Sunday, 17 August 2014

Sri Lanka - Arriving in Colombo

Day 1 in Sri Lanka. We're still trying to get our bearings. We booked a hostel through hostelworld from Perth; the issue with that being its hard to judge where you should be staying without any knowledge of the area. I thought we'd booked right in the heart of Colombo but we've ended up south of the city in Mt Lavinia. Known as a seaside beach area which appears popular with the locals but is not really the place for relaxing on the beach as the one we visited was packed with people and didn't appear to be a particularly good swimming beach.

Whilst booking I thought the Tropic Inn sounded like a popular tourist place where we could meet lots of like minded travellers. So far we haven't seen any other travellers here but the guesthouse is clean and charming, if basic, with extremely friendly staff. We also got a cold juice and bottle of cold water on arrival which was oh so welcome after the long commute. Doesn't appear to be much tourist information available at the hostel which is also a bit disappointing but we'll ask a bit more tomorrow to suss it out further. We have 3 nights here and then we'll go wherever the wind takes us :)

The tuk tuks here are really something else. We've found a local hangout for all the young tuk tuk drivers in their hotted up tuk tuks with installed massive stereos. Probably the cheaper way to travel as taxis are really quite expensive, plus we're probably getting charged much higher prices being quite clearly foreigners. Tomorrow we'll explore Colombo a bit more and hopefully suss out the best places to see around Sri Lanka and how to get there. At this stage we don't really want to take a taxi with driver if we can avoid it so we'll look at trains and buses.

No comments:

Post a Comment