Cable car and Sentosa

Welcome back and Happy Easter!

Hope you have a relaxing break. In Singapore Good Friday is a holiday but not Easter Monday. But we do get two public holidays in May.

This time I have posted some photos of when Daniela and I went to Sentosa by cable car. Sentosa is the island just off Singapore where we had the dinner and dance and I was wearing a skirt! The most expensive, but by far the most interesting way to get to the island is by cable car. We went late afternoon, listened to some live jazz, saw the sunset, ate a pizza on the beach and caught the cable car back. It was a lovely evening and although Sentosa is a bit touristy and man-made it can still be lovely and is certainly a great way to spend a Saturday evening, just 45 minutes from home! I hope you enjoy the photos.

It's a busy and exciting time coming up over the next two months. The week after next I am going to Beijing for work for a week. Daniela will join me at the end and we'll have 3 days to look around. On 6 May we are booked to go to Bali for a week on the beach. A week after returning from Bali I go to Istanbul, again for work, and get to spend 8 days there. I am taking a couple of days free to explore. Istanbul has always been on my list of places I really want to see, but I never thought I'd be going from Singapore! And then 10 days later we fly to London for a holiday to catch up with friends and family.

So look out on the blog. I'll update it as regularly as I can with photos of all the trips.

Take care and come back soon.

Love

Alan

Sri Lanka

Hello

I had a great time in Sri Lanka. Here are some photos.
I went two days early and took the opportunity to have a bit of a rest by the sea. There is a place called Negombo just 8 km from the airport. I enjoyed going for long walks on the beach (and you can walk a long way), reading a book of Short Stories by Somerset Maughan called "Far Eastern Tales" (somewhat appropriate), eating the local curry rice and drinking the local 'Lion' or Three Coins' beer(lots!).





The gentlemen you can see run a restaurant in Negombo called "Palm Lanka" and they do a mean curry rice. The restaurants I saw were all empty. Joseph, the shorter of the two, told me that the tsunami was still having a negative effect on the tourism there, even though the tsunami caused most damage and human suffering in the south of Sri Lanka.

The beach is wide and kept very clean by the hotels. It's not a place for diving and snorkelling but if, like me, you have a short time it's a perfect place to go. People do a lot of fishing and you can see the boats have a single sail. I was invited to go on an all night fishing trip but I was very conscious of the fact that I was really there for work and that making a call to Colombo to say I was hanging on to a piece of driftwood 12 km off the East Coast of Sri Lanka was possibly not going to go down very well. So I politely declined and made sure that I was ready to travel to Colombo to get to work.
























The picture of the palm tree and the sunset was taken on my last night, before leaving, from the balcony of my room. I was 'romantically' on my own!
























I did have a little time to see a little of Colombo. The pictures here, including the elephant and the car, were taken at a Temple on a Lake called Gangaramaya Temple. Lovely old cars, beautifully maintained can often be found in Temple grounds in this part of the world. I have seen them in Thailand, Laos and now also in Sri Lanka. They usually work as well!


































These last three pictures are taken from the promenade along the Ocean in Colombo. Possibly, for me, the best part of the city. The two tall identical towers that you can see are the the World Trade Centre. It is the tallest building in Sri Lanka















































The work I did was very interesting. There were people from Sri Lanka, The Maldives, Thailand, India and Pakistan. I returned to Singapore, exactly a week after I had left, feeling very "full" and, for once, I am not just talking about my stomach!

Come back soon! And thank you for visiting my blog.

Love

Alan