Most tourists who come to Makadi Bay stay in all-inclusive hotels, sit by the pool all day drinking watered-down beer, and overindulge in huge mediocre buffets. Egypt is more expensive than Turkey for lower quality — generally a poor value for money. So why bother with Makadi Bay? The snorkeling!
It was after 2am when Ferda and I arrived at our pre-booked accommodation in Hurghada on flights from Antalya via İstanbul. Nothing really looks good after traveling all day (~11 hours) and arriving in the middle of the night, but Ferda and I really enjoyed our short stay with Adam at his Bob Marley Homestay. He made us yummy breakfasts every day — at about 11am the first day (we really managed to sleep in) and much earlier the following morning so we’d be well fed before our snorkeling excursion. We also ate dinner with Adam two nights.
No one has anything nice to say about Hurghada, but I’m glad we had a couple days there. It was cold and windy when we got off the plane and ended up being cold and windy our entire 11 days in Egypt. Blowing sand was a problem at times.
We walked around dusty Hurghada a bit, stopping at the Coptic Church near our hotel.
alternatively titled: It’s All About the Food
The closest thing I had to a guide book in Sri Lanka was one page of a website written by Yulia, a Russian woman who writes in English and is married to a Sri Lankan. The page is called The Ultimate Guide to Sri Lankan Food: 50 Must Try Dishes. When I first arrived in the country, I was sort of using the page as a reference to get some names of dishes and see what I recognize. After a couple weeks in the country, without even trying, I realized I had made it more than half way through Yulia’s list. It was only during my last week in Sri Lanka that I really started making an effort to find dishes on Yulia’s list that I hadn’t tried already.
For example, why bother ordering biryani when it’s a pretty standard rice dish in so many South and Southeast Asian countries? It was on Yulia’s list so I tried it one evening in Aluthgama:
Surprisingly good.
After the biryani dinner Yulia sent me on a fun expedition to track down homemade toffee. Did I find kiri toffee?
Continue readingMy longest stop in Sri Lanka was the ten days I spent at the beach town of Unawatuna. I took long walks each morning, went snorkeling most days, visited the UNESCO-listed city of Galle, and celebrated my birthday. Unawatuna is a small crescent-shaped beach with lots of places to stay set a bit back away from the beach.
Oops, in Sri Lanka I was doing a good job of writing these blog posts while the information was fresh in my mind. Now I’ve been back in Turkey about a month, but I still want to write about the end of this trip. I knew before I went to Sri Lanka that the snorkeling wasn’t very good, but I brought snorkeling gear with me and used it as an excuse to hang out at the beach a bit at the end of my bicycle tour. If you’re into surfing or kite surfing, that’s a better excuse to hang out on Sri Lanka’s beaches than snorkeling. Many locals say that the 2004 Christmas tsunami destroyed Sri Lanka’s coral reefs, but Aja, the friendly owner of the Green Turtle Snorkeling Center in Polhena, told me the reefs were in poor shape even before that disaster.
My first beach in Sri Lanka was Tangalle, and my first glimpse of the ocean was this, locals painfully and slowly hauling in fishing nets:
A young man came over and tried to get me to help them. I laughed and told him I’d been riding all morning in the sun, and the only thing I wanted to do now was rest in the shade and drink a mango juice. It was a good call as an hour later they were still at it pulling in the net. The young man came back, this time trying to sell me marijuana.
My first snorkeling in Sri Lanka was at Paravi Wella Beach in Tangalle, busy over the New Year holiday:
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