For once, it wasn’t an early start as our flight was at 5pm from Heathrow. I’d travelled down to Mandys on Thursday evening after work and had a really nice run with only a couple of traffic jams.

I worked from Mandys on Friday morning, and the taxi came about 1pm to pick us up. It took about an hour to get to the airport as the traffic on the M25 was awful. Luckily, we had left loads of time.

We met up with Karen and Zoe at the airport, dropped our bags at check-in, and did a little bit of shopping. It was then time to relax.

We boarded the flight on time, and it was a pretty full flight.

On the flight, I watched a couple of films – The Reverend and Mrs Simpson and Reality – before trying to get some sleep. The flight was around 7 hours.

We landed in Doha around midnight for a short stopover. Karen took some great photos out of the window.

Doha was an interesting airport, but we didn’t have much time to look around as we had to board our next flight

The next flight was less busy so we were able to have 3 seats between two of us.

This flight was around 5 hours and I watched The Royal Hotel film. The sun was rising as we flew towards Sri Lanka.

I managed to have about an hours sleep before we landed.

At the airport, there were no queues for security, and the bags arrived pretty quickly.

We were met at the airport by our driver, Alam. It was then a 3 hour drive to our hotel in Kalpitiya.

We stopped on the way for an ice coffee and some juice and water.

The road seemed to be just one long road, with no real rules. If you were overtaking and something was coming towards you, the vehicle you were overtaking had to slow down to let you get in front.

As we headed out of the main town, we saw a lot of greenery, especially coconut trees, and a lot of water.

We had a toilet stop along the way, too.

Eventually, we arrived at pur hotel, Villa Sethi Wadi, and it was beautiful. This is the view from our room.

After a quick change, we headed to the pool.

I walked down to see what the sea was like.

It was really warm but the sea bed was like sludge. And it was really shallow. When I got to the end of the pier, the water was still only up to my knees.

The area is well known for kite surfing.

And I obviously made friends with the dogs.

Back at the pool, we had some snacks, and we tried the local beer.

The water in the pool was a little bit colder than the sea but still quite warm.

We all wandered down the pier and Mandy and I went for a little swim, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant.

It was then time for a shower before sunset and dinner. The bathrooms are semi outside, and they’re really nice.

We went back down to the pier to watch the sunset.

We ordered some gin and tonics, but unfortunately, the tonic water had a really funny taste to it, so we actually struggled to drink them and ended up throwing some away.

It was the time for dinner. We had all ordered sea bass, and it was delicious.

It was hard to stay awake at this point, so I headed to bed around 830pm.