A Battle in a Book

Hill stations,guesthouses and resthouses are very popular in Ceylon, littered between cities, offering weary travelers delicious food that can only come from small hole-in-the-wall places. In each, a book where one was expected to write a small critique of their experience in said guesthouse/resthouse/hill station. A literary war was waged on papers of books like these throughout Ceylon between my father and a Sammy Bandaranaike. Mr Bandaranaike would sniff out every inadequacy, being sure to document every last detail in lengthy epics scrawled in these visitors books. My father would egg him on, stating exactly the opposite of what Sammy had elaborately described. Soon the war turned personal and fiery insults and gossip about each others respective families left unabashedly between pages. Eventually, these pages were torn out and the paper feud was discarded.
On the way to Colombo from Kandy we stop at Kitulgala resthouse for a meal and a sarong. I take a peek in the book with a wild hope that a forgotten page would remain. There was not. 

The view from inside Kitulgala

String hoppers, coconut sambol, parathas, tea, butter and chutneys

The now strictly 'critiques only' visitor's book