Initial planning

The genesis for this exodus was a Christmas 2009 present from Frances in the form of a book covering the 100 best birding sites in the world by Dominic Couzens. We have visited 12 of the sites and (as she intended) I stared pondering which others needed a visit.  I was still feeling opposed to very long (ie more than about 15 hours) plane flights after the massive tiredness from our straight through flight from the UK which suggested somewhere in Asia was the go.

The entry for Sinharaja Forest in Sri Lanka looked rather interesting.  It was ranked #17 with the big attraction being very diverse mixed flocks. I liked the idea of getting a whole lot of ticks in one place.  Frances had also read somewhere about the excellent gardens in Sri Lanka so we seemed to have a definite combined interest.

A visit to Google for Bird tours Sri Lanka was the next effort.  This got me to a consolidator site who, as is the nature of such things bounced me on one of their 'operatives'.  This was Jetwing tours who, to my surprise got back to me within about 6 hours with a very pleasant communication.  They advertise in "British Birds' so were obviously not a total owl (ie fly-by-night) company.

A friend in the UK suggested another company to look at.  They were also very responsive to my approach and were headed up by Sri Lankas leading birder. 

I then started some reading, with an out of date copy of the Lonely Planet guide.  Looking at the places they recommended (other than the beach resorts which have no interest for me) gave me a good list of places.

Of course I also scanned the DFAT travel advisory for the country.  I was particularly taken by this comment

"The safety standards you might expect of transport and tour operators, including adventure and water sport activities, are not always met."

The safety standards I expect in such a country - or indeed from tour operators in any country -  are very skimpy so I expect they will be well met.

We decided that it might be nice to have some friends travel with us and floated the idea with a number of them.  One couple- Rob and Carol - have decided to join in.  This also defined our starting period: it seemed important to do the trip in April before all the migrants head off back to the North, and the male half of this couple has an appointment with a marathon in Canberra on 15 April.  So we are leaving on the 16th: this means Rob has chosen an aisle seat as he reckons he might have trouble climbing over people after six hours in an aircraft seat!

After some discussion of alternatives it seemed that both companies we were looking at went to similar places but the Jetwing team were more generalists while the alternative were more full-on birders.  Given that 3 of the 4 people in our group were non-twitchers the generalists seemed to be the choice and got the tick.  They were then very good about waiting a few weeks (OK, months) while we sorted out details at our end of the arrangement.

Payment of the deposit went very smoothly - mainly because after our trip to the UK I realised that the Westpac site was full of bull**it and all one really needed was an account number and a Swift code.  The arrangements for making the final payment were very civilised and the timing was determined by when we thought the Ocker had peaked against the Greenback.  (It did go up a bit more but then started dropping again, so we didn't do as bad as we have often done in trying to win on currency!)