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I don't know about you but every so often hubby and I start looking back at photos of the girls and are immediately left wondering where have our babies gone, repeatedly saying remember when she did that or said that like this? Well once in a while we go back to our wedding day and our honeymoon. Sri Lanka with it's culture, the amazing wildlife, staying in a tea factory, all the elephants, followed by a week in the Maldives of peaceful beaches, fish in the clear blue sea, nothing to do but read a book. Actually, every time we think of booking a holiday, I have a fleeting thought: why don't we just go to the Maldives again? It's such a popular honeymoon uber romantic holiday destination, I can still see that view from our villa when I close my eyes. I'm sure some islands are kid friendly! Hubby is definitely of the opinion that at some point we'll leave the girls with my parents and escape back there ourselves. One day. I'd love that too, but I'd also love them to grow up seeing such beautiful places. As H is 3.5 and B, 14 months, as much as we'd love to, we wont be going on holidays to Maldives in 2018, maybe in a few years. At the moment we're sticking to easy super toddler friendly holiday destinations like the Balearic's and Lanzarote.
However, back to our honeymoon, a clash of extremes. Ok, not the complete extreme we could have booked of a cosmopolitan Dubai's sky scrapers with the Maldives' tranquil clear blue sea, white sand deserted islands. The culture of Sri Lanka was a one of a kind, unlike anything I'd experienced before. We started at the beach, staying at the Jet Wing Beach hotel in Negombo near Columbo, and then were picked up by our private driver for the week who drove us to the Pinnawalea elephant orphanage, watching the elephants play in the river. There were tuk tuks everywhere, elephants by the side of the road, immense wildlife, all while staying in absolutely beautiful unique hotels juxtaposed with poverty. Temples, monkeys, elephant safaris, climbing Sigariya near Dambulla, staying at the Tea Factory in Nuwara Eliya - totally unique. Sri Lanka was wonderful, bar hubby's food poisoning(!) and we absolutely fell in love with the elephants. So many others were doing similar tours, and it did feel like we saw an awful lot, which did mean we spent quite a bit of time in the car travelling, but spending a week meant we also had days without travelling just to sight see. After seeing so much, and the build up to our wedding, we needed to relax too.
The second week of our honeymoon was spent a short flight away in the Maldives, and if we had the chance I'd definitely be taking our holidays to Maldives in 2018 too, the girls would love it - the beach and the sea are two of their favourite things! They'd also love watching the fish, and if anything like our honeymoon water villa, we spent a lot of time just watching them from our sun loungers, as well as snorkeling and canoeing round the island. We stayed in Meeru and the spas were incredible. We had massage over looking with clear blue sea. Fish swimming underneath. We relaxed. It was impossible not to. There were tennis courts, sports, canoeing, diving, boat trips... basically activities in the Maldives are rather water based exploring shipwrecks, snorkeling with turtles and whale sharks, submarine tours, scuba diving, water skiing, banana boating, kite boarding, windsurfing, jet skiing, windsurfing... along with every spa experience I could think of. Relaxing holidays, serene, idyllic, blue skied, clear sea locations.
I have to finish with one reason the Maldives are amazing... we were lucky enough to see the most amazing Maldives plankon - more accurately the Bioluminescent Phytoplankton, a rare occurence and something we were so lucky to experience.
