Sri Lanka 2019

The rest of the day was not a special one. Took a tuktuk to the other end of the city where most of the restaurants are located, walked around a bit and found a seafood place with a big platter shared for two. Looks like we selected the correct place to live in: The most touristic part of the city had the main road going through the city with a lot of traffic and obviously people are burning rubbish or something so that the air there is very polluted. The seaside was ok, but anything that's not right on the beach wouldn't be a nice place to stay. Our current hotel is far from the downtown, so here is quiet and nice with clean sea breeze coming from the open sea.

I also found out that I had done a funny little mixup. I tried to book the dive center earlier by email and succeeded in that, although their english was really bad. Earlier today I was wondering why the dive center guy actually speaks perfect english and is much more communicative than would be imagined from his email messages... Well, I had been emailing with the wrong company. The company we actually went diving with was the one I originally wanted, but the one I booked was not the same due to me mixing up their websites or something similar earlier when booking in hurry. Well.. Happens.

The morning was more than difficult, waking up was really not a pleasant thing to do due to jet lag and not getting much sleep yesterday. Somehow we managed to get up though and drag ourself to the dive company almost next door.

The season is just beginning here in Trincomalee and we were the only customers today, so it was really nice and peaceful to dive in the warm ocean. The water is at constant 30C temperature even in 20 meters depth and visibility is good, although not at the crystal clear levels of Palau. We did two easy and relatively shallow dives today, just to get used to diving again as the last time was over a year ago in Thailand.

There was plenty of small marine life around, from crabs to eels and stingrays and the second dive even included a small cave. Unfortunately the only turtle we met was surface swimming near our boat before the first dive, let's hope for better luck tomorrow.

Seven long hours later we had reached Trincomalee by car and settled in our new home for the next three nights. Bit too tired for a longer story now, but we walked around a bit, found a temple and followed their religious event for a while. Now sleeeep..

Colombo reached after the night flight, which went surprisingly easily by watching series and sleeping. Airport formalities were completed easily, a sim card purchased and our driver met. Now towards Sigiriya.. And it's hot. Very hot, and that's good. :)

The second day in Tallinn was spent by shopping for new shoes, walking around the city and having a dinner in a vegan restaurant before getting on the flight to Kyiv.

We arrived Kyiv late in the evening and today have just been packing a bit, visiting some shops for last-minute travel equipment purchases and haggling online for Sri Lankan taxi services. As this is going to be a rather short holiday and self-driving in Sri Lanka would require difficult procedures to validate the driver license we ended up booking a car with a driver for most of the trip. The company also gave some preliminary route suggestion for the trip, which will be modified on the go if needed.

It's two hours to flight boarding time, we are pretty much packed and enough movies have been loaded on the laptop. Time to spend a long night on the aircraft.. UIA randomly assigns seats on the aircraft, and we were not really happy with the initial seats and neither willing to pay for the better ones, so we have been checking in and out of the flight for multiple times since yesterday until we finally got assigned the seats we wanted. :)

The first day in Tallinn was made of sleeping late, visiting the art museum Kumu and a Georgian restaurant. Nothing special, but a nice day in a familiar town. Kumu I had actually never visited before, so now that's also done.

The winter is almost over, and it's time for a late escape to vacation. Some work related issues prevented booking a vacation earlier, and even this vacation turned out to be relatively short, less than two weeks. We booked the outgoing journey first preparing to be traveling for a month, and only booked the return trip when the schedule became more clear.

Finland today is rainy, the snow has just melted away and the first signs of spring have started to show up. This journey will be started by a bus and ferry trip to Tallinn for mom's 70th birthday, and after the weekend we will continue to Colombo, Sri Lanka via Kyiv.