Chinese New Year 2015 - Sri Lanka and the Maldives

This was a trip I was really looking forward to. I'm not big on the beach or pools or sand or sun or heat or relaxing. I'm much happier sightseeing, touring, learning, and reading about places where I vacation. As you can imagine, my style of travel is a HUGE hit with the boys...and if I used emojis I'd insert one depicting my boys rolling their eyes and yelling "What!?" after that sentence. But this trip was tailor made for our different travel wishes and it was in the perfect order. And Sri Lanka was deliberately more about seeing the animals than "boring temples and tours." I'd heard that Sri Lanka was called India Lite, and in some ways I can see that, but it is definitely its own country in terms of religion, food, and culture. We spent five days in Sri Lanka and went on three safaris, a whale watching trip, a boat tour of a mangrove, and visited a sea turtle hatchery. It was a lot of driving and early mornings, but we all loved it.

For my dad - Sri Lanka is the little island southeast of India

Turtle hatchery 

Mangrove boat tour

We blew up the picture and you can kind of see how long the blue whales we were in search of are. It was a long time on a boat for the not-so-near encounters we had.

Fish pedicure - I've never seen or felt fish this big used though. Jack's face says it all.

I swear there's a leopard in those trees

See!

Better picture 

This is the traffic jam that would occur when word got around there was a leopard sighting

Cows wandering through our hotel

Different park where elephants are the main draw

 

Our ride on safari

From here it was on to the Maldives. The boys have been begging to go here since I showed them pictures of the resorts built over water about six months ago. It's not easy to get to, but combining it with Sri Lanka over a longer than normal Chinese New Year, was the perfect opportunity. The Maldives is an independent country and a collection of almost 1200 islands. Each resort has an island to itself so it's important that you research and make a good choice about where to stay. Our resort didn't disappoint, but the only downside was that it was pretty far south. To get back to Beijing on the last day we had a speed boat ride and three flights. Another downside is that I don't think anything will ever compare to the Maldives and the boys haven't stopped talking about when we can go back.

Fish feeding time

Watching the fish though the window in our room's floor