As sweet as Kandy!

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We arrived at the Days Inn, greeted by our host, Dan. A Sri Lankan who lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas, but has his home and small businesses in and around Kandy. A warmer welcome we couldn’t have wished for. The accommodation was perched high above the city on a hill, clad in rainforest, filled with monkeys and lots of bugs.
Christmas Day!!!!!! Woohoo! We got up and had our breakfast then booked ourselves in for Christmas “Lunch” at the Earls Regency hotel in Kandy. We then gave each other our presents. Charmaine got a gorgeous pair of 18ct White gold and Semi Precious stone earrings and Darren got a piece of material about 4ft wide, and 10ft long, sewn together into a tube at the narrow ends, great! Just kidding, it was a traditional Sri Lankan men’s sarong. We took a “tuc-tuc” to the Earls regency and had as close to a traditional Chrimbo dinner as possible. Turkey, gravy, potato stars, wine, jelly and much more. We felt sick, it was great! We were also entertained by a live band singing the usual Christmas tunes. From there we headed to the Temple of the Tooth. We were too early to see the ceremony related to the tooth of Buddha, so we wandered around the temple grounds for a short while, it was quite interesting but we didn’t have a clue what anything meant. 7pm came around and we went into the temple, minus our footwear to see the ceremony, we waited for around ½ an hour in the queue and nothing happened apart from some of the loudest and least musical drumming we have ever heard, we wish we knew what was going on! Christmas night was finished off by watching Elf and some episodes of 24.
Boxing Day (St Stephen’s day for non-brits) and we took a stroll down the hill and around the lake into Kandy city. Whilst walking the lake we saw a river monitor of about 3ft in length gently swimming along past kingfishers and terrapins, this was so bizarre. We had a little look about, some dinner and decided to go and check our emails and have a quick browse on t’internet. Well, a quick browse turned into a frantic planning and buying session when we discovered that Air Asia were doing free flights. Yes, FREE FLIGHTS! We promptly booked five flights at a total cost of £100 (taxes you see!), this is awesome we thought and decided to have another go tomorrow. We got back to our room to find the biggest spider in the world (really?) had took up residence in the bathroom, after much shrieking the spider was despatched into the nearest hedgerow with a “crash”.

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