Hiriketiya is a coastal town on the South coast of Sri Lanka and boy were we glad to see the ocean after a week of driving inland through the mountains.
We’ve made our way across the middle and down the centre of Lanka and now we’re on the second leg to work our way up the coast back towards Colombo. We hit the coast and stayed a dodgy little place called Hambantota, and in retrospect we wish we’d just pushed on to our next stop. Its a coastal village that hasn’t really been developed for tourism and there was nothing but the local produce market to see. Our hotel room looked over a salt pan and Sean had to drive 15km to the nearest bottle shop as the hotel didn’t stock beer 😳. Lucky the next day we left for Hiriketiya.
It’s a sleepy little village that’s only starting to get developed for tourism and the whole vibe of the place is super laid back, but there’s been heaps of great places to eat out and the beach is lovely. We got really lucky (mostly because it’s off peak season) and found this great villa on Airbnb for $85 Aus a night and we have the whole place to ourselves. We originally had it for 2 nights but when we got here we saw how nice it was and booked a third night. We’ve learnt the hard way that the hotel pictures online are usually not a true depiction of what you get, but we got lucky with this one.
We’ve been warned by the owners not leave any food out as we might get a few visitors otherwise, and we did.
We’ve had a great time here and found one of the best restaurants we’ve ever eaten at called Smoke and Bitters. We had dinner out overlooking the Indian Ocean under the stars.
The beach is great for swimming and surfing. I got stung by something in the water on our first day and my first thought is “shit I hope they don’t have Irukandji jellyfish here” and after a bit of google doctor and a soak in some really hot water I was fine (glad my surf life saving skills finally paid off).
There’s loads of restaurants and bars right on the beach so we have had afternoon beers watching the surf – it’s been pretty gnarly as it’s off season here now and it doesn’t calm down till around December.
It was really hard to leave this little slice of paradise.
SandSZeAdventures 