wasn't until the 10th June meaning I was literally just extending to catch my flight. I tried to ask the man at the counter if I could leave the country without extending my visa and then literally just fly to Colombo to catch my flight. He didn't understand so told me to join the queue where I would later need to hand the form into - it was a long queue just to ask a damn question and my patience was wearing so thin because of the heat so I then asked the guy how much it was going to cost me. He told me Rs.6000. Rs.6000 for another two weeks - that was it for me, I walked out! I didn't have a solution for how I was going to make it work or where I was going but then once outside I saw an Internet cafe - that was the plan! I was going to go and try and find other cheap return flights so that the Rs.6000 would be worth it and also because I wasn't ready to go home.  I found a flight for £250 - i didnt book it but it gave me a lifeline and made staying a major possibility. It was now 12pm so I needed to get the visa sorted before doing anything else. I got some ugly photos done and headed back to the offices. With a clearer and more relaxed approach everything no longer seemed so bad - it all kind of fell into place and the office didn't seem so busy anymore. I didn't leave there until gone 3.30pm though as the processes really are terrible! I wasn't stressed but it was just such a long waiting game. The first wait is after filling out your form you need to queue to hand the form into this man in this glass room (where everyone was queuing along the walls). The man just chatted casually with me marking out places on my map where I should visit - no wonder the queue was so long before!!! The next wait was the waiting room type set up - waiting for the man from the room to do something and hand the passport to the counter. After like an hour you are then given a voucher to pay. You then take the voucher over to another counter where you need to queue to pay for the visa - it was almost Rs7000. Then you need to go back to the waiting room type setup and wait for the receipt of your payment to be processed and for the payment counter to hand the passport to the people who mark the extension visa in your passport. Surely there must be an easier way!!! Lol!! Anyway I left the embassy and headed to Choco Luv - the amazing milkshake/hot chocolate place that Shiran's friend Gayan worked. He said yesterday that he would he would be working from 3pm and it was gone 3pm now so I thought i'd go and see him. I liked Gayan, he was a really cool guy and yesterday Shiran had been really quiet so Gayan and I spoke a lot and got on really well.  I only planned on staying for an hour or so at Choco luv but Gayan chilled with me as it was quiet and we spoke for absolutely hours. Yesterday I found out that Gayan was married with a son - I'm a journalist at heart and find everything out!! Gayan's son was 6-years old but when I asked yesterday why he only had one son and why there was such a large gap he went quiet and said he didn't want to talk about it. I asked if he was still with his wife and he said yes but didn't say much more. However he had told me to add him on Facebook yesterday and when I was on the Internet near the embassy I could see his profile because he accepted me and he relationship status said "It's Complicated". Uh oh!  Being the nosey person I am of course I asked him - he laughed because he said he knew that I was going to ask! He recognised I was a journalist at heart too apparently!!  When he told me what the situation was I really wish I hadn't asked. The poor guy was heartbroken :-( He had moved to Dubai to work after he and his wife (love of his life) got married and had their little boy to support their dream of owning their own house and living comfortably. She stayed in Sri Lanka. He worked crazy hours in Dubai and put every penny he earned into savings - no parties, drinking or smoking, his priority was saving to buy a house. But then one day he got a text message from his wife - it was a text she had mistakenly sent to him and led Gayan to believe that she was having an affair. She denied it. He booked a flight home without telling her and got copies of all the text messages sent from her phone and discovered that she was in fact having an affair and had been for some time. His dad had said to him "you can find as many women as you want and she can have as many men as she wants, but your son only has one set of parents, only one mother and one father" - because of this he decided to forgive his wife and try again. He moved back to Sri Lanka and got a job in the airport working ridiculously long hours including night shifts sometimes. One day he found a phone that his wife had been hiding - her lover had bought it for her and the affair had continued the whole time. After getting the records and copies of text messages sent from this phone he discovered that she had even been bringing this other guy over to their house with their son while Gayan was at work.  For the sake of his son the poor guy now has her living with him at his parents and is still supporting her. He suspects she is still having an affair and is living his life recklessly - drinking and partying a lot but still being faithful. He asked me "for what am I saving for now?" I tried to give him the motivational speech about making himself happy and having a house to give his son when he gets older but it's going to take some work to get him out of his slump. We agreed that at the weekend we would go to a beach party in Hikkadawu. He works until 5pm on Saturdays and has Sunday off and said he could get Monday off too so we would get Shiran and go for the weekend.  We were then talking about my plans to see the whole island. He then told me I should get the night train to Anuradaphura and go and see the ancient cities before heading back to Colombo to party with him and Shiran on Saturday. It was a great idea! It was like 6.30 and I had already packed up my stuff in the morning and left it outside the room at Parisara ready to check in somewhere else after the embassy so now I could just grab my stuff and go to Anuradaphura. The train was at 9.30pm. I had one problem though! I had too much stuff!! I had bought so many things in Kandy that I now had my rucksack, day pack and four really heavy carrier bags. I asked Gayan if he knew where I could pay to store the four bags while I travelled and without a flinch he said yeh, at my place.  I jumped into a tuk tuk and got my stuff from Parisara, drove back to Choco luv, gave my bags to Gayan, got changed and then headed to the station to catch the train.  Instead of the 9.30 train where I may not possibly have a seat, I waited for the 10.30 sleeper train where I could reserve a seat. The journey was 6hours long and was surprisingly ok. I have read many things about the trains but I think maybe because it was a sleeper the rules dont apply. It did jolt to complete stops at times and was very slow moving but luckily I had noone sitting next to me so managed to sleep through most of the journey.