Beach, incredible sunsets and coconut paradise

After incredibly successful week with “Future Peace”, we decided to take a break and treat ourselves with ‘relax o’clock’. One of our team member Heshan’s family opened the doors to their family and offered to stay with them. So we lived right by Polhena beach, which has it all: amazing beach, sun, snorkeling, BBQs and incredible sunsets.

We are treated here like daughters, as ‘tata’ says, they never had a chance to have girls, as it’s two sons in a family. As soon as we wake up, smell of milk coffee reaches our noses followed by breakfast and fruits.  Even brothers always make sure we have coconuts before leaving to the beach:) Like real girls, each day we spent around 3hours on a beach, sipping coconut milk and tanning yet not so dark European skin. And in the evenings, riding bikes and watching sunsets. This pleasure lasted for 5days and after, it was time to see some culture. So we headed towards Kandy. I won’t lie, it was really hard leaving this family but I guess this is a downside of traveling, you get attached to nice people and then you have to leave them. But we were invited to visit again, so next time winter kicks off on a rough note, you know where to find me:)

Advice on getting from Matara to Kandy can be found in my previous post here.

Luck enjoyed our company and decided to stay on a later travels. We met our next host family on a train to Kandy. They were going there to celebrate daughters graduation in dress making. We started chatting, when ‘mother’ offered a sandwich and later to join them exploring Kandy. There are five members in their family: daughter, two sons, mother and grandma. Together we went to see ‘Tooth Temple’ and Ambakke Dewalaya. It cannot stay unnoticed, that entry to any Kandy attraction is at least five times higher for tourists then locals. Tooth temple is free for residence and 1050LKR plus 300 for a camera. Same with botanic garden, which unfortunately we decided to skip because of the price. Tooth temple turned out to be free just because we joined the forces with new family boys and pretended to be married. Well, after all it saved us $10:)

We shortened our stay in Kandy by one day and went back to Colombo to stay in our new family house. And boy I was happy! They lived in Mount Lavinia, just 5min walk from the beach, pow! We stayed with them till it was time to leave Sri Lanka, which was four days. They went by very quick. Beach wasn’t that nice comparing with Polhena but good company occupied most of the free time. Card games, carrom, movies and tasty home cooked meals made those last days in Sri Lanka even more memorable.

After three weeks in Sri Lanka it was time to move on. With a next destination Thailand, with a mid point Kula Lumpur in Malaysia.

On the way to the airport we’ve learned another painful lesson: bus with A/C is not just more comfortable but also much faster. Government bus took two hours and realising that after all this time we are still not anywhere near the airport, we caught a tuk tuk, as otherwise we could wave ‘bye bye’ to the plane. But we made it and I’m able to announce that this post does have a happy ending!:)