The best place I've ever visited | Steem Sri Lanka: Contest Series - Week 5 | My first ever camping trip

First I want to thank @damithudaya for organizing this amazing contest.

I have a friend named Nawo, I met her at university and bound to be really good friends. She really likes to travel, go camping and hiking. I like to travel but I’m not a usual traveller. It was Imantha’s birthday and I was planning to surprise him when nawo called me. She told me that they are planning a camping trip to Baththalangunduwa next day. It's Next day!!!

It was a trip I wanted to go because of the the things I heard from other people who went before. But I wasn’t sure whether to go or not since it is a sudden plan. Anyway I decided to go just a moment before they order our tents.

Baththalangunduwa…Where is it? Maybe you haven’t heard it before. And it is kind of a different name. This is a little island situated near Sri Lanka, near Kalpitiya lagoon and it belongs to Sri Lanka.

Location of the island

They have a police station, a navy camp, a church and one communication tower for the whole island. Fishing is the income of these people. If they need an any emergency medical facilities, navy would bring them into the main land using their speed boats.

There were 8 people in our group. All of them are students at our university. We gathered infront of university at midnight so we could go on time to catch the boat. Our route stars from University, Colombo main bus station, Palavi, Kalpitiya, then take the boat to Baththalangunduwa.

<sub>Ready to depart

On the roof of the boat</sub>

There is this memory we have, that bus conductor had to woke up us at the right bus stop to get off. We were all sleeping anyone couldn’t get it at once. He repeatedly said us to get off at the right place. Thanks to him we came to the Kalpitiya harbor on time.

As a necessary security measure, they collect details of travellers before they enter into the deck. And everyone was asked to wear life jackets before departing.

It was a new experience with the excitement to travel in a boat for 3 hours. Only three groups of campers were there including us. Because it was a weekday. The owner of the boat said that around 100 of travellers comes in the weekend for the camping. First thing at the island was to report to the police about our group as they needed for our security.

_{View of the island from the sea}

Camping site is situated in the opposite side of the houses of people. And someone looked like a leader has spoken with us when we get off the boat. There are some people lives in there who born in the main land as well.

_{Camping site with tents}

We have spent two days with sea baths, evening walks in beach, Watched sunset, campfire under moon light and BBQ night. We had lot of fun there. There is this problem about water, they have only limited amount of clean water at the island. So we didn’t forget to bring water cans for our consumption.

At the day of coming back, we got our breakfast, packed our bags and put them aside and started to clean the camping site. Collected all garbage into bags so we can dispose them properly.

It was really wonderful and memorable as my first camping trip. When we came back to main island corona had broken out. We were really lucky to come back home before locking down the country. Otherwise we were trapped there at the island.

_{Back at the main land}

Here is a collection of our memories.