Guest Post by Ben from @Tourdust

The premise for our honeymoon was simple. A month in Sri Lanka – the first five days staying in a boutique hotel, complete with infinity pool, and then donning our backpacks and exploring the country independently.

The hotel was, as you would hope given the price, lovely. Beautiful sunsets, complimentary massages, fresh petals on the beds each evening. Every night we sat with the other Westerners in the restaurant, retiring after our food for a moonlit stroll, or a game of pool. It was, to many eyes, absolute perfection. But actually, deep down inside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole place was a little too contrived. On our penultimate day, a young couple sauntered down to the pool to choose their sunbeds. They then summoned one of the staff members, gave him a rolled up note and disappeared for the rest of the day. They arrived later, in time for sunset, and sipped from their gin and tonics with triumphant looks on their faces. The top spot in a top hotel, best of the best.

After our five days were up, we made our farewells to the crisp sheets and outside bathroom and focused on what was outside of the marble walls of the hotel, for we hadn’t left the grounds during our stay. We declined a taxi, much to the staff’s amusement, and lugged our backpacks down the road to flag down a bus. I’ll leave out the near death experience that followed and the naïve tourists-get-ripped-off-on-a-train anecdote and fast forward to the guesthouse we found in Kandy.

We sat on the balcony, watching the monkeys leap from roof to roof, sipping on a beer. Squeaky beds and shabby bathrooms; this was much more us! That evening, as we came back from dinner, Eddie, our charismatic host, greeted us with a bottle of whisky in his hand and an invitation to come and join him and his friends for a night cap. Several hours later, we were a fairly motley crew sat round the table. As well as the two of us and Eddie, there were D and R – two policemen who had served together as UN police officers in East Timor. R was local and D was over from Australia to visit and was staying in the same guesthouse as us. The sixth member of our group was a very (very) senior member of the Sri Lankan Navy. He was full of stories (and whisky too – so much, in fact that he slept in his car that night and his driver had to lie through his teeth to explain his absence to his wife!) The evening ended with R vowing to show us the highlights of the area.

The next morning we awoke to a knock on the door from Eddie to say that sorry, R had been called away on business, but he had sent two friends on his behalf. And so began our day visiting Sigiriya by police escort. The overweight and extremely unfit policemen joined us on the tourist trail, huffing and puffing their way up the 200m high fortress and shouting at any hawkers who came anywhere near us.

After a long day of sight seeing, we were dropped off at the police accommodation for dinner. R, our generous host had invited us to join his family for dinner. There were six of them living in a small 2 bed apartment, which made our London flat seem like a palace. As we exchanged stories about the day, R’s wife cooked in the kitchen. The food was delicious and as we were offered seconds, we tucked in hungrily. We were surprised that neither R nor his family joined us and when we asked them to sit with us, they giggled and went into a different room. It was only once we had finished eating and R sat down to eat his plate, that we realised that they were waiting for us. Once he had finished, the rest of the family were able to tuck in.

As we swapped stories with the children, teased each other about the cricket and shared our future dreams, I couldn’t help thinking back to that smug couple back at the luxury hotel. Yes, they may have got the perfect sunbed with the perfect view, but there are some experiences that money just can’t buy and this was definitely one!

Ben Colclough

Ben has a serious case of itchy feet, he has sailed across the Atlantic, travelled overland from the Southern tip of SE Asia to the North Western tip of Russia and spent an indecent amount of time in cheap huts on tropical beaches. He now has three little girls and is battling the odds desperately trying to keep the travel spirit alive.
Ben is co-founder and blogger for the adventure travel website Tourdust.com.
Follow Ben’s writing and experiences on Twitter at @Tourdust