Travel and Experience: May 2012

Bentota, a beautiful beach town in Sri Lanka

Last month I got an opportunity to visit Bentota, Sri Lanka. As per arrangements made by our tour operator and the input we got from www.tripadvisor.com, we stayed in hotel Club Bentota (www.clubbentota.com), which has been set on area of about 80,000 sq. meters filled with palms and tropical trees.

Bentota is a beautiful beach town located in the western shore of Sri Lanka and is about 64 km south of Colombo, the capital city. There are several white sand beaches and mesmerising lagoons. This lovely destination has excellent tourist infrastructure, very good hotels and ample facilities of water sports, para sail, windsurf, beach volleyball etc.

In this beach town two rivers namely river Bentota and river Maduganga meets the Indian Ocean, at two different places.

A boat safari ride in mangroves of Maduganga, with its so many islands, is a lifetime experience. Tourists may also visit these islands according to their interest.The largest island is called Ma doowa, and as told by my boatman, about 300 families still live within this island. The Kothduwa temple dedicated to Lord Buddha, is located in the most visited Kothduwa Island. Cinnamon Island is another very popular place to visit, where peeling of cinnamon and preparation of cinnamon oil is demonstrated to the curious tourists. The process of making rope from the coconut shells (brown fibre)is also demonstrated here.During this boat safari, visitors may also see different types of reptiles and birds such as monitor lizard & kingfishers.Boat trips can also arranged along the Bentota river.We could not resist but to capture the scenic beauty in my Fuji film Fine Pix Digital Camera.

Another interesting place to visit is turtle hatchery ,which is about 8 kms from central Bentota.Turtle hatchery, dedicated to conservation and welfare of turtles and located at the sea shore, is also worth seeing. They pay local fisherman for the turtle eggs they recover from beach, afterwards they hatch them. Ultimately new born baby turtles are released in to the sea.

Following are some of the photographs of Bentota, which I could save in my Compaq Presario Laptop.