We said farewell to Tringa Villas Yala and we were not sorry to move on. The owner was conspicuous by his absent and we only saw him the first evening, when he was concerned we might give him a poor write up. The rest of the time the place seemed to be managed by the cook who tried to do everything and was obviously so busy that raising a smile was hard work. It’s a pity the owner, who had a lot of charm didn’t spend more time growing the business particularly if he wants customers to give his setting glowing reports. We were disappointed with our choice of accommodation, the food it served and the complete lack of cleaning over our 4 night stay. What’s more they charged us for daily water… even in the cheapest of places we were given 2 bottles a day…… and they charged our driver for his food which was no more than very basic…. They also didn’t take credit card payments, luckily we had enough cash on us to pay….. Would we stay there again… No .

So we headed to the fast toll road and whizzed along to Mirissa. We were quite excited about our 4 night stay at The Sea World Botique ( their spelling!). It was more expensive than a lot of our accommodation so we had high hopes of a wonderful relaxing couple of days……

Alas …. The Sea World Botique didn’t have us booked in until 21st February for 3 nights and they were fully booked….you can imagine I was not amused…we had specifically booked this boutique hotel because it was small, more personal and more upmarket. Suminda our trusty guide and driver had several discussions with Jetwing travel and the lady in charge of our booking. She apologised and admitted it was her mistake but this didn’t really sooth my annoyance. She gave us one option for the night, which she said was a better hotel ( it was nice but at first sight it didn’t seem as nice as our original booking). This was Beach & Bliss hotel. When we got there they only had a second floor room which meant doing about 50 steps…I said “ no way”  I’d have to go down to the pool, beach, restaurant etc and back up again to change, rest etc…so several hundred steps which I just can’t manage. They were very kind and said they would serve our meals in our room. But I didn’t want to be a prisoner in the room because of a booking mistake. I asked Suminda to request that his Jetwing lady to give us other options…this went on for a considerable length of time with no other options being offered apart from we could have half board at Beach & Bliss….considering it was a cheaper hotel ( according to booking.com) this didn’t really cut it with us. The manager at Beach and Bliss was very kind and  altered all his bookings around to give us a 1st floor room, which we had no choice but to accept. It took a while for me to stop feeling cross because not only  didn’t we get to stay in the hotel we had selected and thought we had booked but we were going to have to give up a half day to change hotel again.
Having said all that Beach & Bliss is a lovely hotel, the food is superb, the manager and waiters very caring and attentive and they have been extremely kind. The pool, deck area overlooking the sea and the restaurant looking at surfers is sublime….it could well be nicer than the hotel we’ve booked…we don’t know because we haven’t seen our room there or eaten there…..we can definitely recommend Beach & Bliss.  Lovely room overlooking the sea with balcony, good air-con etc.. We had a well needed swim in the pool a relax on the sun-lounger then retired to our room to make use of the speedy WiFi.

We decided to eat off the half board menu and for our evening meal we had – spring roll followed by pumpkin soup and assorted breads followed by pineapple sorbet. I chose grilled tuna steak for my main course and John elected to have pork chops. For dessert I had “grape sausage’ with ice cream which was pancakes with a lovely sauce and John had fruit salad and ice cream. The meal was sublime… the best we’ve had in Sri Lanka by a long way.

We went to bed to the sound of the sea… although the day had a big hiccup, we ended up in a lovely place.