My long awaited and much planned trip to see some parts of Sri Lanka beyond Colombo was finally going to happen. This time I had decided that I would take at least 10 days of break from work and make the most of my business visits to Sri Lanka. My trips to Sri Lanka on work were a great opportunity and I didn’t want to lose it.
I asked Nushani to help me with at least putting in place an itinerary so that it could form the skeletal of my planning for the roadtrip. The trouble is that there is so much to see and do in Sri Lanka that it can be at times, a daunting task to decide where to start from. Besides Nushani (whose family incidentally owns a travel agency) the other source that I approached was the couchsurfing group. There are some great people on the network. Having in the past exchanged emails with Marlon I knew he was going to be a great source of information. There were few other people who responded to my emails about the trip and it all turned out to be good because Marlon was not in Sri Lanka (he was trekking in the Himalayas and promised to help me remotely – which he did). Anyway coming back to those who responded to email – one of them being Mark who had a couch and extended it to me for 2 nights, I needed a couch during the weekend when my office was not going to pay for my hotel stay and this was before my holiday officially started.
It was the first time I was going to couchsurf an incidentally it was Mark’s first time as a host too. He had an extra room in his JAIC Hilton Residency Apartments. We exchanged emails so that we could confirm that we were both comfortable and had all the fact we needed answered about each other – that by the way is the first rule of couch surfing. Anyway Mark gave me a sensible advice – “decide what you would like to do and then weave the holiday around it.”
Having taken that advice – I shot an email to Nushani’s agency stating what I would definitely like to do. Number one on my list was a visit to the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage, next was scuba diving (preferably someplace that had a certified course) and white water rafting. With my brief in place the agency sent me an 11 day itinerary - starting with Pinnawala Orphanage and ending with scuba diving. Then followed my research on the net, emails to Marlon, Mark and Lindsey (another couch surfer) and taking a realistic approach on what can be done in 5 days ( as a single traveler) and 6 days of diving. I finally decided to for go some of the places that the agency suggested and Marlon helped me bring down the overall cost and added some value adds and did the bookings for me and soon I was all set to go.
As I begin writing my travelogue – let me state upfront that there might be some extra pieces on few things facts and stories that I picked up from people I spoke to or from the guides which I will include, I will try and not go overboard but I do love those tidbits of details.
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