Sri Lanka

Why Sri Lanka?

I would like to talk about my biggest travelling adventure to Sri Lanka. It all happened in summer 2015. When I started to work more often in my second year at the university I realized that I might undertake longer and more adventurous tours during the summer. Until that time I was travelling only in Europe. I already heard from many friends they went to the US, Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. I did not think of going there so much because I thought I would have to spend a fortune to go there. Later, when I talked to my friends who went to Thailand I found out it was not exactly like that. Of course that plane tickets to another continent are expensive. Nevertheless, when you get to the country there are many places where prices in general are lower than in the Czech Republic.

Every time when I went for a holiday for one week it was not enough. I always wanted to stay longer because seven days went too fast. Therefore, I was thinking of longer holidays. In fact, my friend from my university motivated me. She told me she bought the tickets to Bali. When I heard about it I immediately wanted to go as well. I felt so excited about it. The idea of being in Asia was amazing. When I tried to calculate all expenses to travel further than staying in Europe I was nicely surprised. If I visited European country, one week with accommodation and food would cost around 15 000 CZK. Although if I visited Asia, three weeks with accommodation and food could cost me around 25 000 CZK including exotic new experience and assuming good cheap plane tickets. For me, it was definitely worth it to spend more money and experience something totally different than before. I would say that with increasing price of the trip, experience in non-European country would be more than proportionally better. I was sure about it even though I had not been travelling much even in Europe. It was enough that we could freely see a lot of kinds of animals and awesome beaches, experience new culture and taste different types of food. My choice was almost clear. I just needed to work hard to earn enough money.

In the beginning, I spoke to David and to my best friends Marek and Lucy who were really interested in going together. It was not clear where to go but we already decided to plan something. I don’t even know how it happened but when we had meeting in the pub we were seven people all together. I think we were talking about it a lot and when another friends saw our excitement they wanted to join. At that time it seemed to me as a good idea and it often happens that people say they would go and later they change their mind. We suggested few countries we considered. I was definitely in for Thailand because I knew a lot of people who were more than happy to be there. I was also keen on going to Peru but when I heard that there was around 17 degrees in summer I reconsidered it. I was picturing all the beaches and hot weather already. In the pub, we did not agree where to go but we made a list of the countries where we wanted to go and we were waiting for cheap tickets.

I don’t remember when exactly it happened but the server Jaknaletenky offered cheap plane tickets to Sri Lanka. I really like this website because they always shows you good deals and you just need to check the date if it suits you. This offer was for whole July and August which was convenient for us. I did not know anybody who went to Sri Lanka but David and Marek did. Sri Lanka is quite a small island situated under the India. I did not hear about it much before. David said that his friends went there and they were contented so they could recommend us a lot of places too. In addition, some of us really wanted to try surfing and Sri Lanka has a lot of places where you can try it. Even though I would prefer going to Thailand I did not refuse another idea. It was difficult at that time because we did not really know who would go with us. Therefore, we made a reservation for everybody and we all had 24 hours to decide and pay for the tickets. I felt so excited about it. Everything went well and almost everybody decided to go and we were seven for the trip. Our plane tickets cost around 13 000 CZK and since I was supposed to spend one week in July with my mother we decided to go in the end of July for three weeks. It was convenient because David and Marek had enough time for arranging everything because after they moved to the Netherlands.

Plan

We did not really have planned what exactly we wanted to see. We just knew that we landed in Colombo on the west of Sri Lanka and then we wanted to continue through the centre to the east of Sri Lanka to the good place for surfing – Arugam Bay and then through the south again back to Colombo where we took the flight. They say that the north of Sri Lanka is not so safe. That´s why we decided to skip it. During the travelling we had to change the plane in Dubai. I was so sad not to visit this city! Since my second year at high school I wanted to go to the United Emirates so bad. The thing is that everything there is super expensive so even if we went there for three days we would spend a lot of money there. On the other side, I heard so many nice things about Dubai and it is still on my list of “must see” places!

Before summer Lucy told us that our classmate from our university is going to India at the same time with his friend and they want to fly to Sri Lanka as well. Therefore, we decided to meet them in the middle of our staying. We started our travelling from Prague. It was first time when I flew such a long distance. We were watching some movies and we got only one food in the plane. When we got there we found out that even though we were flying to Colombo we landed in Negombo. At least these two cities were quite close. We did not want to stay in the capital city because we heard there is nothing to see and it was probably true. When we were there the station was not so nice and we just bought some snacks, changed the money and we were heading to another city. I expected weather to be much worse but it was all right. It was normally warm weather and it did not seem sultry.

