Sri Lanka - Day 4

Are you out of your minds? Or, has the tropical heat gone to your brains and fried them like jumbo prawns on the barbie? These are things you may well ask when you read that David and I have decided to cut our holiday in tropical paradise short and come home a week earlier than planned. Since rearranging our travel plans yesterday David and I have sat around trying to come up with a story that makes us seem less like ungrateful, wimpy twats for deciding to come home early, but so far we can’t think of one.

The truth is it’s just too hot for the little bugger. It’s 35 degrees out most days from about 10 am onwards which means that we spend all day, until the sun cools off at 4pm, inside. And whilst our hotel is more than nice, the thought of another 2 weeks of stacking cups and peek-a-boo on the hotel bed is out of the question. We’ve chalked it up to a rookie-parenting mistake. 17 days in a tropical country was just overly ambitious of us. We have a couple of friends who’ve taken their little ones to places like Thailand and have loved it and we keep wondering how they dealt with wilting-baby-syndrome. Even sitting in a bucket of cool water or under the shade of a tree on the beach, Cal gets listless within minutes. “Sleepy bay-bay, Sleepy bay-bay,” chuckle the locals as we rush our glassy-eyed, sweaty-haired kid from our airconditioned room to the table in the restaurant closest to the most fans. I guess that our friends are just cooler than us, or that their babies are literally cooler than ours. So tomorrow we’re going to drive back to Colombo for 2 nights there and then we’ll be back in Amsterdam on Thursday. With our hardly-tanned-at-all tail between our legs. A couple of rungs lower on the ladder of cool in some people’s minds, but hopefully with the perky, shouty, smiley Cal that we like best.

P.S. There is one wonderful thing about tropical-Cal though – here in the humidity he has curls! The most wonderful, tight little spirals that look like someone has covered his head with a sprinkling of men's chest hair.