My Sri Lanka tour plan bombed big time. I was supposed to go there in January with a friend who unfortunately had a bike accident just three days prior to the departure and I had to abort the plan. With him out of the picture, I tried to go it alone and here’s how I tried to make the Sri Lanka plan work till the last moment. Here are some of the following things I tried:
- Contacted Trip.me to see if they could offer me a reasonable tour package.
- Created profiles on travel networking sites including tripadvisor, travbuddy and lonely planet and posted my dilemma there.
- Contacted tour operators whose contacts I got from the above forums.
- Emailed Shivya Nath, the famous Indian travel blogger about guidance on how to tackle the sri lanka plan.
Trip.me Correspondence
Tripadvisor correspondence
On the advice of two members, deleted my forum post as it revealed my email address.
Travebuddy experience
Not a single soul responded to my post in the forum here. However, I got a couple of emails from different people on the email address I left there.
Lonely planet experience
Shivya correspondence
I then thanked Shivya Nath and asked her some more questions about how she made her own Sri Lanka plan work.
Here’s what I wrote:
I never heard from her again.
The Final Word on Sri Lanka
Here’s what I learnt from all these efforts:
- Columbo is not only expensive but way out of way if you intend to travel deeper to see the real beauty of Sri Lanka.
- Columbo is for the most part boring and bland as any other metropolitan city.
- Kandy is the ideal location to base yourself both from an economical viewpoint and strategic location point especially if you want to do the cultural triangle.
- Accommodation in Sri Lanka is damn expensive compared to other tourist resorts like Thailand or even parts of Europe.
- Food in Sri Lanka is generally spicy and vegetables dominate.
- Six days is way too short a trip to really enjoy the beauty of Sri Lanka. Those six days would be spent for the large part in traveling so much so that you’ll be fatigued for the major part of your trip.
- Galakadawala is a beautiful village in Habarrana Sri Lanka which ought to be experienced if getting off the beaten track is your thing.
- Tuk Tuk is the dominant form of transport to move from one place to another and should be used as much as possible.
- Train is the ideal option to move from one city to another as opposed to bus or private car.
I’m once again making a Sri Lanka tour plan, determined more than ever to make it work. I’ve learnt a lot since then, read and researched a lot on Sri Lanka, and this time around I’m going alone so that there are no strings attached and nobody could slow me down.
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English
[…] ‘Sri Lanka!’, my friend almost shouted at me. ‘Have you lost it?,’ he just couldn’t believe it. […]