Since it happened last summer I don’t remember what exactly followed but we moved to another city called Kandy. We booked only one accommodation in advance – the one in Kandy. In fact, the weather was not so nice. When we decided to walk it started to rain a lot and I was quite worried because I did not have almost any clothes for raining. I forgot to mention that we took our frame backpack for this trip. I was not used to take it somewhere at all because it is too heavy. Sometimes it was quite demanding but every time we just travelled with it when we wanted to move to another place and for the rest of the time we left it in the accommodation. I just did not like that when I wanted to find something I had to take everything out from the backpack.

Kandy was just a normal city for me but we were excited about the special kind of transportation – tuk tuk. It is a kind of vehicle with the driver for three people at maximum. You can negotiate the price. We used it few times because we were living on the hill. Since we were seven people it was bad for tuk tuk because we had to take three of them anyway. When we went to the supermarket and when we wanted to buy few beers we were surprised. There was no alcohol in the supermarket. We rather checked it three times and seriously there was no alcohol inside. Later, we found out that they have special shops called Liquor shop where you can buy alcohol and the beers included. It took us some time to find one. It was crazy. It was not visible from the street. We just went to one street and we found it. Nevertheless, they had different kinds of alcohol than in the Czech Republic. We therefore decided to buy some but we did not really like it in comparison to our rum in the Czech Republic. We went to the restaurant for the dinner and it came the best part of the trip.

They had a lot of different types of food everywhere for really cheap prices. They mainly offer some type of meat with fried rice, noodles or tortilla. It was so easy to get used to going to the restaurants every day! The price of whole food with meat ranged from 2 euro which was great. I liked their typical food much. In some restaurant they had fresh fishes on the grill and I tried grilled mackerel even though I don’t eat fishes much and it was so tasty. Once we went to the really cheap restaurant – cafeteria and everybody there was eating only with their hands. It was normal that all types of food were spicy. Even if we literally said: No spice please, the food was spicy. Therefore we always said no spice and we enjoyed spicy food and we were able to finish it.

Sometimes they had small shops with food like bakery products with chicken, potatoes or eggs and we had it many times. If you forgot that it was in the dirty space it was tasty. Once it happened that we had bugs in our baked thing! It was awful but we survived. I started to like the food called Kottu Rotti. In Arugam Bay, we had our favourite restaurant for it. We went there many times but the portion were huge and the food was amazing. The only disadvantages was that the service was really slow. Therefore if we wanted to go there for a dinner we had to come around 5 pm to eat at 7 pm. They were also selling sweet rotti. It was something for me. I could have enough of it. It was thin dough with banana, chocolate, cinnamon and so on packed inside of it.

Another thing we all loved was fruit and fruity juices. On every corner we could find a lot of kinds of fruit. Once we went to the one shop and they started to do fruit tasting for us. Except for small differences in fruits (for examples smaller bananas than ours), we tried a lot of new types of fruit. I loved the most passion fruit. Also, I ate almost every day mango! It was usual fruit there and we could buy it everywhere. The taste was the way better because mango was always ripe. Moreover, we could have fruity smoothies in every restaurant for cheap prices. I miss it so much! Every time when I am in some shopping mall and when I see UGO or another shop like this I want to buy smoothie so much but they are so overprices. In Sri Lanka, the price was around 1 euro even though it was made from mango, passion fruit or papaya. Sometimes, we got up earlier and we went to the restaurant to have a milkshake or smoothie with Lucy. It was awesome!

What is Kottu Rotti? It was kind of tortilla cut into small pieces with whatever you wanted. I took always with chicken meat, avocado, cheese and vegetable. In “our” restaurant they gave us always huge portion and sometimes we shared it in two people. Except for Marek who finished up the food after others. We tried to cook this meal in the Czech Republic and even though it was totally different I liked it. You just start frying the onion with meat, than you add vegetable and lastly you add tortilla with spices and mix everything together. It is quite easy and tasty. A lot of my friends had meals with all the types of sea food but I am not a big fun of it so I just tried fishes. As I said, with alcohol it was more difficult, so we did not drink much. Sometimes we ordered the beers and sometimes we were drinking their rum but it was all.

We booked only one accommodation in advance in Kandy. It was quite nice despite the higher price. We already experienced first inconvenience. By the way, in every accommodation they had mosquito netting at the bed because of mosquitos. One of our first nights I was sleeping in mosquito net and I was waken up because of some noise. I thought that it was only in my head so I tried to fell asleep. Although the noise was stronger and stronger. I woke up David to check it out and he did not believe me in the first place. Then, when he heard the noises also he started to pay attention to it. We were both staring at our plastic bag which was the cause of everything. It was moving and doing weird noises. Then, we realized that it was probably small lizard. We already saw them during the dinner crawling on the wall. They were harmless but it was still scary. Therefore, we turned the light on and we could not see anything. We quickly moved the bag to the bathroom and we could not find any animal anymore. Since it was in the bathroom we slept nicely for the rest of the night. Continuation next time!