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The Hill Top Guest house is very pleasant. It is clean the food is good and there are nice views. Unfortunately, I have a big problem with the owner owing to what happened when we left.
I should explain that there is a system operating in Sri Lanka that we would call a back-hander, but which they might like to call sharing. He who cannot be named, because he will probably get lynched if I told you his name, told me that if you are taken to a gem house the person who brings you gets 50% of what you spend and for a Batik house the going rate is 35%. I don't know what massage parlours and so on give but I guess it averages about a third. The problem is that the customer tends to pay for this system so, if you go by yourself, everything is correspondingly cheaper. It might be argued that this system gives impoverished tuk-tuk drivers hope; having someone spend money at a gem house must be like winning the pools! However, on average, I would say that this, something-for-not-very-much culture, is not good.
Anyway the going rate for ringing for a taxi is about 30% of the taxi fare. We arranged our own taxi independently and told him to pick us up at 9.30am. I shook on it. The Guest House owner asked me where we were going next and how we were going to get there. We told him about the taxi coming to pick us up and he asked how much we were paying. We told him Mirissa and the fare 3,500rupees. He said the fare was usually 4,500 and that we had got it at a good price.
I think it may have been a matter of pride to him that nobody gets picked up from his place without a commission being paid. Anyway, at 9.15am our taxi apparently turns up. The owner helps us in with our things and we jump in. It is only when we are half way down the road, that I notice that something is not quite right. The driver is not the one we arranged the taxi with and the taxi (a mini-bus) is in very poor condition. The driver stops to make an offering at a little temple and gets back in blessing himself. I think that I would have preferred seat belts. It seems that, in order to get the taxi at the price we said we were paying, and for him to get his commission, the owner of the guesthouse had hired a very poor means of transport. In Sri Lanka the only thing that M.O.T. seems to stand for is Must OverTake (immediately). To be fair the driver did drive carefully. However, the suspension was hopeless and we had a very uncomfortable 5-hour ride. Furthermore the taxi driver kept pressing us to pay more, saying that he was buying the taxi on the never-never, there were not many tourists and that he was the only breadwinner for five people. All of which was probably true but I was not in a good mood.
On route we passed a large area of lake marshland and the variety of birds were absolutely stunning. I think this was part of the Yala nature reserve.
When we arrived, we gave him the third degree. How much commission did he pay? Who asked him to come to the hotel and so on. In the end he ran away.
For me, tricking me into breaking my word is equivalent to tricking a Buddhist into sitting on a clay statue of the Buddha. Please Buddhists respect our feelings, as you expect us to respect yours! Breaking my word, was the most upsetting thing about the whole episode.
The moral is ‘Don't get a taxi to pick you up from inside the hotel, but from down the road a bit’. We are starting to get very savvy!
Merissa itself is quite nice, the sea is warm and, at the moment, there is just the right amount of surf for it to be challenging, but not dangerous. There is a hip bar right next to where we are staying with loud music, which is fortunately drowned by the sound of the sea, when we are sleeping. We are acclimatized to the heat, which is nice, because there is no air conditioning.
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