Sri Lanka, January to February, 2026

4th to 8th January, 2026

Well, here we are in Sri Lanka for an 8 week stretch as the snow is falling back in old Blighty. Talk about timing!

So, we left in the evening on Saturday from Terminal 3, Heathrow, though not before we had a quick visit to Terminal 4 first due to a mishap with the satnav! Plenty of time though to get to the other side of Heathrow and disembark from Nick’s very smart, electric Renault. Thanks to Nick for the lift (and the pick up on our return, we hope!)

We checked in nice and quickly, though, once again, no upgrade to business class, despite being very nicely turned out. I had even shaved, but not even a scent of an offer. Someone told me that if you ask, they won’t upgrade you, but if you don’t ask, then you will never know… Anyway, we then made our way to the Assistance people where we had a bit of a wait as we were very early (my father’s son…), but soon Val was being whisked along in a wheelchair and we were passing through security.

Again, as ever, we were asked to open our hand luggage as we had Val’s medication in it, especially her vials for her pump for her Parkinson’s. As we are off for 8 weeks, you can appreciate that means a lot of vials (we use about 1.25 per day). Unfortunately, I think we had someone quite new to her role, but thankfully she was advised by her boss just to test a sample of the vials, not every single one.

It was then all aboard our Sri Lankan Airlines direct flight to Colombo, a journey of about 10 hours. It was OK, if a smidgen cramped and with our entertainment channels playing up a lot of the time, but as it was an overnight flight, we did manage to sleep a little. We had thought of stopping off en route somewhere, but felt there would be little advantage once you factor in getting from and to airports and unpacking for a few days’ stay.

We arrived safely in Bandaranaike Airport, which, conveniently for us, is located some way north of Colombo proper, which meant only a 1 hour drive to our hotel (in a taxi). If we had gone to the other airport in Colombo, as a fellow guest had done, it would have taken 5 hours!

We are staying our whole trip at one location, Club Palm Bay resort, north of Colombo on the west coast. We thought we would give it a go as it gets more difficult for Val going from site to site. The hotel seems very nice with cheerful, willing staff and Val has already, I feel, become the focus of attention with lots of staff members wanting to help her at every move.

One development might be both good and bad. I am convinced that I only booked for bed and breakfast, but the staff on reception insisted that it is all inclusive! So we won’t argue and it is a very nice extra. That said, considering how much we enjoyed Christmas with all those mince pies, panettone, turkey sandwiches etc, the option of endless buffets of food and a bottomless jug for drinks is not going to help the old waistline.

As is traditional, here is a picture of our room…

The hotel is quite big, with lots of activities including tennis, table tennis, squash, badminton, darts, pool, though everything is decidedly a bit run down. We will manage well enough and are already getting our routines sorted, though those were disrupted as Val has already had 2 falls (but no submission), thankfully with nothing too badly damaged. They have a very nice doctor on site who has some wonderful ointment that she has rubbed into Val’s shoulder that has helped a great deal.

One of the star attractions is the enormous swimming pool…

The hotel is fairly quiet at present with under 200 guests, as against 500 over Christmas. Lots of Russians and French!

The food is good, which means a great deal of will power is needed to resist trying everything at once, especially as it is a buffet. It is a nice mix of Sri Lankan and Eastern cuisine with quite a wide selection of Western dishes too. I had an interesting mix of Mongolian beef with ratatouille (thank you, Spellcheck, for that one!), spaghetti with prawns and some brinjal (aubergine) pahi (not sure what a pahi is, but very tasty). Luckily there is a wide spread on the salad bar, though a dangerously wider one on the dessert area!! They even do a passable bread and butter pudding.

We have had one outing. This involved a local app called Pickme, which is the equivalent of Uber. Fairly straightforward to operate and you can even choose to go by tuck-tuk. We went to the local supermarket, which was pretty basic as it happens, but covered most of our needs. We also spotted a shop across the road that purported to be a bookstore, which turned out to be a very ramshackle stationery shop, which also seemed to deal in other things, but not very clear (to me at any rate) what. Val wanted a sketch pad and some pencils and lo and behold, they had both, which we discovered with the help of a very nice gentleman who was also purchasing something and who spoke excellent English having lived in London (WC2, he advised) in the 70s.

That was on Wednesday. Thursday, Val took another trip, but this was, once again, over a step at the hotel. Mad rush of staff (about 8, I think) and a visit from an outside doctor, but luckily nothing broken, just a bit of swelling, bruising and a fair amount of pain. On the mend, again.

OK, time to publish as I will never do so otherwise. Hope you are all safe wherever you are, especially in windy, snowy UK.