Sunday 25th January 2015
We booked our flight from Vienna to Colombo about 2 1/2 months in advance. The price was still good with about 600€ from Vienna, but I would advise you to close the deal at about 3 Months in advance, because we saw we could have gotten a few better flights for 520-550€ a few weeks earlier.
As there is no direct flight from Vienna our first stop was Rome for about 1 1/2h. It was quite funny to spot a few austrians on the plane and finding them again all gathering in the one single Rome Airport Restaurant which had a few tables in the sun. So it is quite obvious that we are craving for the sun in our long grey winter.
The first leg of the flight was operated by Air Italia, which was alright. Not good, not bad.
SriLankan Airlines
For the second leg we flew with SriLankan Airlines which is exactly as they describe it on Airlinequlality website. The Entertainment system was really as bad as the rumors said. The movie selection was super nice, but unfortunately not watchable on these defect screens which were so blurry you couldn’t look more than 5 minutes at it. If you can get another operator than choose this one over Air Srilanka. But besides the Entertainment System I have not much to complain. Everybody from the staff was really nice and helpful and you can deal with the fairly old plane.
Passport Visa Trouble
For the visa you can fill out an online (Electronic Travel Authorization) form at the official Sri Lanka Government website and already pay 30 $ in advance to get the visa printout. Unfortunately the form was not well programmed. There was no tooltip with a hint or error control for the Passport Number field. So remember to put also the P- in the form when filling out the Passport number. At the Airport the immigration officer couldn’t find us in the system cause in our Passport the number is P-xxxxxxx but on the form only the digits of the number were visible. That happened to all the austrians on the flight, so I assume there is a problem with the online visa form. Luckily we didn’t have to pay our 30$ again, and they accepted our Visa 🙂
At Colombo Airport arrival hall, we already had our driver to get to Weligama, waiting for us. We took this luxury option because after 10 hours at this last leg of the flight, we thought we need this to get to our hotel instead of searching for bus and train in this sleep deprived mode.
It was a crazy ass drive experiencing the south east asian driving style for the first time. The honking is almost a form of communication. I guess about 5-30 honks per minute is common. After 2 hours we arrived safely and at about 10:00 am local time we could go to bed .
We stayed at Castle Bay Resort (which is not a real resort) to be close to our diving school for the first week.
After this refreshing extended nap we took our fist walk to explore the surroundings. Like Lonely Planet wrote it is a bit shabby at Weligama, especially at our part of the town. But we tried to be as close as possible to our diving school.
If you wanna stay in Weligama we would advise you to pick a place close to the “city centre” or market.
We walked to the Weligama bay (about 1,5 km) and spotted like 10 different surf rental shacks and guesthouses plus a few nice beach bars. One was our favorite cause it had a first floor, so you could watch the surf action even better.
The sunset was breathtaking and showed a glimpse of what is still lying ahead of us.
