Oh this “business visa” forcing us to travel out of India every 30 days, what a pain! Imagine, we had to spend 3 days on empty beaches in Sri Lanka.
Monsoon happening also there, on the West side of the island (where is Colombo), we had to go the North-East to make sure it would be sunny, in Trincomalee area to be precise. This region was under Tiger Tamils domination during war time a few years ago so the population there is mostly Hindu and Tamil. Not a big difference compare to India for us!
After having flown from the capital in a plane run by the Army (we thought that would be quite an adventure but finally the only quirky thing was that they wanted to weight us along with our luggages) we reached “Trinco” where very strangely the usual “urban cows” have been replaced by dears and stags (for real!).
Then, a bit by chance, we finally settled down at Uppuveli beach in a guest house run by Luca and Dona, a lovely Italian couple who traveled all their life and who is staying there half the year for this business. As true Italians they are really welcoming, spend their time chatting with every guest, serve coffee and specially delicious Italian dishes. And as the area is not flooded with restaurants and the Sri Lankan gastronomy restricted to a boring “rice & curry” we enjoyed this place a lot!
For the rest, as you’ll see with the pictures, everything is a real post-card there. The sea has this perfect blue, you can easily find yourself alone in some lagoons, the “Pigeon Island” reserve allows you to watch colorful sealife while snorkeling and local fishermen are managing the beach show when pulling huge nets from the shore!
We just felt really well there and this is clearly the kind of place where we want to come back once in a while.

Concerning Colombo, arrived by the night train at… 4.30 am, we had visited most of the city attractions by 10 am! The atmosphere is definitely more laid-back than in the big metros of India and Buddhism is adding an extra Asiatic or even Chinese touch. The biggest surprise for us there: motorists are letting pedestrians to cross the street!

We’ll continue our Sri Lankan discovery in July.

(Update) 1 minute video with 5 seconds footage each as if you were there, no music, no voice-over:

1 minute in Sri Lanka from On The Road Again on Vimeo.