Saturday, 16 February 2019
Today we were going to spend a leisure day on the beach and hence were in no hurry to have breakfast. We had first tea on our verandah where we had a side view of the river.
Last night we did not see much so it was good to explore a bit this morning before breakfast.
The restaurant was overlooking the jetty where all sorts of boats were moored. On the other side of the river was jungle island with a few luxurious private homes and when we informed how we could get to the beach we were told that they had boats to ferry us across to the is.and where a pathway was cut through the jungle and within two minutes we would be on the beach!
This sounded great so we had breakfast and took our time while watching all the goings on at the waterside. Most of the guests here are Indian, Russian and German – we are the only Dutch-Maltese couple! I had already packed my rucksack so we were ready to go after breakfast!
It only took us a couple of minutes to cross the river and then walk through the jungle path to get to the ocean with its empty beach. It was heavenly just listening to the ocean and basking in the sun. We needed this relax time after being so busy doing the sights….
We spent a few hours on the beach x walking along the shore line, getting into the sea and have the waves break over us and just relaxing x we had the beach all to ourselves and there were only some other people walking along the shore line……. after some hours and of course at the height of strong sunshine we decided to return back to our hotel where there was a swimming pool and we could swim a few laps. When we crossed the jungle path, Gerry just whistled to get the attention of the boat guys on the other side and immediately a boat came our way to ferry us across the river.
Lucky for us, no one was occupying the few sun beds on the river side so we settled ourselves and enjoyed the water activities: banana and mattress riding, jetski riding and water skiing as well as quite a number of Chinese going on a water safari all wearing life jackets – I wonder whether these would protect them from the crocs should they fall into the river…….. anyway we were enjoying our cocktails at the water edge……
Without knowing it, the day was coming to a close so we went up to Our room to shower and get ready to go walking around in town and get some dinner.
We were pleasantly surprised that when we got to our room, our bed was artistically made up and we had two towel swans surrounded by little flowers sitting on our bed!
Our walk around town did not last long as torrential rains came again and we dashed into a restaurant which stated the best Sri Lankan food in Bentota – well I was getting hungry as again we had skipped lunch. By this time it was really pouring but we hoped that by the time we had finished dinner it would be dry again
Well after a superb meal, we decided to take a tuc tuc back to our hotel and as it was dry now we thought we would have a night cap before going back to our room – papaya cocktail for Gerry and pineapple cocktail for me, both made with Sri Lanka’s national drink Araq.
Tomorrow we will be picked up by Indika at 10 am so we will have enough time to organize our luggage before we head off to Colombo, our lost stop in Sri Lanka
