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.