Safari add on to Maldives Trip

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Short answer : yes, we did it was incredibly easy and fantastic value . Many of the dive guides in the Maldives go to Sri Lanka for a week off and local Maldivians go there for shopping and healthcare. Would highly recommend it.

Long answer

To celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary and our 25th year together, we did this wonderful trip in December 2017. We book all our trips ourselves and don’t bother with companies. We flew from London to Colombo and then caught a car to our first stop, Marissa. We picked this town because of its beautiful beach and the fact that it is one of the ports that offers blue whale watching. We stayed in a very nice boutique style family run hotel with a pool and a garden and great food and loved it. The blue whale watching is not an experience out of a David Attenborough film, but we did get to see two whales and felt so incredibly lucky to have done so. We then caught another transfer to Yala National Park, stayed in Cinnamon Yala, a beautiful property with a pool. We did twice daily game drive, saw lots of elephants, beautiful birds, many mammals but not unfortunately the elusive leopard. After 5 nights there we caught another transfer to Colombo and the evening Emirates flight to Male for two weeks diving in the Maldives.
 
That's awesome Tippytoes, but I'm going to drag 12 people half way around the world. I'll probably stick to a tour operator with a good rep. Aggressor is the only one I know of (being a dive nerd and all). But thanks for the input (I owe you 2 cents).
 
The two parks that most operators visit in Sri Lanka are Yala National Park and Wilpattu National Park. Both are nice in their own way. Yala is the more popular park with more frequent animal sightings. Wilpattu has has more scrub forest and woodland so you tend to see less animals but when you do the encounters are very good. The Aggressor Lodge is near Wilpattu. If you are booking your Maldives diving with Aggressor it might make sense to go that route.

For other local options, Cinnamon and Jetwing are good local resort chains. Uga and Resplendent Ceylon have smaller, high end properties including luxury tented lodges at Yala National Park. Leopard Trails is an independent luxury safari lodge operator specializing in safari tours in both Yala and Wilpattu. There are several other good options as well.

When do you plan to travel? Sri Lanka is open to tourists now but there are some restrictions and vaccination / quarantine requirements to take into account.
 
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