For Christmas day we decided to take a surf lesson! None of us had ever tried surfing before – only the occasional boogie board – so we thought it’d be good to do something physical and that we were all beginners at.

We went with a place that got excellent reviews (& we found out later how that happened!) and signed up for a beginners’ lesson on nearby Weligama beach with consistent, small waves.

First, we had to work out which was our dominant foot. For this you stand with your feet together and the instructor pushes you over from behind by surprise and the idea is that the foot you land with is the one. I am not sure how accurate this is as M felt it should have been his other foot. After a quick check with the instructor, relating how he batted in cricket the other foot was chosen. (Sri Lankans love their cricket in case you didn’t realise – one of the nicer hangovers of being an ex-British colony.)

We started with our soft boards on the sand, lying on them and then having to practise pushing up and then getting our feet into position. We seemed to get the hang of it on land but, as you may imagine, the water adds an extra layer of complexity.

The kids were in the white water (i.e. after the wave has broken) but the adults got to go on the “green water” which is harder. Luckily we didn’t have to paddle at all – the instructor pushed us when the wave was coming and then yelled “Get Up!” when we needed to try to stand.

To me, it’s one of those things where you need to make the movement automatic. If I thought about it too much I’d get mixed up and put the wrong foot forward – which I didn’t realise I had done, it just felt off, until the instructor told me! I did manage to get a few good rides in – to where I had to chose to jump off before the water got too shallow – so I was pretty happy with that!

The kids did amazingly well and even had a few surfs next to each other 🏄‍♀️🏄‍♀️

M, on the other hand, didn’t get a good run during the session. I suspect it’s something that is easier for smaller people because he’s easily the most coordinated out of all of us.

At the end of the two hours we headed back to their shop and returned the boards & rashies (AKA “rash guards” which I had to look up what that was as I’d never heard them called that!). This is when we found out that they would give us the professional photos they took for free… if we gave them a review on Google or TripAdvisor (which you have to show them and hence they are all 5⭐) – and this was for each adult, not just one of the group. We asked how much to just get a few pics but there was no straight answer – I guess people don’t ask that very often.

We looked through the pictures and decided that they were pretty good – they had a good zoom and got some great action shots. But the weird thing was that they also insisted that the review had a picture… but they didn’t give you the pics until the review was done. In the end, we sold our souls, and got the pictures a couple of weeks later (we had to chase them a few times 🙄) and they were quite low quality (over WhatsApp**). Made me wonder why we bothered.

The most frustrating thing is, the class was really great. So they didn’t need to resort to these tricks (which are against Trip Advisor’s policy and you’d think Google’s too) and instead we were left with a bad feeling after what should have been a great day.

It’s quite common across Asia to give various incentives for reviews, which is definitely something to be wary of when reading them. In our experience, anything with perfect five star reviews (assuming it’s got more than ten or so reviews) is definitely doing this 😔

*A quote from Crush the turtle in Finding Nemo

**Yes there’s an option for full quality but they didn’t chose that 😦