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Today started with a lie but also the invention for a new family character, "Sri Lankan Lion". Daughter #1 was not being co-operative eating her breakfast, so I told her that in Sri Lanka, they have lions waiting outside that peek through the windows and spy on naughty children who don't eat their food. I left it to her imagination to extrapolate that the lions then eat the children. Somehow breakfast was magically eaten at record speed. Interestingly enough Sri Lankan changed from menacing sneak to friend of the family by the end of the holiday, and today, the kids even invite him and his cubs to tea parties in their bedroom.
Anyway, back to the blog. After breakfast, we were picked up by our driver Kumara. A friendly chap, he was to be our companion for the next 8 days. We headed off towards Pinnewala Elephant Sanctuary. Enroute we passed through Cadjugama, the home of devilled cadjus (chilled cashew nuts, really yummy), but disappointingly it turned out that the cashews in Cadjugama were neither cheap nor tasty. Still you can't go wrong with cashews, no such thing as a bad cashew. It was on this leg of the journey
Trying to escape
One feisty elephant tried to squeeze through the barrier to come play with the tourists. And got stuck. that we also discovered what came to be our embrassingly most requested stop to our driver - Sri Lankan bakeries.
Short eats, they are called. And in Greece they would have called them ambrosia (food of the Gods). Rolls, patties, puff pastry, short crust pastry and buns. Sri Lankan bakeries sell the yummiest little snacks, generally meat or potatoes wrapped in crepes or pastry, and then optionally deep fried. Need to pause here while I wipe the drool from my keyboard. Anyway, Kumara probably got sick of the number of bakery stops we had. Literally every large city we passed, there would be a "ooh, ooh, ooh, Kumara, a bakery, please stop".
Wow, lots of digressions in this blog entry. Back to the road. We finally pulled into Pinnewala Elephant Sanctuary. You can't help but melt into goo here. Pragmatically elephants are extremely ugly, with the saggy skin, patchy pink-grey skin and small beady eyes. But baby elephants ... so cute. First up was feeding time when the carers hand feed the orphan babies from giant milk bottles. Greedy little runts gobble it up in record time, and twirl their agile trunks around the bottles trying to squeeze
Elephants on parade
They knew it was bath time so they automatically started to form a single line and march. How civilized. out every last drop. Next then was bath time. When given the signal from the carers, all 50+ elephants form a line and then proceed out the front gates, down the main street of the nearby town and then into the river. Its amazing seeing how organized their procession is. And how clever those elephants are.
Once they reach the water, the older elephants proceed to obediently wash themselves. However some of the younger ones swam across the river and climbed the opposite banks. They then engaged in games of tug of war - pulling each others trunks back and forth. It seemed like the loser of each round was then punished by being made to stand alone and swing their trunk from left to right like a metronome before being allowed to join back for another round. Crazy elephants.
Unfortunately one elephant had the designated role of being the tourist entertainer. He was made to lie on his side in the water while tourists could walk up and pat him. And feed him a banana. Oh well, its not all bad - he certainly managed to wallop a truck load of bananas.
We then hopped back
Feeding the babies
One milk bottle is drunk in under 5 seconds. into the van to proceed onto our next stop, Kandalama, our hotel for the night. Along the way, Kumara kept stopping the van and pointing out various animals. The guy is a bird nut and was able to point out eagles, king fishers, and all array of other beautiful birds ... many of them hidden high up or far away ... and all while keeping his eye on the road. Many of the times, he would point out a very vague shadow of a blob across a lake and proceed to tell us all manner of details, like genus, family, class, endemic status, endangered status, approximate number in the wild, ... honestly this guy either knew his stuff and had super eagle eyes in order to spot things so far away ... or he knew that we were thoroughly ignorant about birds and thus was indeed actually pointing at nothing and spurting random nothings but still managing to impress us nevertheless.
Finally we pulled up at Kandalama. Kandalama is a unique hotel, a world wide pioneer in creating a hotel that perfectly blends itself with nature. The hotel rooms are built into the overhang under a cliff, and hotel
corridors are completely open the the jungle, so monkeys do indeed run around outside your hotel door. The hotel rooms themselves have one wall made entirely from glass and open directly into the jungle trees. That includes shower and bathroom - where you can bathe while watching monkeys just immediately on the opposite side of the glass jump around from branch to branch. It is indeed a unique experiene and our girls loved waking up each morning seeing jungle life at the foot of their beds. That being said, the hotel has now been around for so any years that majority of animals have moved further away and so in reality all you really see is macaque monkeys. But monkeys are sooo cute.
That night we decided to try out the Kandalama buffet. My parents had been here years before and told me it was the most amazing buffet with literally every kind of food under the sun. Unfortunately it was low season, so they just had a fairly standard international buffet which was nice ... but not worth the exhorbitant price.
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