It would have been good to have had more time to visit Kandy which has struck us as a very nice place indeed after the heat and chaos of Colombo. It is beautifully set amidst the hills and is verdant and fresh. There are parks and a huge lake near the Temple of the Tooth at the heart of the town. We are told that it is the only city in the world to have virgin rainforest within the city limits.
Our first stop was at the very beautiful botanical gardens at Peradeniya near Kandy. Originally the pleasure gardens of the Sri Lankan kings it is a 147 acre park of beautiful trees planted by major visiting dignitaries from around the world, some of whom have less glamorous reputations today. Surprisingly, nobody from our party was invited to plant anything!
On arriving we were assailed by the usual souvenir vendors and even a mangy stray dog pestered us, seemingly set on selling us an old bone for a few rupees! Margaret retaliated by offering to sell everyone lucky Cornish piskies. Ian is seriously considering selling paper elephants. He reckons that if he teaches everyone on the tour to make them we could finance our trip by selling them for 50 rupees each.
Our trip continued through the beautiful hills with small towns and villages to Matale and the spice gardens where we were shown around by a very knowledgeable young doctor of ayurvedic medicine. He explained the different properties of the many oils and spices and we were all then subjected to facial and back massages using a variety of different oils. I settled for nothing more than a mixture of aloe vera, sandalwood, and jojoba massaged into my face though both Ian and Margaret went for the full demo. However, the prices charged for purchasing the oils was way higher than we’d paid at the spice gardens near Galle so we bought nothing. In any case, most can be bought in Holland and Barrett without the need to lug them home from here!
We ate a pleasant curry buffet in the gardens before continuing to the Nalanda Gedige and the Aluvihara temple. The former is a Hindu temple on an island reached by a causeway in the middle of a reservoir. It had been reconstructed there as the original site needed to be flooded as part of the construction of a dam. The setting is beautiful, surrounded by distant, steep, green-clad hills with the grassy area surrounding the water shaded by large fruiting trees. Although the temple is Hindu a Buddha sits inside. Immediately we saw it we were reminded of Mayan temples. Built in granite it is incised with a number of erotic carvings. It has a roof that is stressed and angled so that it is in reality a continuation of the walls. Sunil told us that before he moved to work in England, Abey had been the engineer largely responsible for the project to construct the reservoir and to relocate and reconstruct the temple.
The Aluvihara temple is constructed in a number of caves containing standing and lying Buddhas. Here monks transcribe the Buddhist scriptures on to palm leaves and we were shown how the leaves are first prepared and smoothed by pulling then tightly across a bamboo pole. The script is scratched invisibly on the surface of the leaf using a metal point and then wiped over with charcoal and sealed using a polish of rice flour.
We then travelled on to visit the cave temples at Dambulla. A huge gold-leafed Buddha dominated the city from a vantage point below the entrance to the caves. It is the most recent Buddha to be created in Sri Lanka, back in 1996.
A long, steep, exhausting climb to the top is rewarded by five caves filled with Buddhas carved directly from the granite rock. There are 150 of them! The walls are also covered in hundreds of frescos. The caves date back to the first century BC, but the frescos are fairly modern.
The site offered excellent views of the countryside around. From here we had a clear view of the rock fortress of Sigiriya which we will visit tomorrow. The temple grounds and the trees surrounding it were the playground of wild monkeys. We descended the many steps back to our coach with people trying to sell us locally produced souvenirs every step of the way.
We are now at our very pleasant hotel for the night, accommodated in self-contained apartments in a woodland setting. The rooms are fairly basic but with the welcome benefit of air conditioning and there is a swimming pool into which we all gratefully plunged within minutes of our arrival. Supper, all eating together in the main building, was a pleasant affair and the local beer was wonderfully cold. Returning to our rooms through the humid night air we discovered a green frog hopping up the walls of our apartment. How does it hold on? There was apparently a praying mantis sitting on the supper table. Unfortunately I didn’t see it.
Tomorrow we will make an early start as we will be climbing Sigiriya, so at 10.30 pm it’s time for sleep.
