E 25 Nissan caravan luxury van

We are a Spanish couple who visited Sri Lanka and we had a fantastic experience with Ran during our visit. First of all, Ran is a reputable and certified official tourist guide with 25 years of experience in the job. After working for different tourist companies, he has now been working on his own for the last few years. Once you contact him, he will ask what places of Sri Lanka you are interested in visiting and he will customise the tour according to your needs and available days. Ran is always on time and he will take care of you during the whole tour and drive you around the country, which by the way is not an easy task. Traffic in Sri Lanka is quite chaotic but he is an experienced driver and you'll always feel safe during the trips. He owns a nice, clean and comfortable Toyota van, equipped with good air conditioning and enough space for up to 5 people. He is always taking care of his van and will keep it clean during the tour. He booked the hotels for us in advance at the places we wanted to visit and even bought train tickets before we arrived in Sri Lanka, but he didn't charge anything in advance. For me, the most important thing is that he is a serious, responsible and honest person. At the tourist places, he will guide you throughout and give his explanations, but he will never take you to tourist souvenir shops unless you request it. Ran is also a funny person with a great sense of humour. He has been through a lot of experiences with people from different nationalities during his years as a tourist guide and is always happy to keep up a good and interesting conversation during the trips. He has a really good knowledge of the English language. During our trip we met other tourists who had hired a driver and then another person as a guide, and were struggling to get hotels on their own at the touristic places in an attempt to save some money. Other people were hiring tuk-tuk drivers day by day and getting cheated by them, or travelling around in crappy buses with no air conditioning. My advice is: why would you do that when you can have a driver who is a guide at the same time, somebody you can trust who will take care of everything for you? At the end of the day, in my opinion, you will save money and headaches by hiring somebody like Ran and trusting in his experience. I really recommend Ran for your tour in Sri Lanka. As he said, we came as clients and left as friends!

November 17, 2017

A friend and I travelled with Ran and had a fantastic time. Ran had been recommended to me by a friend, so I got in touch, and we arranged everything via email. We mostly picked our own itinerary and went for a mix of accommodation choices — some places we picked ourselves, and some came recommended and were booked by Ran. Ran conveniently quoted an all-inclusive price upfront, which included petrol, driver accommodation and so on, and that was exactly what we paid in the end. Ran didn't only drive us, but also functioned as a guide — he gave us a great tour of the Dambulla caves which no guide book could have provided, and he showed us real local things and attractions which are not heavily promoted online but turned out to be wonderful, saving us from many tourist traps on the way, as well as hopefully making our travels a bit more responsible and sustainable. We found him incredibly knowledgeable about all things Sri Lanka; basically you can ask him anything and he will be able to explain. From the beginning we were quite keen to eat local food, being both keen vegetarian hobby cooks ourselves, so he took us to quite a few local food places to have a meal together, sampling authentic and cheap Sri Lankan food. He also managed to convince our hotels to give us Sri Lankan food for breakfast, as most hotels tend to only put bland western food on their menus, presumably because they assume a lot of tourists can't take a bit of spice. We were 100% happy, and very much recommend his services!

September 24, 2017