ECO-V starts its field trips again

After a lapse of few months ECO-V revived its educational visits to different parts of the country again. As the first trip for year 2009, we decided to take our members for 2 days “Thiresi Charika” to war ravaged Eastern province capital Trincomalee by train. Ranjith, chief organizer of the ECO-V was back in action with Harsha in organizing the field trip. We wanted to keep the crowd to minimum as we were not sure what to expect. At last 15 of us started our journey from Colombo Fort railway stain by night train. It was not too bad though we struggled to catch our sleep with hundreds of mosquitoes who got into the train. However we reached Trincomalee by 6 am in the morning on 28th November. We were received by Sarvodaya district coordinator Jeeva aiya and we were ushered in to a van and he took us to sarvodaya guest house.
There was a drizzle when we reached Sarvodaya Centre at Uppuweli but it didn’t stop us having a great day in Tricomalee. After a lovely breakfast we visited Nilaweli beach which is named as one of the most beautiful beaches in Sri Lanka. We were not encouraged to visit the Pigeon Island one of the marine National parks in Sri lanka in the morning .Therefore we decided to go to Thiriyaya, Girihandu Seya temple which is about 33 km away from Nilaweli. It was a very beautiful area where we saw some birds including Jungle fowl, Green bee-eaters and Malabar pied Hornbills. The scenery was so exiting when we climbed the rock where we could see most of the province up to Mullaitivu. There were many ruins of Buddhist pagodas which were supposed to be first build during Lord Buddha’s era. We all were so glad to be there after 30 years of the war where the area is lot of activities for development and re awakening.
On our way back we visited Nilaweli beach again and had a discussion about environmental facts and issues in the area. We were thrilled as the boat men agreed to take us to Pigeon Island in spite of the rough sea condition which had a great risk too. But it was a life time experience and we all were very happy to be there. Everybody enjoyed the sea bath at the end and we returned to Sarvodaya for early dinner. We had a short “Thiresi discussion” after dinner in the beach hut of Sarvodaya and everybody agreed for more frequent meetings and field trips since the war is over.
Next day morning we visited Koneshwaran temple and got into the train at 10am. No body felt tired during the 13 hour train journey as Nanda, Prasanna and Ranjith kept us laughing by making jokes on each other and feeding us with many snacks. We all were very happy as it was a very successful field trip after many months of silence.