beautiful Sri Lanka
This past Christmas holiday, I took my family (Sophie, Marie, and Giovanna) to Sri Lanka.
Personally, I wanted to go to our home in France to enjoy great food, wine and just relax at our home, but Sophie and the girls outvoted me …
Sri Lanka is an easy 4-hour direct flight from Dubai so traveling there and back was easy.
Over 11 days, we stayed in two parts of the Island country and thanks to AirBnB, We rented two large beautiful houses – the first one was in the southern province of Unawatuna and was right on the water;
The 2nd part of the trip our house was in the mountains and had gorgeous views.
Each of the houses included a Chef so we got to enjoy the real home-cooked Sri Lankan food. We all agreed that both chef’s cooking/food was better than any of the restaurants we went to over the trip (with the exception of Ministry of Crab)
A friend of Sophie’s had recommended a driver, so we had a van and driver the entire trip. Very convenient.
My closest friend who lives in Singapore, Jason Gorud decided last minute to meet us in Sri Lanka so he joined us on day 3. He is an uncle to my kids and crazy fun to spend time with so everyone was very excited about him joining us.
A funny memory… the day he arrived, we were all out sightseeing … and when we came back home at 6pm, Jason opened the door with a big grin on his face and shouted a short Japanese expression, “Domo!!!”, shirtless and obviously midway through a big bottle of “very expensive” Rum! I am laughing as I type.
Jason and I have a dinner club we called “FND” (Friday night dinner) I have blogged about this before and will do a more detailed blog about this in a couple weeks – it’s a dinner club we started in Tokyo on Friday evening after a great week at work, and ultimately this dinner club has turned into something very important for both of us.
We have traveled to more than 20 countries just for this Friday night dinner, journaling each one … so this trip gave us a chance to enjoy an “FND – dinner club.”
The dinner has to be on a Friday night, so we had a full week of adventure until then — and ultimately, we got to enjoy an “FND” in a new country.
After 5 days in the southern province, we drove 6+ hours to Kandy to the mountainous area of the country.
The home we rented in Kandy was ideal and it had an amazing view.
The highlight of the trip for me was going on an elephant safari.
We saw many more elephants than I ever saw on any of my various safaris in Africa.
Elephants were everywhere. Incredible.
Our last couple days we visited Colombo (the capital)
Although there were tourists, more than we saw elsewhere, I enjoyed the city because we had great food and wine – the highlight being the infamous “Ministry of Crab” where we all enjoyed a massive crab meal.
Sri Lanka is a beautiful country with very nice, easy going people.
