Accommodation in Sri Lanka

As mentioned in my previous post, our options for accomodation in Sri Lanka were pretty limited, after taking into account of budget, location and comfort (and also the last minute booking!). Here's a list of hotel/guesthouses that we stayed in:

Colombo - Moss B&B
This is a new establishment, probably only less than a year old. It has 14 rooms including some shared rooms. The rate that we paid for a double room was USD56. This is a small no-frills guesthouse but it's nothing like the normal dinghy 3-star hotels that Colombo seems to have a surplus of. It's minimalist and modern - with concrete floors and backsplash, champagne bottles as vases and even haikus peppered throughout the property at the most obscoure places. A bed for the night with poetry thrown in.

"whirring city heat
relief in haikus
a hidden patch of moss"

The only downside is the location especially if you plan to be in the Colombo Fort area. But you can easily get a metered tuk-tuk to take you to the central tourist area (approx Rs300,000 or RM9). To compensate for this, the hotel is a 10-minutes walk to Barefoot Ceyon, a Sri Lankan institution as far as quality souvernirs are concerned.

The hotel is located down a narrow alley and is not that easy to locate especially if you arrive at night. Your landmark would be a huge Banyan tree on Bauddhaloka Mawatha  right at the turning into the alley.

Our room in Moss Colombo
- with Irf sprawled on the bed after the late night arrival in Colombo

Galle - Mango House
This was Irf's favourite hotel in Sri Lanka. The best part about this place is its location within the fort walls right smack in the middle of everything. It's a 5 minutes walk (or less) to many shops, cafes and restaurants. In fact, the back door of Odel is just next to the hotel. This also meant that we never needed to use the public toilets during our walk around the fort as we could go back to the hotel whenever we wanted. If you are in Galle for only 1 or 2 nights, I think it's best to stay within the Fort.

Mango House oozes with characters. It used to be a cinnamon factory and but has now been restored into a  a Dutch colonial-style villa. Despite its heritage, it also manages to be funky with splashes of vibrant colours on cushions and drapings and bollywood-style posters. It was nice to relax on the patio overlooking the garden with 2 huge mango trees with a cup of Ceylon tea.

Breakfast was fresh fruits, curd and treacle, fresh juices, coffee/tea and a choice of English, Continental or Sri Lankan breakfast. We chose the latter obviously, which consist of chilli omelette and pratha (roti canai for Malaysians). On the 2nd morning, we even had visitors literally swinging by. The purple-faced langurs looked like they could do with a banana or two from our fruit platter, or maybe even the omelette?

Our Sri Lankan breakfast...

...seriously eyed by one of the visiting langurs

Guest lounge cum reception cum breakfast hall

The corner where we could make coffee or tea - just next to our room

Tissa- Shangri-Lanka Village
I chose this hotel/guesthouse solely based on the rave reviews on Tripadvisor. Rohan, the owner, also managed to arrange our transfers to and from Tissa so that sealed the deal.

There's only 3 bungalows and throughout our 2-nights stay, only one of the other 2 bungalows was occupied and we barely noticed the other occupants. It really felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.

Each bungalow was huge and the bathroom was extra huge, probably bigger than our last flat in London. We did not take the full-board package but you can always order food for lunch or dinner. We ended up having all our meals there as there did not seem to have a decent restaurant within walking distance (there were a few restaurants but looked dodgy from outside). Oh, we did have visitors here too in the form of strutting peacocks. Bonus point - I now know how a peacock sounds like.

View from our room

No association with Shangri-La hotels...obviously

I was pleased to note that all the accomodations that we stayed in seemed to be enviromentally responsible. Not sure if it was a Sri Lankan thing? There were no packaged soaps or bottles of toiletteries - shower gel and syampoo were in ceramic jars. No plastic bottles - drinking water was served in glass bottles. And solar heaters too.

My only wish was that I had booked earlier to get cheaper rates!