Hopp(er)ing Around

The last time we went to Sri Lanka, in 2013 [blog here, Slinking Around Sri Lanka], we were looking forward to the food, because we knew it would be spicy. And it was! It was great, one of the best parts of the trip. What we didn't know about were egg hoppers, which are eaten for breakfast but they're also street food snacks. A very thin rice flour batter is poured into a bowl-shaped skillet, and then an egg is cracked in. Chili and coconut condiments go on top, then you pick it up, kind of roll it together, and eat it and I can't properly say how much I love it. I have dreamed about it for the last eight years. 

These were made by Ravi, in Galle

Then there are the curries -- typical meals feature 11-ish curries at a time, a table loaded with small bowls to share, a kind of Sri Lankan tapas, of a sort. We had a table full in Kandy, and a table full at a great little restaurant next to the bus station in Tangalle, swoon-worthy. Kotthu roti was harder to find than we anticipated; part of the fun of getting kotthu is watching it being made. The rhythmic sound of the chopping at the end always makes me smile.

We're rambling all over Sri Lanka this time, top to bottom and west to east, so finding a title that pulls together hoppers and hopping makes me smile. Because there aren't internal flights, mostly we'll be driving from place to place (hiring a car and driver, that is), but we're planning to make one segment a train ride, details still TBD. The route: Negombo to Tangalle to Colombo to Anuradhapura to Jaffna to Trincomalee (which Marc frequently calls Trichonosis, so that's now how I think of it too) to Pasikuda and then back to Negombo. Lots of driving. Counting down days now....