The good to come out of this was that we were on the road by 7am. Back to Negombo, then to Chillaw on the A3 road. Trafic was calm and kind to cyclists. In Chillaw we managed to find some great food in a fly infested restaurant and a shop selling Samsung S3 batteries. A solar charger to boot, although this has since proved to be fairly useless at providing moe that 2 minutes of phone time.
After advice from the restaurant owneres, we plodded iff north twatrds the town of Puttlam. Time was not on our side an we finally had to concede defeat and try to find a guesthouse. With sore behinds, ew collapsed into a road side cafe to start making enquiries. No accommodation for 25kms either way, but another restaurant owner agreed that we could pitch our tent in his rounds when his last guests had left. The ownerem who had worked for 11 years in Italy as a chef, and his brother, a ship's second officer made interesting company. As sson as the tent was pitched we were out for the count!