AT#202 - Travel to Sri Lanka

Travel with Amateur Traveler Podcast

Chris Christensen

History, Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2009

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Amateur Traveler talks to Karl Anders who has traveled to Sri Lanka 8 times after striking up a friendship with the late author Arthur C. Clarke who settled there. Karl takes us on a vital tour of Sri Lanka from the capital of Colombo to the beautiful beaches to some of the archeological ruins at Dambulla, Sigiriya, Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Dambulla is notable for some of the cave murals. Sigiriya is particularly notable for the rock fortress, ruins of a palace high on this rock outcropping and again some of the cave murals. Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa both also have numerous stupas (a mound-like structure containing Buddhist relics). The inland high mountains are home to the tea country, plentiful tea fields and numerous tea factories. Karl recommends the Galle Face Hotel and some of the other inexpensive hotels left over from the British era. He also recommends hiring a car and driver/interpreter and avoiding the traffic and public transportation. We also talk about the recent civil war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I got my bags packed on a roll. I'm heading out there and I'm ready to go. Looking real good in my passport photo.
0:10.0	Oh no.
0:11.0	Fifteen.
0:12.0	Amateur Traveler episode 202. Today the Amateur Traveler talks about ruins,
0:17.0	Buddhas and tea as we go to Sri Lanka. Welcome to the amateur traveler. I'm your host Chris Christensen. Before we get
0:36.7	into today's interview I do have three news stories for you. The first one
0:40.6	struck me as odd it's not exactly a travel story, but Nigeria may have been
0:46.1	sending you some emails saying that they have millions of dollars they'd like to move into the country,
0:51.0	the famous Nigerian fishing scam, but they got very upset when
0:55.4	Sony mentioned the phrase, you can't believe everything you can read on the internet
0:59.2	otherwise it'd be a Nigerian millionaire by now and they're demanding an apology from the company.
1:05.0	Yeah, I don't think that's very likely.
1:08.0	In another story there was a list that came out of the 10 safest countries in the world to visit
1:12.0	and the leader was New Zealand.
1:14.8	I don't know that they noticed that New Zealand, the home of bungee jumping, they like to jump
1:18.2	off of tall things.
1:19.7	I'm thinking they didn't factor that into their equation.
1:23.6	And then Hyatt showed us how to damage a brand name.
1:27.1	They decided to fire their modestly paid workers
1:30.5	who clean the rooms and replace them with a contract firm, but before they did that,
1:35.4	they had them train their replacements as, quote, vacation replacements.
1:42.0	The good news is you get to go on vacation the bad news is you can't come back
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Christensen, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Chris Christensen and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.