Wednesday, December 27, 2017

2017_12_27 FIRST FULL DAY IN SRI LANKA

Traveling to Sri Lanka was pretty much a LONG DAY “yesterday’ and into the early morning hours today (Wednesday).

Left Chicago early evening on Christmas day ans arrived in Doha, Qatar after a 12.5 hour flight.  We than had a layover for a couple of hours and continued on to Colombo. Sri Lanka.  We arrived at 4:00a.m.

Our driver was waiting for us and we got to our room and into bed around 5:00.  We arrived at A Resort Like No Other and a staff member showed us to our room.  I awoke the next morning with cramps in both legs (probably from the long time in the air) and decided to get up. I walked around taking some pictures and had a pot of tea while I waited for Connie’s alarm to go off.



After we met up with our friends Paul and Larainne Shore-Suslowitz in the morning we had breakfast and the same driver came to take us to The Cinnamom Lodge where we will be staying tonight.



We actually arrived a few minutes after the other two couples in our ‘group’ the Redikers and the Steingarts and the adventure was ready to begin!

After we checked in we went a few minutes away to Minneyira Narional Park where we saw a lot of wildlife.  Mostly elephants!  There were a LOT of jeeps taking tourists deep into the Park to a open area that surrounded a large lake.  This is where we saw MANY elephants and a ton of birds.  Connie and I were so glad to experience elephants in the wild.  Towards the end of the day we stopped to stretch our legs and climbed up an observation tower that loked out over the lake.  Rick spotted what I thought were dirt mounds pretty far off in the distance.  It turned out the ‘dirt mounds were a bunch of elephants gathering together for the night!






As we started back to the gate area to leave a jeep in front of us began backing up.  A LARGE male elephant was walking down the trail right towards us.  He walked off the trail and a bit farther we encountered another group of elephants also on the trail.  Our drived revved his engine and they too went off the trail towards the other elephants at the lake.

Back to the hotel and a great private dinner outside by the pool. A very nice meal with many different types of seafood prepared on a grill.  We could choose whatever we wanted to eat.  Too many types of fish to mention but the tuna steaks were especially great.

Time for sleep as I am running on 2 hours sleep.


More to follow.

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