Overall summary

Important note about access to the posts:  to access the chronological part of this blog either go to 

• the bottom of this first page and click on "older posts' or
• the Archive on the RHS of any page, click on 'March' (which is when I set the pages up) and you will see inter alia a post for each day we were away.

This was a very enjoyable trip.  I would certainly recommend Jetwing to anyone contemplating a similar - or in fact any - trip to Sri Lanka.  I may add further to this post as I go through reacting to comments (very few thus far) and inserting additional images etc.

Most of the images were taken by me, but I have inserted some by Frances and  Rob/Carol in places where they add to the narrative.

This blog will cover our trip to Sri Lanka intended for April - May 2012.  It is mainly a wildlife trip with some fair interest in the gardens around the country and the history and architecture.

The title of the blog reflects the fact while farm ponds (in the UK) are called dams in Australia in Sri Lanka they are called 'tanks'.  At this stage I have no idea why.  That started me thinking about a famous Esso advertising slogan, but on reflection I decided it might lead to some ambiguity, and possible displeasure from the authorities,  so adapted it slightly: we are after all expecting to see a bunch of elephants at various points in this trip, but probably not any stripey felines.  Spotted felines are very much on the agenda.

I will make the linguistic/zymurgic comment that in both Tanzania and Vanuatu the local beer is called Tusker.  However in Tanzania this refers to pachyderms while in Vanuatu it is about porkers.  In neither case do they have the property of Camel cigarettes of having a picture of the factory on the packet. In Sri Lanka the main brewery keeps the feline tale lashing under the name of  Lion.  They seem to have four brews (plus the boring Carlsberg of which conglomerate they are part).  I expect there to be a fair bit of testing what it tastes like although someone else's view is not promising in terms of variety.!

After a few introductory pages those for the trip itself begin with an extract from our itinerary (which could be thought of as the theory) followed by comments on, and images of what actually happened (aka the practice).

the final section of the blog will be thematic pages covering the major subjects of the trip: various forms of wildlife, nosh, accomodation, gardens and archaeology/religion..

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!)

Don't Fly me to the moon

Just get me from Sydney to Colombo and back!

My usual starting point with booking air travel is Expedia Australia.  They are often where I end up as well, since I can get good deals on cars with them as well.  In this case we don't want a car as the Sri Lankans are providing that.

It seemed clear from Expedia that flights from Australia via wherever ending up in Colombo all got in around midnight and the return flights left about 90 minutes later.  (This caused some perturbation in specifying the exact dates for the rest of trip: although we won't actually get to the first accommodation until the 17th April, we need to book the accommodation starting on the 16th!)

The best deal seemed to come from Malaysian Airlines.  QANTAS flights on the way home all seemed to involve longer holdovers in Singapore and Emirates seemed determined to send us via Dubai (and thus have a 14 hour leg, a several hour holdover in a really unpleasant airport and a 5 hour flight back.

The Malaysian on-line ticketing system seemed to have a life of its own, but with perseverance I got it to accept our booking.  So did our friends - one of who is a database management professional and reckoned they needed some more resources in their system since he recognised the problem.  So we are booked!

A reader may wonder why, since we  live near Canberra, we are starting our flights in Sydney.   There are several reasons for this:

• By the time one has travelled to Canberra airport waited and for their 'systems' to process you, taken the flight and transferred to the International terminal it is very little less time than driving;
• The cost of the flights (if more than one person is in the group) is more than the cost of hiring a car.  With 4 of us my guess is that the total cost , including cabs to the airport on one hand and petrol on the other) is about $300 driving and $600 flying.
• Canberra Airport is one of the most revolting places on Earth.  I am sure that if Dante had wanted to have a place worse than being pitchforked into the fires of the Inferno he would have come up with somewhere like this.
• By not using the airport one avoids adding revenue and kudos to the owners of Canberra Airport who in my opinion really deserve a close inspection of traditional hay handling implements!

It is now only a few days to go  and I was contemplating the joys of checking in online at 10pm on the Saturday before we left to make sure we got reasonable seats.  Just on a chance I rang Malaysian to see if I could do this over the phone.  I succeeded for the outward legs and was so excited I didn't enquire about the inbound trip.  However when I passed this on to Rob, giving him our booking code he fixed up all their seats and our return ones also.  Well done that boy!  Well done that airline!  (This turns out to have been a tad optimistic since the pelican on the other end of the phone booked us 4 seats out of 5 on the leg from KL to Sydney.)

Some mappish material

Here is an initial Google Earth screenshot showing quite a few of the spots we expect to visit.

Other images will be added as seems appropriate.

To begin with here is a screendump  showing the surrounds of Villa Talangama.

Travel Guides

The starting point is of course Lonely Planet.  Before advancing much on this foray I borrowed a somewhat ancient copy from the Queanbeyan Library and it seemed entirely adequate.  Our friends used the (unfortunately no longer available) Borders Library to suss out the latest edition but did purchase one!

Frances searched the net for an alternative and came across a JPM Guide as the only alternative.  So we got it - very cheaply and were astonished to find how small it is.  Literally pocket sized (64 x A6 pages), but it did seem to cover the main stuff.

Somewhat later we were chatting with a neighbour and found her daughter writes guides for the Bradt imprint, with whom we were not familiar.  They do a guide for Sri Lanka but being a cheapskate I thought I would check prices on Amazon before ordering.  There was one review there which was very negative.  On looking up the reviewers profile he seemed to be a serial whinger:  I wondered if he was related to Philippe from the Jetlag Travel guide series?  Reverting to the Bradt site they offered quite a chunk of the general material for on-line browsing and it seemed quite reasonable.  So some funds have been invested, through Amazon because they were as usual a lot cheaper.

So I think Rob and Carol will take their LP and we will take the Bradt version.   Feedback will be included at sometime after we return.

Some more or less random links

 Tammy's Holiday Camp

Birding

Endemic birds of Sri Lanka
Fat birder links
A trip report

Other Animals
Reptiles
Mammals

Vegetable things

No, not members of certain political parties or sporting teams, but plants and fungi.

• Orchids in Kandy- and elsewhere in Sri Lanka
• Other flowers

Jetwings folk

In setting things up we dealt with Paramie.  Our tour guide was Suchithra.