Getting to and Staying in Negombo

When you fly on frequent flyer miles, you only have so many options in terms of timing and mile usage; once in a while, it turns out better for us to just buy the tickets instead of redeeming miles, and that's what we ended up doing on this trip. For some reason, the options for getting to Colombo from NYC are limited, and it seems that you have to transit through the Middle East. The last time we flew on Etihad and transited through Dubai, but this trip we took Qatar Airways and transited through Doha. Very unusually, we left JFK at 11am -- bizarre, we always leave for these trips at midnight -- and we were scheduled to arrive in Sri Lanka at 5pm, 20 hours all together, with 3.5 hours in Qatar. That seemed ideal, to arrive in time to get some dinner and then crash, leaving us reasonably able to spend a full day the next day.

We always get a window and aisle seat in the hope that the middle seat won't be taken; having that extra bit of space in economy makes such a difference. When we saw the plane filling up at the last minute, we paid extra money to get a better grade of seat, in the extreme hope that no one would pay extra money for that middle seat, but nope. There were empty seats when the plane took off, just not our middle seat. It would have been great for these flights because Qatar Airways really packs the seats in, and these had less room than Cathay Pacific airplanes. By the time we finally arrived in Colombo, my knees were hurting so, so much I wasn't sure I'd be able to walk. But the most startling thing was how actually great the food was! We had a lunch, a snack, and a breakfast, and everything so was good, spicy, cooked well. In fact, we had a meal in Tangalle that left us commenting that the Qatar Airways food was a lot better.

In Doha, there are very few places to sit in the terminal, and they have every other seat blocked off for Covid distancing, but there, at the gate, the promised land of abundant seating! They don't let you into the gate area, unfortunately, until about an hour before boarding, and since we had a 3.5-hour layover, that sucked a lot, because we'd just come out of the 12-hour flight and we were so exhausted. Two other bizarre things about the Doha airport, which loudly trumpets itself as the greatest airport in the world: (1) no jet bridges! We were on a giant plane, a long-haul flight, and we exited the plane onto the tarmac and boarded a bus for the arrivals terminal. It wasn't just our flight, either; there were no jet bridges anywhere. Usually this happens on a smaller flight, at smaller airports, or on Air Asia, where they seem to park the plane 15 minutes away from the terminal. (2) The simultaneous mentioning of prayer rooms and the biggest commercial space I've ever seen at any airport. It felt like the worship of capitalism more than Islam.

But everything went as smoothly as it possibly could! Although historically the flight leaves JFK at least an hour late, we left on time. The transit was simple and we arrived without problem (although whoo boy we landed through a storm, lightning and a bit of plane tossing, and everyone applauded when the pilot touched down). Passport and visa, done. Baggage arrived, check. Money changed, simple. QR code shown to the health agent, done! That whole process of uploading copies of our passport, vaccination card, and PCR test in exchange for a QR code from the Sri Lankan government worked like a dream. And then the driver from our hotel was waiting, and off we went. 

The driver told us about SL's response to the pandemic, and how they worked very hard to get tourism up and running again, because it's the primary income for the country, even before tea exports. The country is 80% vaccinated, he said, and there are fines if you don't wear a mask, even outside. He talked about the war, and said that SL was actually two countries, with the Tamil north being Eelam. This is very confusing, and contradicts what I find about the country online; I read that Eelam is the proposed country the Tamils in SL and in the diaspora wish to create. He said the war was terrible, and that the bombings in SL in 2019, by Muslim terrorists -- he emphasized terrorists, and said most Muslims are not terrorists -- was horrific. He said that kids in school learn three languages: Sinhala, Tamil, and English, and he said that was necessary for the country to be unified. He was lovely and told us that Sri Lankan people are warm and smile a lot, and asked if we'd noticed that when we were here before. The flight from Doha to Colombo was full of Russians, for some reason, and they dressed alike in pastel colored, puffy track suits of a sort, and they seemed to be athletes of some kind when I saw the bags they were picking up, so I asked the driver if there was some kind of sporting event happening, and he said no, it's just Russian and German season. NO IDEA.

The hotel we stayed in, Daffodils Beach, was completely empty except for us and two sweet Sri Lankan guys who run the place, young men, soft-spoken and gentle. If we wanted breakfast the next day, we had to let him know the night before because, we gathered, he'd have to get the cook to come over, and get food. When we said no, that's OK, we'll eat breakfast somewhere else, he seemed relieved. The room was huge and comfortable, but there was nothing on any of the walls, which made it seem like a big, comfortable cell, despite the good bed and fancy bathroom. The safe sat loosely on a sagging shelf and could easily be picked up and carried off, which made us laugh. The hotel was new and just getting off the ground when the pandemic hit, what terrible timing for them.

We were just a quick walk away from the main road along the beach, and Marc had scouted out a couple of places for dinner our first night since he knew we'd be kind of strange and shattered from the trip, so we ate dinner at Seafood Embassy. Marc ordered deep-fried prawns, which weren't on the menu as such, and I got a simple Sri Lankan fish curry. His were overfried and bad, but my fish curry was really good, and there was so much that sharing was required. Fish curry, beet curry, dal curry, coconut sambol, and mango curry on a big mound of fragrant rice with julienned vegetables on top. 

The next morning I was really hoping for egg hoppers, but we couldn't find them anywhere. We had breakfast at Salt, a very highly rated restaurant just a few doors away from our hotel, which was great because it was drizzly. It turned out to be the restaurant of a small hotel, and the staff seemed a little confused by us since we weren't guests of the hotel. We got the Sri Lankan breakfast, which was fresh fruit and juice, rice and a bunch of curries, and a pot of instant coffee. We went back to the hotel and crashed, then got out for a walk along the main road to see what's what, then back to the room to just kind of crash and be too tired to get up. The main reason Marc chose this hotel was its beautiful pool, and in the late afternoon when the skies cleared up we talked about going down to the pool but we were just strangely too tired to do more than talk about it.

Dinner that night was amazing, at a small family-run restaurant called The Jade Restaurant. It was so sweet, and the waiters were attentive and just adorable. One told us that they were a family, with a smile. Our meal was excellent, and so, so inexpensive, and we left full and happy. I wanted a bit of gelato from a place I'd seen as we walked to the restaurant, so we stopped and I got a coconut gelato, just a small cup of it, and it cost as much as our entire meal -- which is both a comment on how inexpensive our dinner was and how crazy expensive that gelato was.

Our last morning, we tried to find egg hoppers but just couldn't. The waiter at The Jade had told us they started serving breakfast at 8am, and that they serve hoppers, but we got there at 8 and the place was closed. Marc found someone -- the dad, I guess -- and he said no, 8am is the getting-up time, not the restaurant time. So we went back to Seafood Embassy and had an American-ish breakfast, and that was that. We were planning to leave at 10am, but our driver was already there so we left early for Tangalle, since there wasn't anything else to do in the part of Negombo where we stayed. Next stop: Buckingham Place at Rekawa Beach in Tangalle!