The day after Sigiriya it was raining, so we took it easy. Yanmei did some laundry.
In the afternoon it stopped raining, so we decided to go out and look around Kandy. It was about a hour walk to downtown so we were going to take a tuk tuk, but then Yanmei said “let’s take a bus”. The buses seem to come about ever 60 seconds which is great. We hopped on and it was 25 rupees, which works out to about 8 cents each. The bus took us to the central market.
After that we walked to Lake Kandy.
We did some shopping in the downtown area, then walked over to the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, which is the most important Buddhist temple in the area, it has a tooth from Buddha.
We were templed out so we didn’t go in, but there was a procession of girls and women holding a rope and going in as we watched. The above picture is only the entrance gate, not the temple itself.
We headed back for another home cooked Sri Lankan dinner.
The first thing we did in Kandy was go to the elephant orphanage in Pinnawala. The General drove us and picked up his brother-in-law, who is a retired school principal to be our guide. This host is treating us like royalty and really making it a great trip.
We bought one ticket to feed a young elephant milk. There was a huge audience of school children on a field trip watching.
After that we also got to feed an elephant some fruit.
After that the principal told us the elephants would go down to the river for a bath, and we should move down there to get good spots. They actually have to walk through the town to get to the river. I ended up in too good a spot, I was trapped in a corner by myself. The elephants were as close as they looked in this video.
Once we finished watching them in the river, we headed back and I went on an elephant ride. I found out later that this wasn’t part of the orphanage, but was some guys running their own business. Anyway since I’d never ridden an elephant before I gave it a try. It was basically bareback, with nothing but a thin blanket. This actually made it pretty uncomfortable because my legs were spread too wide because the elephant was so big.
After the elephants we drove back to Kandy and stopped at a tea factory for a tour. Tea is one of the biggest exports of Sri Lanka. The tea plants are dried, then ground up, then separated into finer powder for tea bags and larger leaves for loose leaf brewing. They had a pretty interesting machine that separated the loose leaves from the loose stems using static electricity.
After the tea tour and a cup of tea, we got dropped off at the Royal Botanic Gardens. Once again it was full of students on field trips.
We’ve been to a lot of botanic gardens on our trips so it is hard to impress us. They did have a good variety of trees from around the world, and a nice orchid garden.
So we took the train from Colombo to Kandy. We had 1st class reserved seats in an air conditioned car, but it turns out we didn’t really need them. Yanmei took a tour of the train as shown in this video.
The train left on time and arrived early, but it still took over 3 hours to travel about 120km. It moves at a pretty leisurely pace and made frequent stops. The scenery was quite beautiful for much of the route.
Our host came to pick us up and drive us to their house. I saw on their house it said Major General, and I asked if he was a General in the Sri Lankan army, and he is, although he is retired now. When we arrived his wife prepared a lovely Sri Lankan lunch for us.
