A Lady in London

After my foodie trip to Madrid, I decided I needed to cut back on my calorie consumption for at least a day. Then I remembered that I had been invited by Travel Onion to attend a dinner at the Andaz Hotel in London. Located right next to Liverpool Street station, the hotel had no fewer than four restaurants and two bars, and I was offered a chance to sample a bit from each of them. With that much food and drink involved, I couldn’t say no.

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Less than a week after I returned to London from Singapore, I was already starting to miss good Singaporean food. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long to try more of it. Nor did I have to go very far to do so.

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After three weeks of traveling in Asia, I was ready to return to London. But when my flight touched down at Heathrow at 4:30am, the dark, damp reality of winter had me wishing I were off traveling again. As a partial concession to this desire, I had an invitation to stay at Flemings hotel in Mayfair, where I planned to spend a one-night staycation in denial of being back in the cold.

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After almost three weeks of traveling in Asia, exhaustion started to overtake me. I had been to three countries—one of them three times—and had not spent more than three nights in any one place. But I still had another destination on my itinerary before my trip was over: Ho Chi Minh City.

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After traveling through Sri Lanka for 10 days, it was time for me to head back to Singapore. I took a red-eye flight that arrived at Changi Airport at 8am, and had breakfast in the BA First Lounge before starting my day in the city-state.

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I love train travel. I never traveled by train growing up, and despite taking trains all over Europe since moving to London, it’s still a novelty to me.

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After visiting the legendary city of Kandy, the next stop on my Asia travel itinerary was the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka.

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After my tranquil stay at Ceylon Tea Trails, my Sri Lankan travels continued in another location in the hill country: Kandy.

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After the big New Year’s Eve party in Unawatuna, I spent most of New Year’s Day in a car. Six hours from Unawatuna lie the mountains of Ceylon, which are at the heart of Sri Lanka’s tea country.

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After a great day first day in Sri Lanka, I waved good-bye to Colombo and traveled south. With me was a friend of a friend, who drove the two of us and his brother to Unawatuna—a beach town near Galle—for a big New Year’s Eve party.

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Following my visit to Langkawi, I headed to Sri Lanka to start what would be the longest portion of my winter sun holiday in Asia. After a three-and-a-half hour flight from Singapore, I arrived in Colombo late at night and took a taxi from the airport to my hotel, the Tintagel Colombo. There I found myself in a beautiful 10-room boutique hotel that was formerly a mansion belonging to the family of the first female president of Sri Lanka.

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