Buses parked all over the place, no central offices or signs to help, people and buses mixing in all places at pretty close distances; but honestly, this is just the smaller, less crazy part of this bus terminal, one of three in the city of Kandy.
Buses were always crowded, hot, run-down and slow, but also on schedule, common, and very cheap. Our longest bus ride was from Badulla to Kandy:
Google says the 100-km trip should take an hour and a half. Our bus took 4 hours (right on schedule) and cost less than $3.50 for the two of us.
Our next and final trip, from Kandy to Negombo (near the airport), was 110 km, took 3 hours, and cost about a dollar each.
We took a day trip from Kandy to near Dambulla (directly north of Kandy on the above maps) and were lucky enough to catch air-conditioned, private buses. As such, that (shorter) trip was pretty steep: about $5 one way and $4 the other.
But this was all at the end of the trip. At the beginning, we were planning on taking trains. We had heard that they were slower, but less crowded (at least in first class), more comfortable, and more picturesque, while being only slightly more expensive than buses. This was all true. Here are some pictures we took from the train.
(Dagobas and statues of the Buddha were every couple of miles all along the roads and tracks, as well as all over cities.)
(You can barely see, in the distance, people walking the tracks; there were people doing this all over, because 1) sometimes the train tracks were simply the shortest way between two places and 2) sidewalks were slim to nonexistent, and the train tracks are probably safer than the crowded roads.)
But trains were also completely unreliable. Our first train broke down after about 5 hours (it was supposed to take 6 and a half, and we were only a little over halfway). At our Ella guest house, another couple staying there mentioned that their train was held up for a few hours because a giant tree had fallen over the tracks, and all the men got out and laboriously removed it. The next time we tried to take a train, when we arrived at the station we were told it wouldn't arrive for at least another three hours, and probably not even then. When I offered to buy tickets anyway, the bored, disinterested bureaucrat in charge of the station hemmed and hawed, went back to his work for a minute or two, and finally asked me what I could possibly want to do with the tickets. We ended up taking a taxi.
Taxis were much more expensive, though not, as in the US, prohibitively expensive for long distances. The going rate was 50 Rupees (about 45 cents) per kilometer. Of course, not knowing distances, we couldn't really judge prices, and we ended up getting dramatically ripped off at least once (the driver claimed the ride was 180 km; according to Google, which I checked yesterday, it is actually only 100, and there's a shorter route). Not only that, but taxis tended to be very old, run-down vans without a/c or, more importantly, working seat belts. On the plus side, nobody drove very fast, not because there were police out--we saw only one police car on a road, and it was in a city--but because in the Hill Country, the roads look like this:
(You can't tell from the key, but the foot paths are the dotted lines; all the wavy, solid lines are roads.)
Roads don't blast through parts of mountains, or go over bridges; they just follow their contours. This meant that the highest speed we ever attained in a vehicle was probably about 45 mph. Drivers would gun the engine as fast as they could down the straightaways, then slow down dramatically into the curves. Needless to say, this lurching back and forth between different speeds did little to increase our appreciation of taxis, especially since we were nearly always sucking in the dust and exhaust of the large Tata, Lanka Ashok Leyland and Isuzu trucks that dominated the roads. (There were only a couple of "normal" sedans, almost exclusively new Toyotas; motorcycles seemed to be the preferred mode of personal transportation.)
Within cities, a cheaper version of taxis existed: tuk-tuks.
These vehicles, essentially a motorbike with a cab and two back wheels, were absolutely everywhere in huge numbers. Certainly our cutest mode of transport. But even they had their downsides: we were offered rides by seemingly every tuk-tuk driver in every city we went to, and driving at night or in the rain felt a bit like a scary, more dangerous roller-coaster because the side views were entirely blocked by a black cloth.
But hey, what's a honeymoon without a little stress to throw the better times into relief?
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