コロンボ空港 (CMB)からカンディ (KDW)までのバンは

The journey was fine and we felt safe in the car. However, there was another passenger in the car with us (we were 2 women) and the driver heavily favoured him. At the start of the journey, the driver bought us all water, which we appreciated as it was an extremely hot and humid day, but the other passenger received a 1L cold bottle of water whereas we each received 500mL bottles of room temperature water. The driver also happily made two stops for the other passenger to buy fruit, but when one of us requested a bathroom stop, the driver responded with "is this an emergency?" and only stopped when the other passenger pointed out that there might be a facility inside a building we were driving past. It was disappointing that the other passenger seemed to be more attentive to our needs than the driver. The driver justified this at the time by saying that our hotel was 10-15 minutes away. The driver then started driving up a mountain. We were quite confused, as we should have been 5 minutes away from our hotel at this point and the mountain did not seem to be on the way to our hotel. We found out, 20 minutes later and now on top of the mountain, that the driver had decided to drop the other passenger off first instead, despite our hotel being much closer and arguably on the way to the other passenger's hotel, and also despite the fact that the other passenger only booked his accommodation halfway through the ride whereas we had provided our accommodation details well in advance. This sudden shift in priorities resulted in us arriving at our accommodation 30 minutes later than necessary - it would have made far more sense to drop us off first as the other passenger's accommodation was much more of a detour whereas our hotel was literally 5 minutes away at one point, so we have to conclude that this was the result of some strange prioritisation by the driver. Overall, this experience really gave a sour start to our trip in Sri Lanka. While our driver Shan was perfectly friendly and courteous in a sense, as two Asian women, we did not feel like we were treated with the equality and dignity we deserve given we each are equal customers who paid the same amount as the other passenger, a Caucasian man.

I arrived at the meeting point as agreed, 30 minutes before departure. When no bus had arrived even 20 minutes after the scheduled time and I contacted the company, a different vehicle than the one I had booked suddenly showed up (a private car instead of a bus). The driver couldn’t explain how he got my number or whether he was from the company. As a woman traveling alone, this was rather frightening. Nevertheless, the driver was kind and courteous and took me safely to the hostel.