Kandyland

This is what pepper looks
 like when it is growing.

On the way to Kandy, we visited an Ayurvedic spice garden where we had lunch and then learned about all the herbs and spices that grow here (there are so many) and what they are good for and the Ayurvedic way of thinking and healing. Interesting fact that there are no fat Sri Lankans, they are all thin, their diet and way of life must be somewhat healthy – or maybe they are all just starving. We had Ayurvedic foot and neck massages with red oil that is supposed to be good for your joints and it did seem to help.

Kandy turned out to not at all what I expected.  Although high in the mountains, this city known for its colonial aspects was the most congested place yet in Sri Lanka; we were stuck in an unbelievable traffic jam on the road in – this must be what India can be like. Kandy is situated around a picturesque lake, almost looks like Switzerland, and has a much cooler climate than the previous places we had been. It made sense that more people would want to live there – why wouldn’t they prefer a more perfect temperature.

After checking into our hotel which was perched on the side of a hill overlooking the city and the lake, we went almost immediately to the evening ceremony at the Temple of the Tooth, the most famous and most visited Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka, where an actual piece of Buddha’s tooth resides deep inside seven caskets. Drums were played and we marched with a throng of people up into the temple and past the tooth shrine where many were worshipping and making offerings. Being among hundreds of barefoot attendees made us feel very much in the moment of the excitement. Afterwards Indika lectured to us for 45 minutes on Buddhism and we were all dying of hunger and starting to feel incredibly ambivalent and downright disinterested – we are of the belief now that he is a born-again Buddhist – who knew there was such a thing.

Finally we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant where we ordered a few bottles of local Sri Lankan Moscatello wine – “social wine” it says on the label – and yes, I am guessing it is similar to the lowlife wine we know as Muscatel, but I will say it was my best night sleep since joining the tour. I have been sleeping like shit most of the time.

The next morning we visited a tea factory and learned about how tea is processed – much more complex than I ever imagined. I thought it was dried in the sun and put in a bag. Hardly.

Afterwards we were dropped off in downtown Kandy to make our own way back. I walked around the lake and then did some clothes shopping in local shops where men went scurrying like rats to find a woman to wait on me – obviously not many tourists dared to venture into these stores where blouses and skirts were less than $5 each. I ended up with a dress that I paid about $6 for and a little short sleeve wrap that makes any outfit appropriate for Sri Lanka (shoulders must always be covered.)

In the early evening we went to a dance performance of traditional Kandy dancing – there are so many different kinds, and many of them seem to be what we consider to be traditional circus acts, spinning multiple plates at one time, acrobatic back flips and the last one was fire dance where they ate fire and walked on hot coals. At the same time, after a week of nonstop sun and heat, the sky opened up and rained buckets.

Because some bigwig in Kandy had died that day, a lot of restaurants and shops were closed that night and lucky for us, we had to alter our dinner plans and ended up at the Royal Hotel, which Anders and Anna had found during their wanderings during the day. It was finally what I had imagined Kandy to be, a vestige of the British colonial period with tons of 19^th century character, an open courtyard and an old-fashioned pub where we drank and ordered food from a waiter who barely understood us and brought me the cauliflower dish insisting it was eggplant and it turned out to be the best meal any of us had ever tasted. The “chips” were actually a potato that was cut into a thick endless coil and fried with spices – exquisite and delicious. It was a memorable and perfect accidental evening.