Sri Lanka

by Trevor Thorpe

I visited Beruwela in Sri Lanka on a 2 week all-inclusive holiday in December. I stayed at the Hotel Confifi which is a very small and basic hotel. I picked Sri Lanka because I wanted somewhere different – I have visited the Maldives before.

There is a dive shop run by the Confifi Group and their minibus picks you up every morning as well as stopping to pick up divers from the other hotels. The dive shop itself is on an inlet across a river so you have to get a boat across. I’m afraid that in my opinion there were quite a few problems. The staff are very helpful but their safety standards weren’t very good – in my opinion. Most of the dives were done in very strong currents which I thought was potentially dangerous for any inexperienced divers. I took my own equipment BCD., regulator, fins and mask which was just as well because their rental equipment was very basic and in need of repair.

To get from the dive shop to the sea the boat had to travel up the inlet and across where the tides met resulting in a 6 foot plus wave which if hit wrong swamped the boat. Anyway, when you did get into the open sea, the currents were so strong that you had to get to the bottom as fast as possible and the safety stop was impossible to hold. On one dive I buddied up with a BSAC. Divemaster from Wales and after the dive we tried to do the safety stop at 10 metres but the current was so strong that we aborted it. When we surfaced the boat had to throw lines out for the divers to hold onto or else they would have landed in India. I did 12 dives, some of the dive sites being Marina, Modoun, Siri, Shark Point, Mada, Atara Caves and Gorgon. I would definitely not dive there again. There isn’t much to see and the visibility isn’t that good either.They can only dive there November-March because the currents are so strong and they even warn you not to swim in the sea.

For non-divers it is an interesting country to visit and the elephant orphanage/sanctuary at Pinnawela is a must. There are many temples and ancient ruins and you can have a very interesting tour of the island interior seeing them and the tea plantations. The holiday cost me £8-900 & the diving another £3-400 and I travelled with Eclipse the direct sell arm of First Choice. The flight from Gatwick took ten – eleven hours. The weather was very pleasant in December although slightly humid and during the second week we did have several monsoon rainstorms.

To summarise: Interesting to visit, but as a diving destination - DON’ T GO!

Sri Lanka main page