Thursday 17th October 2024

We were up a little later this morning, enjoying the freedom that a monthly Poya Day brings, so we didn't have breakfast at Razeena's until 09:00, and we were presented with egg hoppers, plain hoppers, iddli, plus a host of other foods that would have almost done us for breakfast for a whole week. Razeena is simply amazing both in terms of the fantastic quality of her food, and her expectation of how much food we might realistically consume at any given mealtime.

After enjoying a sensible amount of Razeena's cooking, I had a very good meeting with a guy called Tharaka, who has set up a company called Project Roots, which seeks to link up people from the Sri Lankan diaspora with volunteering opportunities in Sri Lanka. He is keen to work with Tea Leaf Trust, and it was my job to give him an initial idea of all the work that Tea Leaf does in and around the tea estates in the Hill Country of Sri Lanka.

I then had a few minutes to complete my packing, as we were about to head off for a 2-night 'mystery' break to celebrate Sandra's birthday and Ravi's too, as he was born on her birthday. Part of the 'mystery' is that we weren't supposed to know that they were celebrating their birthdays tomorrow! We were driven to a very pleasant villa called 'Sunbird' not far from Negombo, where we are very clearly going to enjoy a lovely time with close members of Sandra's  family.

The 'Sunbird' villa has a small swimming pool in beautiful grounds, but the highlight for us was being able to pop out from the garden to the beach, where we watched the sunset over the Indian Ocean, something that I know I won't ever tire of. We had already had a lovely lunch on our arrival, and had more delicious food for dinner, after enjoying a great karaoke sessions in a very large reception room in the building that we are sleeping in, so a very good time was had by all.

Today's photographs show the 'Sunbird' villa, and shots by the Indian Ocean, then a couple by the pool, and a couple of lovely sunset ones.









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