Today was our last full day in Sri Lanka, so we had planned to take it easy and not do too much.

We had a full buffet breakfast again. I tried a plain hopper, which is a bit like a crepe. It came with a very spicy accompaniment, which I didn’t eat.

As the weather was looking ok, we decided to head to the beach. A lot of the hotels in Colombo also own a stretch of beach, and they offer a free shuttle service to and from the hotel to the beach. The shuttle bus dropped us off on the roadside, and we had to walk across the railway lines to get to the beach.

The beach area was very quiet – probably because it had been raining and was looking like rain again. It was very pretty, though.

Mandy and I went for a swim. The lifeguard came down to check we were ok, which was quite funny as we are both good swimmers.

We stayed for a little bit longer, relaxing on the sunbeds, but after about an hour, we decided to head back to the hotel. There was a spider in the shuttle bus back – I was keeping an eye on it as it was right above me.

We made it safely back to the hotel and decided to make use of the swimming pool. We did some more posey pictures.

In the afternoon we had a drink – I went for a chocolate milkshake.

In the afternoon we all packed our suitcases, ready to travel home tomorrow. As we were having a very lazy day, and as it was pouring with rain, we decided to eat dinner at the hotel. I had a mixed seafood grill. It had lobster, prawn, squid, cuttlefish and other white fish and it was ok, but nothing spectacular.

It was a lovely evening but quite sad too as we were back to England in the morning.

After dinner, we headed to bed as we were up early in the morning, as we had a taxi booked at 8am.

We had breakfast at Colombo airport, along with a bottle of fizz. We also did a bit of shopping as we wanted to spend the last of our Srilankan rupees. The first flight to Doha seemed to go quite quickly. I watched the ‘Boys on the Boat’ film, which was really good.

We had a couple of hours stop over in Doha, which is a huge airport.

We had a cocktail at the only bar we could find.

The second flight did seem to drag a bit, but I watched a couple of other films and time passed. I also slept for an hour or so.  Some of the views out of the window were lovely.

We arrived back at Heathrow at about 10pm. Mandy had booked a taxi to take us back to hers and after a bit of searching we managed to find it. We were back at Mandys and in bed by midnight. Karen and Zoe weren’t so lucky as their taxi was late, and then they got caught up in a traffic jam leaving the airport.

Sri Lanka is a beautiful country, the food is delicious and the people are lovely.