We left Kandy on the early morning (6.15am) train which meant the stunning view over the first hour of the three hour trip had clear light with a nice misty covering. The descent is only about 400m but from the train you can see the taller mountains off to the south. We had booked our last night at a beach resort close to the airport , Negombo. Colombo airport is in the middle of a runway resurface. I read in the local paper this hasn't been done since 1986 and if it wasn't completed in 2017 then they would loose their accreditation to land International flights. This means the airport is closed from 8.00am to 4.30pm. Our flight back to India was scheduled for 3.00am! Negombo is a beach side tourist hang out so had some ... read more

we had arranged for our driver Albey to take us on to Kandy with a bit of sightseeing along the way. True to form it wasn't that straight forward. His car turned up with a different driver. He had bought with him a wedding invitation that showed Albey had other plans! The replacement driver was nice, a retired school bus driver and very cautious. Our first stop was Dambulla. We hadn't expected to find such a great place and it turned in to another highlight of the trip. Situated up a hill behind a Bhudda built in 2000, complete with neon lights, were 5 cave temples of varying size. The detail and scale of them was impressive. They dated from 100BC and construction on them started by the same King who established Sigiriya. Next on our ... read more

We had planned to head down the East Coast of Sri Lanka however the weather forecast didn't look promising for some beach time. The North East monsoon which normally occurs this time of the year was late and the long range forecast when we left Colombo was for fine weather for some inexplicit reason decided to start at exactly when we planned to head East. The forecast was for two days of rain. We had been chatting to some people about other places and thought a place called Sigiriya, north of Kandy, where we had to catch a train back to Colombo in a few days, sounded interesting. This proved to be good advice and turned into one our highlights of the trip so far. The train we had booked our ticket on carried on past ... read more

Today we had booked first class train tickets to Jaffna, a town right on the northern tip of Sri Lanka. It looked to be the best spot to try and get to the start of Adam's bridge for photo two and large enough to find a party for New Years Eve. Our train was the Colombo to Jaffna Express and extremely modern. First class had much more comfortable seats than the previous trip although the trip was only 3.5 hours so I will hold back on saying they were great. Sri Lanka changes considerably up in this northern area. It's very flat and desolate, it sort of felt like heading to the end of the world. The roading and rail infrastructure is new, having been rebuilt and extended recently resulting in an increase in tourism. The ... read more

The day awoke clear and hot. We didn't have a lot on our agenda before catching the train at 3:55pm so we decided the National Museum could be a good introduction to the history of Anuradhapura where we were destined. It proved to be awesome with a good coverage of the history of the various ancient seats of power in Sri Lanka's history. The omnipresent Buddhist faith scattered in amongst various rulers and races controlling the country painted a clear picture on how significant the religion is to most of the country. From the museum we went to an upmarket shopping complex that had been recommended. Shelley needed a couple of new tops as the Indian laundries had almost destroyed some of hers. Nice to sit down and order a flat white and a long black ... read more