Sri Lanka 1st day - Tel Aviv to Negombo - Sun 8 Jan 2017

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Our flights began on Saturday night so motze Shabbat was a scramble to clean up and close the suitcases and start on our family trip to Sri Lanka. Caroline was already on her way from Manchester to Dubai when we checked in at Ben Gurion airport. Our first flight was to Bangkok. We took off on time and I slept for most of the way. We landed on time and then sat in the lounge for seven hours waiting for our second flight to Colombo. The plane was late coming in and so we were an hour late taking off. We had been told that Thai airlines was a great airline. Well the hostess uniforms were beautiful and that was as far as it went. The kosher meal was a grey looking chicken dish on rice.

We arrived at Colombo airport after Sunday midnight to be met by Jagathsingh Jayasingh - simply called Jagath - the proprietor of Luxurious Sri Lanka travel management and Basil our driver and guide for the next two weeks. I received a bouquet of flowers and Don got a lei. Jagath had also presented Caroline with flowers several hours earlier when they collected her from the airport and brought her to our hotel.

As we went out of the airport Jagath pointed to a tiny Smart car and told us that that was our taxi! I was quite bemused how three adults and many bags were going to fit into that, but soon noticed that he was laughing. That set the marker for what kind of a trip we were going to have. Basil drove us to Negombo our home for the night, in a luxurious van. We stayed at the Jetwing Blue hotel and found that we had been upgraded to a suite as had Caroline who had checked in five hours beforehand. So at 1 am we got to our room which must have been almost as big as our apartment at home. But we were too tired to really enjoy it. A shower and then bed was all we were fit for.

We learned the next day that Caroline had enjoyed the benefit of the private jacuzzi style bath on her deck overlooking the seashore. We were merely amazed at our rooms, and wondered what the rest of our accommodations would be like.

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