Well, it’s almost over! We were picked up this morning from Galle and driven to Colombo. This entailed driving up the motorway - a first for us as we had only briefly tried out dual carriageways previously. It’s a proper motorway (toll) built by the Chinese (who else?) and whisked us with almost no traffic to within 20km of Colombo. Then we came off and went through the suburbs for a guided tour. Thankfully, this was in the car as the distances are quite...

Yesterday (Sunday) we got a tuk tuk from outside the hotel to take us to the fish market that we had seen on the way in a couple of days ago. There are probably about a dozen stalls with a good variety of fish landed that morning. We can see the lights from the fishing boats off the coast each evening. On the way there, our driver offered to take us to the spice market, take us shopping, introduce us to his brother who had a nice car to take us to Colombo etc ...

05.30 wake up call! Some of the reviews we had read suggested that there was always a long queue and a long wait to enter the park in the mornings. We needn’t have worried - Lionel had everything in hand! As we approached the park, Lionel simply drove up the outside of all the queuing safari jeeps and forced his way into the entrance car park. There parked and waiting already with only about 6 vehicles in front was our driver and jeep. We did see quite a l...

Regretfully checked out of our hotel this morning. It was an idyllic spot, the room was awesome as was the scenery and the staff were ever pleasant and helpful. However, needs must and we had to be on the road again heading south for our next safari. We stopped on the way at an ancient historic ‘temple’. Well, it was once when it was built in the 10th century! It has a huge 50ft high Buddha carved into a rock face as well as other smaller figures. It is ...

After breakfast we decided to walk to the very close Diyaluma Falls. These are just over a kilometre from the hotel and on the way we saw monkeys playing in the trees and power lines! The falls are 628 ft high. This is the 361st highest waterfall in the world - I can tell you’re not that impressed with the statistic but it’s still quite impressive! Returning for coffee and a swim (the pool is an infinity pool but has a leak so was being refilled to make i...