Trip Report and Budget
(vero;2018-Sep-22)
During this trip we discovered a new country, Sri Lanka, and explored parts of India we had never seen before: the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujarat, Amritsar and parts of the Punjab.
- Sri Lanka: we had a nice and interesting time, our personal highlights being the hill country (Ella and Haputale), the Jaffna peninsula, Sigiriya and Dambulla's cave temples. Sri Lanka has everything to please visitors: sea and beaches, national parks with elephants and wild life, cultural highlights and breathtaking landscapes. Add to this friendly people, spicy food, good accommodation and short travelling distances, you get a gentle and easy going country, a perfect introduction to travelling in South Asia. As far as we're concerned, we found the country as a whole a bit tame and it rained too much to our liking; we sent a short mail from Mumbai with our first impressions which you might find interesting.
- India: our fifth visit and as fascinating as ever. We loved Gujarat, its hill-top Jain temples reached with fellow pilgrims climbing endless flights of steps in the early morning hours, the amazing shipyards of Veraval, the old town of Ahmedabad and the magnificent Sun temple of Modhera. Our next destination, Rajasthan, turned out to be quite a letdown: we had been there already twice, in 2004 and 2009 and except Udaipur which was still pleasant, we found Jaisalmer way too touristy, Jodhpur horribly polluted and suffering under an incredible amount of traffic while Bikaner's old town had quite a derelict feeling which we did not remember from the past. We had started this trip with the express will to visit Amritsar at last, a town we always wanted to see but somehow never managed to reach. This time we were committed and embarked on a long bus journey which brought us from Bikaner to the Punjab and which retrospectively, combined with our stay in Amritsar, turned out to be a highlight of the trip.
Sri Lanka
We were there for 23 days and managed on a budget of 3012 Rs (€16/£14) per day for the two of us. More than half of it was for accommodation (54%), then came the entry fees (24%), food (15%) and local transport (7%).
- Hotels: for the first time in our travelling history we have been booking half of our rooms in advance on booking.com. We have mixed feelings about this. On the positive side, it removed much of the stress of looking for a place but on the negative side, although we were rarely disappointed, we did not fancy the idea of being committed; we missed the opportunity of finding a cheaper and better guest house nearby or getting a better room than the one allocated. We found the level of accommodation in Sri Lanka quite high with clean and comfortable rooms, all of them with attached bathroom. The most expensive room was in Unawatuna where we paid 2500 Rs, the cheapest was in Anuradhapura where we paid 1000 Rs (both without breakfast). We had two outstanding guest houses which we are happy to recommend, both booked on booking.com: Villa 67 (previously called Petmart Resort) in Negombo and Akila Homestay in Sigiriya. Note that all our rooms were non-AC.
- Entry Fees: we found entry fees quite steep and we had to be discerning about what we wanted to see. We visited the temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic in Kandy (1500 Rs), Pidurangula Rock in Sigiriya (500 Rs), the Dambulla cave temples (1500 Rs), Polonnaruwa (3875 Rs), the Isurumunuiya Vihara in Anuradhapura (200 Rs) and the site of Mihintale (1000 Rs). Retrospectively, the only site we regret not having visited is Sigiriya Rock but the 30 US$ fee seemed quite expensive at the time and we were happy to content ourselves with Pidurangula Rock which provided a perfect view of the Sigiriya Rock. Note that all given prices are per person.
- Food: it was good, spicy and cheap, although not always easy to find in the evening. We do not like eating in our guest house and prefer going out, but we soon discovered that Sri Lankans are not keen on eating outside in the evening, preferring to stay home. Small street restaurants close quite early in the day (5 to 6 pm) so we had to adapt and thrived on street food, mainly samosas and patties in all kinds and forms. We also keep a fond memory of many tasty cakes. As usual we abstained from alcohol and purified our water.
- Local Transport: we used public transportation only and it was incredibly cheap. We covered a lot of ground by train, travelling unreserved and third class. We took the train from Negombo to Galle via Colombo, did the obligatory scenic ride from Ella to Kandy, stopping en route in Haputale and used the train to travel from Anuradhapura to Jaffna and back to Negombo via Colombo. We used buses for the rest of our travels and liked the fact that distances are relatively short throughout the island; our longest trip was the one from Unawatuna to Ella with a change of bus in Matara. We left Unawatuna before 07:00, arrived in Ella around 15:00.
India
We were there for 34 days and managed on a budget of 1173 Rs (€15/£13) per day for the two of us. Nearly half of it was for accommodation (48%), then came local transport (22%), food (16%), fees (9%) and a few souvenirs (5%). This is more than what we spent during our last trip in 2015: our daily average back then was 880 Rs for the two of us, an increase of 33%, mainly due to an inflation of 13.5% between 2015 and 2018, a rise in the price of accommodation and a lot of ground covered by public transport.
- Hotels: the average room price seems a bit low at Rs 566 but this includes two night journeys which both brought the average value down. Our most expensive room was predictably in Mumbai where we paid Rs 1300 for a room with shared bathroom, our cheapest was in Jaisalmer where we paid Rs 140 for a room with attached bathroom (actually the worst room of our trip although it had raving reviews on booking.com). As long as we were in Gujarat and on the road between Bikaner and Amritsar, which means in places not seeing many foreign tourists, our average hotel room price was around Rs 700-750. This decreased significantly when we were in the touristy towns of Rajasthan where there are many guest houses competing against each other. Our average room price there was around Rs 350-400. Note that all our rooms were non-AC.
- Local Transport: we covered a lot of ground in the 34 days we were in India. It started with a night train from Mumbai to Bhavnagar (3A Class 1125 Rs per person). Once in Gujarat, distances were short and manageable. We moved next to Rajasthan and had a very long journey to travel from Bikaner to Amritsar, which we made in three legs, sleeping in the towns of Sri Ganganagar and Faridkot on the way. It was at the moment a bit tiring but we have good memories of this part of the trip. Finally we took a night bus from Amritsar to Delhi (800 Rs per person) where we spent a few days before flying back home.
- Food: as usual, our diet is very simple… Thalis and snacks, purified water and the occasional fizzy drink, no alcohol. Looking back on previous Indian trips we seem to have kept the same average daily budget for food but in reality we found it really hard to find good thalis in small joints as we used to; maybe a feature of northern India? Even in towns in Rajasthan we had visited before, we headed to places we remembered just to find out that they were not serving unlimited thalis anymore or that the prices had really rocketed which made us wonder how the locals manage nowadays.
- Entry Fees: we visited the Sun Temple at Modhera (Rs 200), Udaipur's City Palace (Rs 300), Jodhpur's Mehrangarh Fort (Rs 600) and Delhi's Red Fort (Rs 500). Note that given prices are per person.
Want to read more? Go back to Introduction or go on to Sri Lankan Snapshot or go up to Blog
$ updated from: Blog.htxt Fri 16 Aug 2024 15:40:09 trvl2 — Copyright © 2024 Vero and Thomas Lauer unless otherwise stated | All rights reserved $