Day 1 / 2
Door: Elke
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Elke
10 Oktober 2016 | Sri Lanka, Colombo
Usually, the flights are not particularly the highlights of my trips, but this time I was quite looking forward to it, given that I had found out two weeks earlier that we were flying Emirates and transferring in Dubai. The flight numbers even started with EK - clearly suggesting that Emirates and I are made for each other (although our first flight also had an MH number…). By now, that initial excitement has mostly subsided. The planes start out to be awesome when you enter, but the further you proceed to the back of the plane, the more it starts looking like any other airline and obviously the back is where my seat was. Granted, on leg space they do score high, which I truly appreciated given that I did not get an aisle seat. The food did smell and look okay, but I was slightly disappointed that they woke me for that after I managed to doze off, despite the blanket and earplugs and the fact that it was 1 am Amsterdam time.
What I did like was the fact that the plane had camera’s on the outside that allowed you to look at the surroundings from three different perspectives, offering an interesting view of the vast sandpit surrounding Dubai. Really, there is the city which from the air and from a distance from the airport looks good (although not much more impressive than any other large city), but absolutely nothing else than sand around for hundreds of kilometers. It was amazing to see and sobering at the same time. The airport was also not as grand as I had hoped it to be and in terms of organization even less impressive, although they did manage to get all our luggage transferred between airplanes at two different terminals in a transfer time of less than two hours.
The second leg of our journey was a bit more bumpy and filled with screaming kids. After 11 hours of flying at night time and a transfer after 6.5 hours we arrived in Colombo. After passing a large number of electronic stores at the airport (apparently when people return from working abroad for a couple of years, they are allowed once to buy appliances at reduced tax rates, which most of them do only to resell at higher price on the normal market) we were warmly welcomed with a garland of lovely smelling temple flowers and the greeting “ayubowan” (may you live long). Due to the delay, we made it to the hotel later than scheduled. Since we were all rather weary, we took our time to settle in. We got our first glimpse of the ocean, but from behind a closed fence and then had dinner with the 31(!) participants of this trip. I thought this number was more than optimal and at that time I dreaded having to find my place in a group that large, but things did work out well in the end.
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