NOVEMBER 14 SPENT THE DAY IN KANDY

We got up early to the sound of pounding rain.  Ah, can't win them all.  The hotel sits in very steep sided mountains just outside Kandy.  Kandy, itself, is at the base of a number of the mountains.  Breakfast on the porch of the hotel.  The rain made it very pleasant, warm, but not too warm.  The hillsides were covered in mist.  It really is pretty.

View from the back lawn of the hotel during a rain break.

View back toward the hotel.  

The neighborhood around the hotel is really for the rich and famous.  Wealthy people from Colombo have homes here.  They come by sea plane.

Our driver, Gabriel, came at 9:30 to take us to the Temple of the Tooth.  It's one of Kandy's most famous sites.  Supposedly, it houses a tooth of Buddha's.  The traffic in Kandy is anything but sweet.  Since it was Saturday, we mistakenly believed the ride to town would be easier than on a week day.  Wrong.  It's an awful snarl of Tuk Tuks, motorcycles, pedestrians, buses, cars, anything that moves - all held in check and NOT moving.  Eventually Gabriel gave up, parked, and we walked a couple of blocks to the temple.  I haven't seen so many people crammed into a building on this trip.  The Sri Lankans tend not to shove and push.  This place made them crazy.  The last place we've seen religious people go nuts was outside the Vatican just before Easter.  Wild and Crazy Nuns.  This crowd was everyone else.  It's extremely elegant in the temple.  Only the most holy go near the tooth, so we just took in what we could.

The Temple of the Tooth from the outside

Interiors of the temple

Temple ceiling

The tooth is behind the gold doors.

Independence from Britain was declared in 1948, the same year that India was declared independent.  But Sri Lanka remained a Dominion of the British Empire until 1972.  The hall where independence was declared was on the premises of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy.  The building below is that hall.

Lovely teak carving on the pillars inside the hall

Once a year a pageant in Kandy is lead by an elephant.  Raja was the elephant.  He did such a great job that when he died of old age, they used taxidermy and recreated what he looked like alive.  His possessions are in the room with him.

After our Temple of the Tooth tour, we went slowly to the Elephant Orphanage to watch some elephants.  On the way we stopped for an overview of Kandy.

There's a large reservoir in the center of the town.  Two spraying fountains are on the revervoir

On the road to the orphanage we drove along for about 1 or 2 miles where there were pottery shops on both sides of the street.  There really weren't any before that stretch and none after.  

We got to the elephant orphanage.  I must say, I really didn't know what to expect.  As we drove closer to the place there were lots of other elephant activities that one could do.  Ride elephants, feed elephants, bath elephant, or what ever struck your fancy.  Clearly the elephant orphanage was the most "elegant" of these.

An elephant equivalent of a taco truck

 At 1:15 they fed the baby elephants.  The two below were 3 years old.

This funny fellow kept his mouth open as he followed the feeder around.  The feeders tried to feed them from various parts of the ring so people got a better look.  They gobbled the bottles down in less than a minute.

We ate lunch with an overview of the river.  Supposedly the elephants were to be brought down to the river for a bath. It had been raining off and on all day, mostly on.  So the elephant baths were called and they had a shower instead.

View from lunch

ATMs around the world make traveling very interesting.

At this point it was about 3 in the afternoon.  We were scheduled to go to an arboretum and to Sri Lankan dancing.  We opted to stop with the arboretum.  With the traffic and the timing we wouldn't have gotten back to the hotel until after 8.  As it was, we wandered the arboretum for nearly an hour and a half and got back to the hotel at 6:30.

A lane of royal palms

Ficus with great branches and roots

The strange tangle above is the side of a cannonball tree.  Flowers form on the tangle.  If they bloom, they fall to the ground, and that's that.  If they don't bloom, they form the cannonball.  Dozens of them are on on tree.  They are the size of coconuts, can't be eaten, and are just forest decorations.  

Tomorrow off to Hatton.