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Dear Shawn,
Our trip to Sri Lanka was a great success and we are grateful for the effort you put into rearranging our holiday when we had to cancel Egypt at the last minute. The suggested itinerary worked well and we enjoyed all the places at which you recommended we stay. We were also glad to be able to recommend you to some people whom we met en route whose experiences had been less happy.
Thank you – this was our third trip with Indus Tours and we shall look forward to arranging other trips through you.
We thought it might be useful if we made some particular comments about the trip:
Sri Lanka Air:
Fine – Club seats on return flight much better than outward.
Cinnamon Grand:
Lagoon Seafood restaurant is excellent.
Norwood Bungalow:
Excellent service and great location. Tea factory tour was fascinating.
Yala camping:
If we had a bit of an issue with accommodation, it was here. The camp was not ‘super luxury’ – they have much to learn from African safari companies in this regard – but was acceptable even though the standard of cleaning in the bathroom area left something to be desired. The food was only fair: they would do better to concentrate on getting a reduced number of courses up to a really good standard.
That said, we really enjoyed the game drives and the staff were attentive and pleasant.
Kahanda Kanda:
This was a highlight and we were so glad not to have been in Galle itself. Yes, a car needs to be available but that is a small price to pay to be in such a wonderful place.
Reef Villas:
Nice place with good food.
Car/driver:
These were adequate but rather disappointing. As one would expect, the driver, Chandra, was careful, safe and reasonably informative. However, he was unable to estimate realistic journey times – they always took far longer (sometimes 50% longer) than he said they would without any obvious reasons such as traffic or road works. We learned to cope with this although his poor timing meant that we had to miss our first evening’s game drive at Yala. It was also tiresome that he constantly received and took telephone calls……safely enough as he always stopped, but he should not have been doing it.
His car was just about acceptable but compared unfavourably with that of the guide/driver who took us from Reef Villas to the airport. He and his vehicle were both in a different class.
Chandra also had (in my view and after I had taken local advice) an unrealistic view of what his tip should be.
Best regards,
Hugh A J Shuttleworth |
