Andrea

Waking up today and going down to breakfast was a large wakeup call. Actually there were two wake up calls. First of all, our across the hall mates, had a fight. It must have been really big, because the girl decided to leave the tour. Secondly we found out our hotel was very muslim, and there were few girls showing their shoulders. It was defiantly the push I needed to go back to my room and change before we went out for the rest of the day. I changed to a dress that covered my shoulders in [...]

Today we headed out for a long drive to Bosnia. Today’s movie of choice was Meet the Millers. I mention this, because this movie has a classic character in it. Scottie P. He has a catch phrase that became our running joke all through the movie. “You know what I’m saying?” He says it after everything he says. Also he has a tattoo that says No RAGRETS. “What’s the one right there?” “Oh this? This is my credo, No Regrets” “How about that. You have no regrets?” “Nope” “Like, not even a sin [...]

Today was our free day in Budva, and for a rainy day we tried to make the most of it. First off we slept in. I think we didn’t got out of bed until 11am. Which for anyone who knows me, is not usually a thing I can do. But it was nice to have a slow start to the day and spend some time catching up with family and reading. We did manage to get our buffet breakfast right before they closed to prep for lunch. I think I had toast. When we finally got dressed, we decided to brave the weather and [...]

Day four of Best of the Balkans. Breakfast was another buffet. I had cereal. We all piled into the Contiki bus to drive to Montenegro. All of us were sad to see Dubrovnik go. It was such a magical city. However the drive out of Dubrovnik was almost as magical. To leave Dubrovnik to go towards Montenegro, you need to zig-zag all the way up the mountain. Which basically meant we had gorgeous views of Dubrovnik the whole way up. Our driver Marco, was awesome an found a photo spot for us all t [...]

Day Three of our Best of Balkans tour. I started the day off with a run around the harbour. I loved the fact that I could see the harbour in the early morning light with only the locals around. It was really quite, other then the fish market down the street. The downside of this run was that there was only so far you could go before the streets started going up hill. So I ran so a bit then gave up when I was in a residential area and wanted to make sure I could remember the twists and tur [...]

Day Two of our Best of Balkans tour. Today we started off with free time in Split. Our guide walked us to the old town of Split and gave us a few options of what to do. So quick background on Split. Split is the second largest city in Croatia. According to our travel guide Carly, an old Roman Emperor called Diocletian thought Split to be the most beautiful spot in Croatia.  So he decided to build his retirement house there. (A note – online sources seem to think he choose the spot inste [...]

It’s the First Day of the Best of the Balkans Contiki tour. I took this trip with my husband Andrew. We were one of two married couples on this tour. The rest of the trip was a group of 35 people with the majority between the ages of 25-35. We had flown into Split, Croatia the night before, so that we could get a good night sleep and be awake when we met the group at 6pm for dinner and drinks. Or Contiki set up a meet up group so we knew that two other girls on our trip did the same thing [...]

Day fifteen, and we were ready for our beach vacation. We could not wait to get out of Columbo. It was dirty, it was dusty, and there were too many swindlers. So we got breakfast at the hotel before we jumped into a tuk tuk to go to the train station. The Tuk Tuk driver tried to convince us to let him drive us to Galle, but I don’t think he understood how excited we were for the train. We got to the train early, and the thing to remember about the trains in Sri Lanka, is that the trains do [...]

Day fourteen we arrived in Colombo. This was our last officially guided day on our tour. after that we were on our own. We decided after watching a lot of travel docs, that we would only spend one night in Colombo then make our way down south for a few days. Mainly all the advice we got was – Colombo is a terrible city, but the rest of the country is lovely. Needless to say I am glad we followed this advice. Colombo is a lot of things. it is the biggest city in Sri Lanka. Its where all the [...]

So on day thirteen we stayed at Turyaa Kalutara by Aitken Spence Hotel all day long. We decided to just relax and enjoy the hotel instead of going off site and trying to explore town. It was relaxing. They have a large pool, which is necessary as the waves on the beach were too large to swim. There is a fence that blocks off the beach from the hotel. Once you pass the fence you are bugged by tuck took drivers, vendors selling elephant pants and people offering to take you on an excursion. [...]

This morning we signed up for whale watching in Marissa. So we got our breakfast packed up to go and headed out to the boat. However it was raining and the seas were really rough, so we had to cancel, which was sad because the whale watchers had seen a bunch of blue whales in the area. So we headed back to the hotel to wait for a decent hour to leave to go to Galle. We were so excited to see Galle. We had seen it on the TV show “The Amazing Race” and wanted to see it in real life. This cit [...]

5 am wake up call today. Yikes. But we wanted to get to Yala National Park for 6am, so on the road we went. We got our breakfasts boxed up and ready to go. After our Safari yesterday we were so pumped to go on another Safari. Its like the ultimate I Spy adventure. We had a different Safari guide today. This time we had our driver as our guide. As we went through the park, we found that this is not actually as amazing as having a driver and a guide. On this Safari we had to be more on guard [...]