2019-08-13 Sweden, UK, Crete, Santorini, Athens, SriLanka

This trip takes us to Sweden where we will visit family and enjoy the Scandinavian environs. Then we head on to the UK to visit my cousin in Leicester. From there we fly to Crete, ferry to Santorini, fly to Athens. Then we fly to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks of touring and safaris before we return home.

The first leg, Melbourne to Sweden was tiring. The flight went via Bangkok and the plane was full. The current pro-democracy unrest in Hong Kong led to a shutdown of the airport so lots of people ended up taking flights with alternate airlines that did not go via HK, filling up any available seats.

In Bangkok we had a 3.5 h wait for our next flight. Fortunately it is a massive building so we got a little exercise on our walk to the next departure gate, and luckily we found a stretch of seats where some form of horizontality was possible.

Alas, the queue at immigration in Stockholm airport was very, very slow and by the time we had got out, the direct bus to Vasteras had gone. The next departure went via Stockholm through building morning peak hour traffic, adding an hour to the travel time. Not what we wanted. We’d assumed there were regular direct buses, but the system has changed since our last visit, and there are now fewer buses and some, as we found, take the circuitous route via the city centre.

We were very glad to get to Västerås and relax.

 

2019-09-17 Sri Lanka

What an amazing place. I will update with more text later, but for now, here are the annotated galleries of photos: You’ll see from the number of photos that we found Sri Lanka very photogenic.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/zJpq22xPNNiLGVBs5

https://photos.app.goo.gl/XvRmUypRuW4L67zL8

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8BmzHKM5fiUQmWVs9

https://photos.app.goo.gl/BGwgcF34H5UWK6Gu6

https://photos.app.goo.gl/s9MqMHjUaZ6KiYdv7

We used Dazzling Tours, and highly recommend them. They provided sound advice, a car and chauffeur (Nalaka, who was fantastic), picked us up at the airport when we arrived, dropped us at the airport at the end, and made sure everything in between was smooth and stress-free.

E-mail: info@dazzlingtours.com or dazzlingtourssrilanka@gmail.com

Websitewww.dazzlingtours.com

Face Book Fan Pagehttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Dazzling-Tours-Sri-Lanka/507081532722374

Reviews on TripAdvisor –  http://www.tripadvisor.com/5541620?m=19907