Day 1 to 4 – Family Catch ups
At the time of writing this blog article we are actually up to Day 18. I wish I could say I was busy writing content for the blog, however I am more happy to say I was enjoying all the sites, sounds and tastes (mountain loads of food) of Sri Lanka. We have travelled from busy Colombo by train, to the hills around Ella and Nuwara Eliya. From there we visited sacred sites in Kandy, followed by the ancient ruins in Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura. Now we are on the relaxing stretch of the holiday having visited Pasikuda and we are currently surrounded by nature in Panama on the western coast of Sri Lanka.
But before we get into detail with all that (in future blog posts) I will briefly cover the four days we dedicated to visiting family. Below are images from various gardens of our family members.
In case you don’t know, the roads of Sri Lanka can be hectic. From my observations the line markings are more like guide lines which allows for every inch of the road to be utilised (In a way this is saving the planet I guess). So instead of getting behind the wheel and having to deal with traffic and everything else, I recommend getting someone else to drive.
For most of the travels we used an Uber-like app, called Pick Me (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pickme.passenger&hl=en). We only used the Nano option which was enough to fit us and both our backpacks and day packs (Screenshot of charges for Nano options below). For the rest of the journey we used three wheelers (tuk tuks) and had family arrange transport (Big shout out to the fam!).
Visiting family involved covering around 150 km around the town’s of our families. While visiting family in Colombo, we also did some recon work for the upcoming train journey to Ella which will be in the next post.
It was amazing to see all the grandmas, uncles (mahappas, bappas, mamas), aunties (mammas, aunties) and cousins (aiyas, mallies, akkis, nangis). And looking forward to seeing them again soon before we leave the country. The only downside is that every household insists that we have a drink and snacks/meal at their place. So we have gained a bit of fat during these four days!!!
:S