After over 20+ hours of traveling, waiting and more traveling, we finally arrived in Sri Lanka. It was a long journey, but luckily a fairly uneventful one and went by faster than anticipated.
People are probably wondering, why Sri Lanka and the Maldives? Truthfully, a couple of reasons. The first being that one of our goals as a couple is to visit all 7 continents. This trip was able to check off continent number 4 for us, with just 3 left to hit. Second, we've always wanted to stay in an over-water bungalow, I mean really, who hasn't?! And third, we used Timbuktu Travel for our trip to Africa just over two years ago. We often receive emails from them with trips they recommend or have put together. After we returned home from Africa we received an email saying, "hey, look at this trip to Sri Lanka and Maldives!", and we thought, huh, that could be interesting. We emailed our travel agent Joanna and she got to work putting it all together amazingly.
Leaving on Friday night, we arrived on Sunday morning. With both the travel time and time difference it felt weird to arrive almost two days later and took us some time to adjust to it all. We were extremely lucky in being able to sleep on the flight, and couldn't believe how empty the lounge felt at Doha airport so were able to relax throughout most of the trip.
At the airport we were met by our driver, Ram, he would be our driver for the entirety of the week and stay nearby or in the same resort we were staying in so he could get us from place to place. After gathering our things, with the help of some amazingly friendly airport staff, we piled into the car and were headed to our first destination.
Let's talk about driving in Sri Lanka.
It's terrible.
Everyone drives on the left, and most roads are two lane roads. Instead of pacing with traffic as we often do here, people wait until there is an opening in the other lane and then cut around the person in front of them if they are going slower than average. This creates a lot of stop and go and slamming on the brakes if the opening in the other lane is very short. At least they honk as they do it, not as we would in order to get out of someone's way, but more as a head's up that they're close by and don't want to take anyone by surprise. On the way to our first hotel it wasn't too bad, as it was just around 15-20 minutes away. However, later in the week we had some drives that were upwards of 4+ hours and around narrow, windy roads which made for an interesting drive.
Something we also learned very quickly was that there are dogs everywhere in Sri Lanka. Every. Where. I estimate we saw hundreds, if not thousands, throughout our week. Getting dogs fixed is very expensive in Sri Lanka, so people can't often afford to do it, creating a problem everywhere. A lot of the dogs would hang out by the streets, looking for food, creating some close encounters in the car.
Our first hotel was the Wallawwa. We were just here for one night as basically a stop over and rest stop before we started our itinerary. At first, we thought maybe we should have skipped this and just gone straight to our next stop, but we were really glad we stopped here. The next hotel we were headed to tomorrow was another 2 hours away, and with just having traveled for so long, it was great to get out, stretch out legs, have a good meal and relax.
The Wallawwa is this adorable little hotel just a short while away from the airport. You wouldn't even know it was there based on it's location. It's on a fairly busy road, and when you turn into the driveway you're immediately surrounded by palm trees and thick tropical gardens on both sides, completely hiding the feel of being so close to a city. It's tucked so far back that you can't hear any of the traffic or noise once you enter the resort. It's very open air, with a beautiful sitting area overlooking the grassy area, with a pool behind it.
We arrived very early in the morning, around 8am their time and though check in wasn't until later in the afternoon, they were able to get us into our room at 9am. While we were waiting for our room we sat in their outdoor lounge with some coffee and started playing a game that was laid out across a few tables. The game is known as Carrom. Carrom is a tabletop game of Indian origin in which players flick discs, attempting to knock them to the corners of the board. With each game we played we learned the rules a bit better, understanding we each had to flick our disc from behind our own line and could not change our seating position at any point throughout the game. It was almost like pool, but using your fingers.
Once our room was ready we passed out. For hours.
Finally awaking from our slumber, we head to the restaurant for lunch and spent most of the day just lounging by the pool reading. That night we sat out in the lounge before dinner with the other guests. We enjoyed a few more games of Carrom while watching a thunderstorm roll in, not realizing that was going to be the start of a wet week to come.
