Wednesday 18 October 2017

Day 1 – The journey begins

The team had an early start, meeting at Calthorpe park school at 7am, where we met with the teachers and pupils to take the coach over to Gatwick. There was a constant flow of baggage coming into one small music room with most bags being larger than a lot of the pupils. At 7.30 the mammoth task of packing the coach began but amazingly we managed to hit the road to Gatwick by 8.

We arrived at Gatwick at 9.30…the M3 and M25 rush hour was kind to us. Check in was relatively simple and no queues as we had arrived 6hours before the flight… We killed time in duty free, restaurants and catching up with each other before the long flight to Dubai (7hrs).

We arrived in Dubai with no delays following a comfortable flight – everyone seemed to love the new Emirates A380. We then had a short wait at Dubai (2hrs) which was mostly taken up by security and walking to the connection. At 2.30am local time we sleepily boarded our flight to Colombo (4hrs). Again, another lovely Emirates flight, with a choice of Curry or Omelette for breakfast. Most opted for Omelette.


After landing we had a very easy time through immigration (nobody questioned the 500 toothbrushes and 750 teddies) where we then waited and waited and waited for our bags to arrive. We eventually got all our bags so proceeded to find our driver. We were then greeted with beautiful flower garlands that smelt divine. After approx. 40min drive to Negombo we arrived in a beachfront hotel where we had enough time to grab some food and have a much-needed freshen up before the group split. One group went off on a tourist trip while the other began a 10hr journey up to Killinochchi… A sleepless 27hrs and counting...

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