It was amazing to travel to a country that is not that famous for tourism in the Middle East and especially in the UAE. As our supposed flight to Kuala Lumpur was to transit in Sri Lanka, my family decided to visit it for 8 days on the way. My first reaction after arriving in the capital, Colombo, was how friendly people are and how simple a life they live. We stayed in Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, which was built 500 years ago when Queen Elizabeth once came to stay. After being in the capital for 2 days, we went to Kandy, the first capital of Sri Lanka. We went to visit the King\'s Palace, whose roof is made of pure gold. Moreover, we saw Kandy festival which shows us how the kings used to act and dress up with their elephants too. The unique thing which was happening was that people were throwing coins all over the place, just to express their happiness and to give donations to the temples. During the festival, elephants went to collect all these coins. After that, we went to the north, to Nuwera Eliya, a tea plantation on a hill, and stayed there for 2 days. The weather was wonderful; it was quite misty, but sunny and kind of cool. Most of the time we wore our jackets and used the heating in the hotel rooms. Going back from Nuwera Eliya to Colombo, we admired the tea trees all along the way. It was enjoyable to watch the women collecting the tealeaves and putting them into the huge baskets that they were carrying on their backs. The thing that I was upset about was I didn\'t find any good shops or stores to buy any good stuff for gifts. There were just a few stores, which were quite small compared to our huge malls in the UAE. In my opinion, Sri Lanka is the best country to spend your honeymoon. You won\'t spend a lot of money on this trip, the food is delicious, the people are friendly and most speak English and the cost of living is cheap! So, what more do you need to spend a wonderful holiday? Lina Al Hashemi, B1C This trip was in July 2001 I\'ve taken these picture from the Internet. |