Tiger Villa & Shaggy's Surf School

The camp

Tiger Villa has five rooms, each named after a plant: Bamboo, Banana, Cinnamon, Coconut and Jungle. Every one has its own bathroom, Banana and Jungle sleep three, and Cinnamon is the only one listed with air conditioning. The house is down a lane just past the railway line, and it lives like a shared flat: a communal kitchen with boards leaning on the wall, a veranda along the garden, a hammock upstairs.

There is no surf package here. Tiger Villa rents rooms by the night, the week or the month, and the in-house school, Shaggy's, sells its lessons separately, one at a time or in blocks of three or five, with board, rash vest and sun cream included. No meals are served. You build the week yourself: the room, the lessons you want, the kitchen for the rest.

The school moves you up a step at a time. A complete beginner goes by tuk-tuk to Weligama, fifteen minutes away, where the bay is a long sandy beach and its soft left has nothing underfoot. Once you are standing, you come back to the Midigama reefs, starting with Lazy Left, the least steep of the four: it peels rather than throws, and you pick your way in between the rocks.

In the evening Midigama has next to nothing, and the night happens in the shared kitchen. This is for a traveller on a tight budget who puts the week together and wants to go from sand to reef without changing house.