How do you summarize a 10 day trip to an island paradise with incredibly hospitable folks that you took with a group of awesome friends? This has been the question that has been annoying me over the past few weeks since I have gotten back from my trip and as you can guess by the lack of posts before this one I haven’t really found a good answer to it yet. However a month is more than enough time to ponder and I realized that because I was avoiding posting anything about the trip I was also not posting anything else on the blog either because that summary had to come first. So without any further ado here we go.
We flew from Bangalore to Colombo via Chennai. If you are ever planning on going to Sri Lanka take a direct flight, the Chennai airport is the worst airport I have had the ‘pleasure’ of flying out of. The duty free shopping area is 2 shops with minimal goods and the ‘food court’ is one shop that didn’t have have the items on its menu available. (this was at about 10pm or so). We got to Sri Lanka at ~2am and took a cab to our B&B which was decent, not great but decent. From there our grand adventure started the next day. We got lucky and got a great driver (Sujeet) who was excellent in guiding us and making sure we had a good time.
The first day we mostly traveled and didn’t really do much but starting the second day the fun started. We did a whole bunch of water sports (Jetski, water-skiing, Banana boat, River cruise etc) and we visited a turtle farm where we saw turtles aging from a few days to one over 150 years old. We also did a river safari where I tried out a fish spa for the first time. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting and for the cost it was worth it.
The third day started off with me going for Scuba diving and the rest of the folks went snorkeling. Managed to do two back to back dives, one was to a sunken ship and the other was in coral. Got to see some really colorful fishes but nothing too spectacular. Unfortunately the underwater camera at the dive shop was broken so didn’t get any underwater pictures but the memories are certainly great. After we got done with the diving we drove down to Galle and saw the famous clock tower and fort. The tower wasn’t very impressive and was under repair. There was also a nice beach and some colorful nick-knacks to pick up. (Though we ended up not guying anything). The fort was nice and it was obvious that it would have been very impressive during its peak.
On the fourth day we decided to go whale watching and that meant waking up at 5 so that we were there at the port by 7am. The trip was nice but extremely hot and since we were on the deck with no shade all of us got tanned (and slightly burnt) by the time we got back. Unfortunately we didn’t see any whales but we did see a whole lot of dolphins as they were pretty much constantly following our boat. The fact that we didn’t see a whale was disappointing but later in the evening we visited an ancient stupa and prepared for an early morning the next day so that we could go on a leopard safari.
The fifth day started off really early again (before dawn) and though we saw a lot of birds we didn’t see any leopards. This and the fact that we didn’t see any whales earlier made us decide to avoid any further safaris in the trip and focus on other kinds of sightseeing. So on the next day we visited a couple of ancient temples, stupas etc and on the 7th day we went river rafting. The rapids were grade 3&4 for the most part but it was a lot of fun esp the part where we got into the water and swam around.
On the 8th day we visited Sigiriya which is a world heritage site and saw the amazing construction and palaces that had been built so long ago. It was impressive and humbling to see what people were capable of constructing with pure muscle power without any of the modern technology to assist them. If you visit, make sure you request a guide because otherwise you will miss out on a lot of the background information and things you def must see.
The last day was spent relaxing at the Colombo beach after spending some time shopping and seeing the local sites. It was with a heavy heart, amazing memories and a lighter wallet (not that much lighter since things were not as expensive as we thought) we boarded our flight back. I wish we had more time there because we weren’t able to cover any of the northern or eastern part of the country but that gives us an excuse to plan another trip so lets see how that works out.
I have uploaded the photos to Facebook so you can check them out over there.
Well, this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya