Decision made, tickets booked.  Since it was our honeymoon, I looked into getting our seats upgraded to give us a little more luxury.  Sri Lankan do not have a First Class section of seating, so I enquired into prices for the Business Class.  Suffice to say, you had to double the cost of your flights to upgrade, we decided against it.  Business Class doesn’t get you to your destination any quicker anyhow.

However, Sri Lankan do have an Economy section of seating between the main block of Economy and Business Class.  We shall call it Premium Economy for the purposes of this review, but in fact you don’t get anything that normal Economy doesn’t, apart from a lower chance of having a screaming brat sat right behind you.  You pay £50 per person, per flight to sit in the Premium Economy section, which in my opinion is worth the money.

The day after our wedding, we travelled down to London Heathrow airport.  Terminal 4 is where Sri Lankan Airlines is located at London Heathrow.  Terminal 4 (at least on the departures side) had had a huge facelift and modernisation programme almost completed, and was a very nice place indeed to spend a few hours waiting for our flight.  There is plenty of seating, and a vast array of over-priced designer goods boutiques to keep you amused, wondering who pays these extreme prices, to waste away the hours.

Overall I was very impressed with Terminal 4, and the amount of work that has gone into it to bring it up to date is well implemented.

What isn’t so good about Terminal 4 is the staff, and their seeming incompetence at how to use the tannoy system to avert a stampede as the impatient travellers try to sneak through the boarding gate when clearly their seat numbers have not been called.

First impressions on the Premium Economy section were that it was nice and small, and luckily no screaming children seemed to be around.  It was a busier section compared to the Standard Economy, so don’t expect to get some spare seats next to you to stretch out onto.

The seats are exactly the same as Economy, as I expected, and from what I could tell, so is the legroom.  We were greeted by the rather rude cabin crew by them bringing round a basket of ‘freshen-up’ wipes.  These are just the same as the after dinner KFC hand wipes you get to wipe the grease off your hands from the family bucket meal.  With coleslaw.

We departed Heathrow around an hour late.  The weather was cold, and getting icy which was the excuse the Captain used when he apologised, but from the way the cabin crew were rushing around, they would never have been ready to leave on time.  Making an poor excuse about delays boarding the passengers due to the fiasco at the departure gate, would have been fine, but a blatent lie about the weather being the problem, irked me from the start.  Unfortunately, a Captain being less than open with truthful statements was going to be the norm for this flight, as you will find out later.

Leaving the cold December UK weather was a nice feeling.  Knowing that in just a few hours we would be, more or less, on the Equator let us overlook the few foibles with this rather old aircraft we were travelling on.  It was an Airbus A340-300.  I’m not sure of it’s age, but judging by the fact that it still had CRT monitors in the ceiling of the cabin would make me assume it was built some time ago.  The reclining operation of the seats was also rather hit and miss, and could probably do with some TLC.  What the aircraft did have though, was a TV in the back of the seat in front of you.  Whilst not the latest TV on demand style features of the more modern aircraft, it at least seemed to work well, even if the choice of what to watch was somewhat limited.  There also seemed to be a fair few games installed to keep big kids (like me) and small ones amused during the flight.

The meals and drinks are all included on a Sri Lankan flight, which was a nice change, seeing as my most recent trips have been with budget carriers.  Now, generally I am quite a big fan of airline food.  I’m not sure why, maybe it is an indicator that I am going on holiday, I’m not sure but I enjoyed most of the food.  The main meal was a Sri Lankan style chicken curry, and was very nice.  I don’t remember exactly what the dessert was, but I seem to remember it looked rather odd and not very appetising.  On the whole though, the food was good, but may not be to everyone’s taste with a British narrowband palate.

The majority of the flight was rather uneventful.  It was sometimes difficult to ruse a member of the crew if you wanted a drink or such, and it was even more difficult to find one of them smiling!

Onto the landing.  Or rather the lack of it.

We started out descent into Male at around midday local time.  The sun was shining, and we were now low enough to start seeing the atolls that make up the Maldives gliding past our window.  The decent continued, whilst our spirit ascended.  We were finally here.  Well.  Not quite.  We were now low enough, you could make out fishing boats with people on them, a few vehicles here and there, and people diving in the sea.  All was quiet as we glided towards our destination.

Suddenly, the engines roared back into life, and the aircraft banked sharply to the left and started climbing again.  I presumed that an aircraft already on the runway had not sufficiently cleared, or similar, and that we would just go around for another approach.  Not so.  The captain came on to the tannoy to inform us that there was heavy rain at the airport, and standard procedure is to now fly to the standby airport.  The Maldives, only has one airport, so that meant we were now on our way to Trivandrum airport in India!  Is this standard practice?  Why would the aircraft not join a holding pattern for a while to see if the heavy rain subsides?  We later found out, from some people that we met, that there was in fact heavy rain at midday in Male, but it only lasted for 15 minutes.  Surely this was a poor decision by the Captain?  I suspect, to save fuel costs, Sri Lankan had only put the minimum amount of fuel in the aircraft, hence why we could not simply ‘hold’ until the weather cleared.

Now we were starting our one hour (or thereabouts) flight to Trivandrum.  I had already started mentally calculating that we were going to run out of daylight hours pretty soon, and I knew that the seaplanes in the Maldives that take you to your resort stop flying at sunset.  We landed at Trivandrum, and it was a much smaller airport than I was expecting.  They obviously don’t have many large aircraft land there, as the chaps who were sent to refuel our aircraft didn’t really seem to know what they were doing!  In all it took around two hours for them to refuel us.  In this time, the air conditioning in the aircraft had been switched off, and the cabin was hot.  Extremely hot.  The cabin crew did not even come around with water, we had to go to the galley and request some.

Now comes the incident which led me to make the decision to never fly Sri Lankan ever again.  The actual route that the aircraft we were on is classed as a Heathrow to Colombo flight, but it goes via Male.  Now, the Captain had two choices.  Get his passengers going to Male to their correct destination, or get the aircraft back on schedule to please his management.  He made the wrong choice.  He chose to get the aircraft back on schedule and effectively he resigned most of his passenger to a night of misery.  The most galling part of this sorry tale was the fact he blatantly lied to us, by saying the weather in Male was still very bad, which we later found to be completely untrue.

We took to the skies once more, for another hour or so flight across to Bandaranaike Airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  We landed at nightfall, with almost no information given to us at all about how we were supposed to be getting to Male.  When leaving the aircraft an airport official was giving out transit cards, and directed us towards a restaurant where we would be able to get some food.  On the way to the restaurant we were told to go to the airport information desk to find out about the connecting flight which was apparently being sorted out for us.  Little information was given apart from the fact we were being put onto an Emirates flight leaving later that night, and to just turn up at the departure gate when it is announced.  Firstly though, a few hours to waste.  Bandaranaike Airport is actually a lot nicer than I was expecting.  It is all very new and looks like it was only built a few years ago.  It was meticulously clean, and an abundance of military and security staff made it feel a very safe place to be.

Unfortunately, there was very little to do to keep oneself amused.  There is very little entertainment, and not even many people around to be nosey at.  It was a long couple of hours.

Time for boarding the Emirates flight finally came around, only for a series of mild panic at the departure gate as the airport staff told us we needed to go halfway down the terminal to collect our boarding cards!  This created a lot of confusion for many people, and a simple lack of communication on the part of Sri Lankan Airline staff when we first got off our original aircraft.  Surely they must have had to divert aircraft to different airports before?  You would have imagined they would have a well oiled emergency plan in place.  It would seem not.

Entering the Emirates Boeing 777-200 was like a breathe of fresh air.  Modern, clean aircraft with the latest bells and whistles, but also the most important thing, happy, smiling, motivated staff.  The flight across to Male was relatively short at just over an hour, which in a strange way, was a shame, as we didn’t get to experience the great Emirates service to it’s full potential.

Arrival at Male was uneventful, but difficult to appreciate the views as is was now bathed in darkness.  After luggage reclaim, and being abruptly spat out into the arrivals area at the airport, it was what can only be described as organised chaos.  Lots of young Maldivian chaps wandering around trying to find the guests they are responsible for.  After a short wait, ours found us, and directed us towards a boat to take us across to the main island of Male, where we were going to be put up for the night.  As with everything, it would seem that Sri Lankan try to get away with paying as little as is possible for anything, and we were put in the Central Hotel.  You will see the standard of accommodation from the photo below, and certainly not the type of room I was expecting to be spending the first night of our honeymoon in.

After only a couple of hours sleep, we were up, and back across to the airport to get on the seaplane.  At last it seemed, we were back on track for our honeymoon!  No thanks to Sri Lankan Airlines…….

Just before the lovely Sezincote House, you make a right turn, and head down the hill towards a couple of small lakes.  Heading back up the hill on the other side and into the village of Bourton on the Hill.  You pop out just down the hill from a wonderful pub called the Horse and Groom, and the food looked amazing.  We only stopped for a beer in the garden as we had some dogs with us.

From Bourton on the Hill, head down the hill, and turn into the driveway to Batsford Arboretum.  Then picking up the Monarch’s Way to take you gently back into Moreton in Marsh.

In total, a distance of a shade under 7.5 miles, and only a couple of steep but short hills to deal with.

You can find all the details of the walk on my GPS track and trace of the route.

And also to test the hundreds of theme options that seem to be prevalent in this new install of WordPress!

Anyway, this will just be general blog for me to write or post anything about everything.

For now though, I will leave you with a wonderful photo of my beautiful wife and I at our wedding back in December 2010.

Feel free to say “Hi” in the comments. So I know they’re working, no?