October/November is the intermonsoon season, so you get grey skies, but when it clears up the sunsets are remarkable. By our second day the sky was being a total attention-ho, so we managed to capture a series of photographs for you.
Colombo to Negombo
Now that there are these godayata-magic highways in Sri Lanka, it only takes you 45 minutes to travel from Colombo to Negombo. You can find the Negombo highway bus at the Gunasinghapura bus station, which is a little ways off the main road in Pettah. The A/C bus is swift and quite comfy – make sure to get a window seat. The ride costs only Rs. 120. The bus ends at the central bus station in Negombo.
Sky-Watching
The best spots to watch the sky or the sunset are from a balcony or the shore itself. Negombo, for the most part, has a nice wide uninterrupted shore. We stayed over at Hotel J, and the view from our balcony lured us to the shores later on, where there were rows of overturned boats to sit on and chill.
The Physics Of A Sunset
If the earth had no atmosphere, the sunset would look the same as any other part of the day. Earth sunsets are awesome because, as the sun goes over the horizon, light passes through more atmosphere than usual. Rather than coming straight down through your eye, it’s going across the surface of the earth, passing through a lot more atmosphere than usual. The atmosphere acts like a bunch of randomized Instagram filters, resulting in awesome.
Image credit: R Nave of Hyperphysics.In fact, as you can see from the diagram here, when you see a sunset it’s actually below the horizon already. The very end of a sunset is when the light is being completely bent around the earth.
Anyways, the colours we saw in Negombo were pretty epic, and the clouds actually made the sunset edgier though some might define a good sunset as cloudless.
These fluffy monster white clouds gathered up behind us while the sunset exploded on the other side. Below is a series of pictures showing the stages of the sunset – these aren’t altered, it was this trippy, and to be honest, the pictures don’t do justice.
The sky and sea were actually striped red and blue at the end of it. Also check out our Kalpitiya sunset pictures. Where have you seen the best sunsets? Let us know.
