At 5.30am we drove to Mount Lavinia with Jeev’s cousin Ravi who is responsible for organising our cultural tour before the wedding. Here we joined about 20 of Neil's and Jeev's friends for the tour, travelling in an air-conditioned coach. It’s very different from, and far easier than our experiences so far in Sri Lanka with everything arranged for us. Margaret, Ian and I are family but the others include school friends Sam and Darren with Darren’s girlfriend Helen, Oxford friends Lydia and Martin with baby daughter Anya, French friends Bruno and Andrea with Bruno’s parents Yves and Cathérine and research colleagues Ruth, David and Dom. We are accompanied by Sunil and his brother Susantha who works for the Sri Lankan tourist board and is acting as our guide. We none of us knew each other before this visit but we seem to all get along remarkably well together.
First we made our way up to the Elephant Orphanage at Pinnewala which, despite being commercialised, is excellent. Although it is primarily an orphanage there are elephants ranging from the age of a couple of months and only two foot high, up to an elderly bull elephant of sixty with tusks, now blind. Only about one in a hundred elephants in Asia produce tusks and average life expectancy is around seventy years.
There was a five month old, found and rescued from the recent flood area and brought in only a few days ago. Most of the residents are young elephants who have become separated when they have been unable to keep up with the herd when chased by angry farmers who see them as pests.
There is now a breeding policy as the number of elephants in the wild has dropped dramatically in recent years. We watched the mahouts caring for them, feeding the babies, posing for photos and herding them down to the river for a swim. They need this several times a day or they develop a skin complaint. I counted more than fifty in the river, swishing their tails and trunks as they squirted water over their backs. A couple of them just lay down and completely submerged themselves. Others, once wet, ambled across to the far bank and spewed dust over themselves, which turned to mud on contact. I imagine it works like a sunscreen. One poor creature has lost its foot in a land mine explosion placed by the Tamil Tigers up near Trincomalee in the North East. He hobbled along waving his useless stump as he went and eliciting heaps of sympathy from everyone. (I wonder if it’s possible to produce a prosthesis for an elephant!)
Reluctantly tearing ourselves away from the elephants we continued to a tea factory where we saw the tea arriving in sacks from the plantation. The sacks were weighed, emptied into huge long troughs with a wire bottom beneath which a fire burned on the floor below so that the heat rose to dry out the initial moisture from the leaves. After twelve hours or so they are passed down a hopper to a rolling mill below where they are flattened and the leaves, tips and stalks separated. We were told how teas are graded and blended and about the international tea market in Colombo where names like Lipton and Tetley vie to purchase the best teas.
Different milling processes are gone through until the tea is dry and sacked up to travel to the auction. The leaves come not only from the large plantation owners, but also from small co-operatives selling to the factory. We were shown into an airy, shaded room and served with very welcome tea and chocolate cake.
We continued our journey along a narrow road beside a jungle ravine with some twenty flying fox bats gliding amongst the treetops on their leathery wings, three foot
in width. Hundreds of others hung like shapeless black bags from the branches of the trees, waiting for dusk.
Lunch was a series of mild curry dishes with rice, followed by fruit salad, eaten under an awning with overhead fans in the garden of a little restaurant. Then Ian, Margaret and I walked back ahead of the coach which picked us up later at the small Commonwealth War Graves cemetery were we walked around the beautifully tended gardens and graves with their rows of matching white headstones. Most were of airmen shot down by the Japanese over Trincomalee or Colombo between 1943 and 1945. There were soldiers from a number of countries including Sri Lanka, France, Britain, Canada and the USA as well as a couple of Italian prisoners of war. We were shown around by one of the five gardeners who showed a justifiable pride in his work over the past thirty years. He said he knew the grave and inscription of every soldier and over the years had met the families of many. He told us of an old man in his eighties who had recently come to see for the first time the grave of his twenty-two year old brother who died nearly sixty years ago.
Once back in the coach we drove to an exhibition on gem mining with a video explaining the process. We had the rough stones identified to us – sapphires, emeralds, rubies and cats'-eyes – and watched the cutting, polishing and grinding processes. There was of course the showroom where several of our group purchased items.
We then continued to Kandy and our very nice hotel, overlooking the town. At last we have a huge, air conditioned room with a large balcony from where we can look both up, and down, on the green slopes of bushy, flowering plants and palms with monkeys playing in the trees. We also have a shower with hot water as well as cold! AND a fridge in our room. Bliss, bliss, bliss!
The hotel is perched high on the big rock Kandy mountain with a view down onto the beautiful man-made lake and the Temple of the Tooth. On the far side of the town a seated Buddha sits on a hilltop, visible from all around the town. The air is generally fresher up here and the scenery is lovely being very verdant with little villages and interesting hillscapes.
After a shower and a brief rest we went down to the town to watch a presentation by Kandian dancers and musicians. This was wonderfully vibrant, the dancers wearing white costumes trimmed with red, black and yellow with orange head dresses for the men, who played hand drums with pounding rhythms whilst a couple blew conch shells and the girls danced, waving their arms like snakes. There were masked dancers, jugglers, tumblers and acrobats. The men did a fire dance with real fire, running it over their bodies and spurting flames from their mouths. We had been escorted to front row seats in an auditorium filled with visitors from Europe, Australasia and the Americas. We began to doubt the wisdom of this when a bed of burning coals was placed immediately in front of us and oil poured onto it. The heat exceeded anything we’ve felt before, ever! We were on our feet trying to scramble over the backs of our seats to escape! As the flames died down, two barefoot dancers with flaming torches, having prayed at a little portable shrine, walked slowly along the eight foot long bed of flames and red hot glowing coals! How can faith alone enable anyone to do that?
The dancers must have been exhausted from the heat of both the dance and the flames. It was a wonderful experience even though it was put on for the tourists. We felt particularly impressed as from here on we feel in some way linked with the culture of Sri Lanka and this was an exciting discovery. We wanted to buy a video to show everyone in England but at 1500 rupees Sunil said it was too expensive. He says that he’ll ask Ravi to run us off a copy of something similar from the film archive for which, as a film editor, he is responsible.
We walked across to the famous eighteenth century Temple of the Tooth where the relic of the Buddha is now held inside seven separate caskets. Drumming could be heard inside, calling people to prayers. We joined the mixed queue of devout Buddhists and visiting tourists and processed slowly around the building in a very long file, passing from chamber to chamber until we passed in front of the actual casket with time only for a very brief glance. The faithful waited there in a special area to make their offerings of white or pink lotus flowers. The walls and ceilings were brightly painted with pictures of the Buddha – always painted yellow – and scenes from his life. Every room held statues of him in a variety of sizes and positions – standing, sitting in the lotus position or lying on his side in either the sleeping or the dead position. There was an odd atmosphere with so many tourists wandering around amongst the devout Sri Lankan Buddhists. It all seemed rather casual and rather different from the feel of an English church or cathedral. But, if I have understood correctly, people do not come to pray to the Buddha, who was a man like any other. He is now dead, having attained Nirvana and cannot come again or answer prayers. The faithful therefore go to make offerings in his name and to be influenced by him in their efforts to attain their own, individual Nirvana, the state where they no longer have anything to long for, when all has been achieved and everything is ended.
The people were very tolerant of western tourists wandering around. Everyone of course was barefoot. It was certainly an impressive experience and Susantha explained everything to us very well.
We left the temple with the drums still playing and returned to our hotel for supper followed by the best night’s sleep we’ve had since arriving in Sri Lanka.
