It has been almost 1 week since we left our home in Gothenburg and headed to Sri Lanka.
Stopover in Doha
Alena has booked the flight with Qatar (our preffered airline for travelling east, along with Turkish) and we found a long (18 hours) connection in Doha so Qatar offered us complementary layover in a hotel in the city. We accepted... (I mean it was planned on purpose to have long connection sleep in a nice bed and maybe visit the city of Doha).
Everything worked as planned we arrived around 5 pm to Doha and took taxi to the hotel. Note to self: next time book the hotel with free transfer! When we got settled it was already dark outside but we fear no darkness so we took the taxi to "a nice area where we could eat". They dropped us off at some pretty location, somewhere near the main mosque of Doha. We walked around the narrow streets making racial profiling of the people we meet. Doha is diverse! very (maybe Alena will disagree). We ate, waled, took some selfies and went back to hotel. Next morning we took off for another 5 hours flight to Colombo!
Sri Lanka
It's a messssss. Alena says that Sri Lanksa is India light (I hope it doesn't offend anyone). I've read that the country is aiming to develop tourism for the past few years and it has been on a rise about 100% every year. Good numbers but maybe it grows just a bit too quickly. Unfortunatelly you can spot all the downsides with such a growth. We saw them in Hoi An, a town in Vietnam which experienced a rapid tourims boom for last couple of years. That means that it will be dirty, the infrastructure is not ready to handle so much tourism. A lot of scamming (not in a bad way, but trying to bite the biggest possible piece of tourist's wallet).
First 4 or 5 days we stayed close to the airport just to settle down. Negombo is a high end area, expensive hotels and overpriced coffee. There is on long street by the beach which has restaurants with close to western prices. Stay away! they even have tuk-tuk mafia there. First days we used "pick me" app, it's like local uber or grab (in SE Asia). it worked great until we wanted to get back home from that beach street. One guy cancelled on us, the next one arrived but once we started moving a few tuk-tuks surrounded us and explained that there was a mistake and we can't take tuk-tuk from pick-me. At one point I thought they will beat the hell out of that driver (who came to pick us up), a few moments later there were like 8 of mafia tuk-tuks and I feared that they will beat us too (they might got scared off by Alisa though). Basically they told us that we have to take another tuk-tuk (mafia one) for double the price. We declined and went away, turned a small street and 20 meters later ordered another pick-me tuk-tuk which came with no issues.
Food is a bit tricky as everything is a little spicy. I was expecting it to be more spicy, it is very delicious but not suitable for Alisa :(. We have to opt for rice and noodles while me and Alena enjoy a lot of roti (roty, rotee, they spell it in all possible ways). Very nice and cheap food at local places. You feed a family of 3 for 30 sek or you can get a cappuccino for 30 sek at the beach street (you choose).