21 December 2012-6 January 2013

Sri Lanka and the Maldives

This trip started as many do, in my mind during another holiday. And it was just having returned from a jaunt around central and eastern Europe in January 2012 that I started the research for Christmas 2012/ New Years 2013 trip.

Before I go much further I should explain that my girlfriend, if left to her own devices would have us exclusively on holidays in the less…first class... parts of the world. So for the past few years we have holidayed in Mongolia, Russia, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania etc. Now I enjoyed those places and there were enough cities like Prague, Budapest and Paris in the mix to satisfy my urges for luxury travel. But our trips have to have the right mix of rough and ready for her and swish and luxurious for me.

So this time we were going to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who picked which country. Because of my demanding travel appetite we had two weeks to play with around Christmas/ New Year and even that was tough to convince work of; one week travelling around the cultural attractions of Sri Lanka and one week in a resort in the Maldives.
After several months of planning and counting-down the trip was happening. I live in Canberra but my girlfriend is currently studying in Europe so we were both flying into Colombo on different planes. My carrier of choice is Emirates and this trip would mean my graduation from Silver to Gold Skywards after the touchdown in Colombo.

I began my journey at the Canberra airport, I was flying Qantas to Melbourne and had down the only respectable thing and used some points to upgrade myself to business, even though it was only a short flight it meant access to the lounge before the flight, sitting in 1A, some really good service and being able to race off the plane with my carryon (no checked bags is my personal challenge) to the check-in counter for Emirates.

This was one of Emirates’ dog legged flights through Singapore to Dubai but I was hopping off in Singapore to connect to the flight to Colombo along with 70 other passengers on my flight. I had used miles to upgrade this flight to Singapore to Business class as I had about 3 hours in Melbourne and wanted to make use the lounge and get an early taste of EK Gold. With the exception of one other eager beaver I was the only one in the lounge, so I helped myself to some delicious snacks and cold drinks and sat down, put my feet up and enjoyed the views of the planes.

As the lounge filled up and the time till the flight grew shorter it was funny to overhear the same phone conversation from just about everyone there “Hi, how’s it going?...oh me? I’m just in the Emirates lounge enjoying a glass of champagne living the high life…”. Not to be outdone I went over poured myself a glass of Moet (no Veuve…very disappointing) and started making some calls…

Not long later the boarding call was made and people slowly trickled out of the lounge oasis and back into the regular airport. Boarding was quite smooth (no red light as they scanned my boarding pass…  ) and before I knew it I was being offered some wine and nuts in my seat. Very civilized. This was a Boeing not an A380 but the seats were decent as was the view from my seat of a freak lightning storm in the air not more than 2 minutes after the much talked about December 21, 11.11am Mayan time end of the world… But the world and the Emirates flight carried on.

Some nice service and a few movies later we began our descent into Singapore. Although I did notice that one woman was getting a lot of special attention from the EK staff, I assumed she was either Gold or IO and looked forward to my return flight and extra special treatment. I disembarked, the flight was running a little late so it was almost time to catch the flight to Colombo.

More to come.