Leaving Colombo

I was feeling a bit sad about leaving Colombo for Christmas because I know the next time I leave Sri Lanka it will be for good. We raced around all day finishing up reports and running last minute errands. Traffic in the city was horrendous and Ravi was 30minutes late picking us up (we were cutting it rather close as it was). There was a huge traffic jam and the drive to the airport was incredibly slow. At one point I thought that we were not going to make our flight. However Ravi to the rescue! In typical Sri Lankan style, he crossed over the meridian (the road to the airport is one of the few roads in Colombo that actually has any kind of divider or indications of lanes), and drove about 3 kms on the opposite side of the highway into on coming traffic with his hazard lights and his horn honking until we were out of the traffic jam.

When we got to the airport we found out that according to the new weight restrictions, 2 of our 4 bags were overweight. Rob shifted the contents of one overweight bag into one underweight bag. Now only one bag was over weight. However the second underweight bag was not really a bag but a box containing our Christmas tree which I was determined to bring to Hawaii for my family to enjoy. We could not stuff anything more into the box so Rob asked for a large plastic bag and crammed the box with the tree and a bunch of stuff from the overweight bag into the plastic bag and had it shrink wrapped. This wasted about 25 minutes of the agent’s time while we shifted the contents of our bags. With the new weight restrictions we will now travel with lighter bags - but more of them. Not really sure how this is saving the airline money. Anyways we made our flight and were soon on our way to Narita!