Sun, Surf and Sand!

As we all know, sometimes life throws some challenges your way that you just have to deal with!

It may have looked like we went missing….and yes we did!

A week or so into our Sri Lankan adventure we heard news from home that Thommo’s mum had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As you can imagine it came as a bit of a shock!

21^st Century communications while travelling are good though so we continued on while keeping in touch daily to check progress. The doctors were awesome and hopeful that some radiotherapy etc would improve her outlook. Treatment started on the 28^th of December but by the 2^nd of Jan she took a turn for the worse. We decided to get a flight home asap but unfortunately mum passed away while we were at the Colombo airport.

So on arrival back in Aus we had a new set of priorities as you can imagine

We are all good now and life goes on so sit back with us as we fill in the last few days of our adventure before we made the dash back home…

The kilometres slipped away slowly as we wound our way down out of the mountains. The views changed at every turn and we often spotted waterfalls as we made our way towards the seaside town of Marissa.

The rain cleared and the sun was shining as we made our way into town. We had heard a lot about the Sri Lanka’s South East Coast beaches and keen to check them out ourselves. Lots of holiday makers were busy soaking up the sunshine. Mostly westerners and more westerners then we had seen elsewhere.

The beach areas are such a contrast to the rest of the island. On this part of the island we were mindful of the fact that it was the East and the Southern beaches that were the worst affected by the Tsunami in December 2004. Maybe being closer to Colombo and having a few more tourists means that the whole scene has recovered more quickly here? There were many thriving little businesses happy for the tourist dollar and it had a nice feel to it.

 

We checked out a few resorts and they were really nice and then settled in for a few beers right down on the beach. It was pretty warm but most travellers here still seemed to think that baking in the sun was the normal thing to do. We noted that sunscreen was not a big seller here if the sunburnt travellers were anything to go by!

There are an endless choice of seaside villages along the coast line here but we have since heard that Unawatuna is the place to go but we had to board a train bound for Colombo to get to the airport before we had a chance to check it out.

The train was slow, but fun, crammed with locals all heading back to Colombo as it was Sunday afternoon.

We caught up with some people in Colombo and then made our way up to Negombo a little further north to the Airport.

As mentioned above, it was on arrival here that we received the call informing us that mum had passed away.

The flight home via Singapore to Melbourne was a bit of a blur.

Anyway, life is as close to back to normal as possible now and we are busy planning our next adventure.

Stay tuned!