After our time with Mum in Mirissa and Galle, we farewelled her and moved up the coast to Unawatuna beach for five nights.  This is the most popular beach along the south coast and there are lots of tourists and places to stay here.  Normally we book ahead but this time decided to be typical backpackers and wander around until we found somewhere we liked.  This turned out to be a useful exercise, as we discovered that over the last year the beach layout had changed and lots of the hotels no longer had access to the beach.  After visiting 11 guesthouses we found Boomerang – a simple beachfront place that had a view of the ocean and a kitchen we could use for the extremely reasonable price of $20 NZD a night.  It was definitely worth the two hours of looking to find this, as cooking our own food saved us a lot of money and we still got to enjoy being right on the beach.

The beach was great – we spent time swimming, lying in deck chairs, walking to the fruit shop to get fresh tropical fruit to make smoothies and just generally relaxing.  We walked to the temple one evening and went out for dinner on our last night but spent most of our time just chilling – it was fantastic!