Our four weeks in Sri Lanka, teaching on the edge of the Wasgamuwa National Park, is now at an end so we thought we would give you an overview of our time here before heading onto Thailand. Following a daunting first day thrown in at the deep end, we have grown into our roles as teachers/local celebrities and for the last four weeks have been teaching the same children in the village school. We started at about 9.45 with our grade threes and fours and at 10.30 moved onto the grade fives. For this second class Em took on the kids single handedly whilst I was accosted by the teacher to impart my knowledge on him. Now those that know me have a clear idea that English grammar (Em just had to correct my spelling of grammar!) is not a strong point so imagine me trying to explain cardinal and ordinal adjectives, past, present and future tenses and pronunciation of vowels, all without any real resources to tell me what these things actually are. Basically, I have been blagging out my arse for three weeks! He seemed happy enough though. As you have all seen, our favourite lesson was animals! Em's drawing, I think we can all agree is a different class! Particularly her sheep! The afternoons were consumed by temple class, which could last one hour or five minutes depending on how the kids behaved, twice we packed up and walked out after five minutes! Our big thing in this session was the camera project which resulted in some amazing pictures. We gave each child a digital camera to take home for the night under strict instructions to snap family life, working, eating etc. So naturally we got back 134 pictures of a poster from one child and 850 pictures from another, of which only 10 were any good. We did uncover a few natural photographers though. Whole evenings have been spent editing and re-editing 7000 pictures down to about 700. Not an easy task, but one with a huge reward as we were able to get access through the cameras into the heart of the village. The teaching has been a massive experience. Trying to teach children who don't speak much English without a translator seemed at first to be an impossible task and at times it has been. But smiles and laughter are a universal language and we can look back over our month at the school and say that we did make a difference to these kids.

We have managed to survive amazingly well with the cold showers, washing our clothes in a bucket, eating nothing but curry and cohabitating with frogs, geckos, giant snails, giant squirrels, rats, insects and our beloved paralyzed chicken who met an untimely end one morning whilst chilling on the living room floor when a wild dog came in and unceremoniously bit her head off! Em also succeeded in making our cat, Pusscat (Karen from Outnumbered was a huge influence here with the name!), cry one lunchtime by feeding him a (rather hot) fish curry!

As well as teaching we have also gone on safari where we saw elephants, fighting monitor lizards, crocodiles and the smallest tortoise imaginable. We've spent a weekend in Kandy, Sri Lanka's second largest city. It's not much bigger than Salisbury and was much more manageable than any Asian city we have encountered so far. The centre of Kandy is dominated by a large lake which we had to navigate every time we wanted to go anywhere, meaning we walked many, many miles. As our placement at Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage has been cancelled, we jumped on a train from Kandy to visit it for the day so we can at least say we've been there. Not fancying the 2000 rupee entrance fee we went with the intention of seeing the elephants in the river and walking through the town. On closer inspection though it seemed we had to have a ticket to see what we wanted. To cut a long story short, we wandered into a shop which just so happened to have a side door leading out to the street the river side of the barrier where they checked tickets. Seizing the chance we strolled out and proceeded to the river to spend the afternoon watching the elephants free of charge. We figured it was only fair we got to do this as they cancelled our placement at the orphanage. During our time here we have also visited the Veddah's who are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka who still live as traditionally as possible in their mud huts. We met the chief and wandered round their village for a while. One other highlight was our afternoon spent in a tree hut in the national park buffer zone, observing elephants.

It's been a crazy month, but really amazing. We have had such an amazing reaction from the villagers who break out into massive smiles when we say hello to them. We have had experiences that you just don't get following the tourist paths. We feel we have been a real part of the community and have enjoyed it so much, but are now ready to take on our next challenge in Thailand. First stop, Bangkok!