We went on holiday as a family with our 10 year old daughter

Mark, Rachel and Lily

15 April 2010

I would like to recommend Walk With Jith, if you are thinking of holidaying in Sri Lanka.

We went on holiday as a family with our 10 year old daughter at the start of April 2010 and were made really welcome from the very start of our holiday when Prasanjith  met us at the airport with  a big basket of flowers for our daughter. Although Prasanjith was unable to accompany us in person, as he was already accompanying a group of ‘Birders’, he arranged another driver , Allen, to look after us. Allen became ‘one of the family’ and fixer extraordinaire and was both a careful driver and considerate to our needs. Prasanjith made daily contact with us through Allen to ensure we were enjoying our holiday and were happy with the arrangements he had made for us and also met up with us several times on route so he could check that all was going well, (which it was!)

The hotels carefully chosen for us by Prasanjith were of a very comfortable standard and a couple, The Sigiriya Village and Amaya Hills were really superb. We had opted for half board and the buffet food we experienced for breakfast and dinner was of a high standard. My daughter could eat non-spicy western style food and my wife and I got to eat the delicious Sri Lankan curries (even for breakfast) that were always available. Fruit will never taste the same after the amazing melon and pineapple we ate on holiday.

The tour that was arranged for us was fantastic and met the specifications we had given to Prasanjith before our departure i.e. a mixture of culture, nature and R&R. Any changes we made to the itinerary during the course of the holiday  were no problem and we had the freedom to decide for example what time to set off in the morning and when to stop for lunch, a freedom we had not experienced when travelling in a group. Having a child with us we really appreciated having this flexibility.

We visited cultural sites including Sigiriya (it’s an amazing climb), Anuradhapura (enormous – Sri Lanka’s Pompeii) and Dambulla (beautiful and peaceful). We went to the Tea Plantations in the mountains, visited a botanical garden in Kandy where Prasanjith had arranged for a botanist to accompany us on a tour of the gardens (my personal passion being a gardener) and went on a safari in Udawalawa national park (the families highlight of the holiday) where we saw wild elephants, water buffalo, mongoose, crocodile, snakes, eagles, hornbills  and a whole host of beasties . We finished the tour with a very lazy 3 days on the beach at Unawatuna catching some rays, drinking G & T with fresh lime  and swimming in the sea.

Sri Lanka was the best holiday I’ve been on,the people were great, the scenery was great, everything was great. I can’t wait to go back. When I do so, I will certainly ask Walk With Jith to make the arrangements for us.

Mark, Rachel and Lily.