Kandy

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Colombo to Kandy

After an exciting nights sleep in an open plan, open air house, listening to the monsoon howling a gale around us we got up to enjoy a traditional English breakfast with Sunethra- I say traditional... Sunethra tells us that when the English were in Sri Lanka they always started with fruit, followed with toast and jam and had scrambled egg last ... Totally backward if you ask me. Anyway, we followed this with over an hour o backpack fitting time- I have never had a bag with so many straps! Our plan today was to travel to Kandy, Sri Lanka's cutural capital in the Hill Country. Little did we know that as it is a full moon it is a holiday weekend and all of Colombo is heading home to Kandy to see family! The first class intercity train is fully booked so we settle for the 2nd class train, once tickets are booked we store our bags in the cloakroom and set off to explore Colombo. I start to get hot, bothered, a little lost and really struggle to cross the road safely - I resort to closely following a very smartly dressed Sri lankan man who seems to know just which tuk tuks will stop and which motorbikes will happily take you out! we head to the presidential area hoping to see ... Something interesting, maybe some posh buildings? as we get closer we pass through a road block and are warned not to take photographs. You can tell we are in a country just recovering from war. We bump into the man who we had followed across the road earlier. Inevitably Rich got chatting to him, turns out he is the harbour master and, desperate to show us his harbour he asks us to join him for tea in the harbour room. 5 minutes later we are in the poshest hotel in Colombo, one of the 3 large colonial hotels, in a special, private viewing balcony, being waited on hand and foot and being told the workings of the harbour by Captain Vije. You have to wonder if these guys are for real - why do they want to go out of their way to befriend us? what is in it for them. Captain Vije says that he is Buddhist and you do good things and good happens to you - karma. He also tells us that all of Sri lanka wants to encourage tourism and everyone wants us to go home with a good impression of the country. We leave the Captain with an invite to his house in Kandy for Sunday lunch with his family and to stay the night, he has also promised to send some tea to my family, mum, dad let me know if anything arrives!


Time for our train and we stand on the platform with a very persuasive tout, he owns a guesthouse and considering we haven't booked anywhere to stay we are a little susceptible to his banter. He didn't quite warn us about the lengths to which people fight for a seat on the train though. Friday rush hour is bad in London but in Colombo people jump onto th track to climb in the other side of the carriage, they climb through the windows and are brutal in their force to get on. Once in though everyone is in good spirits and I was impressed with how respectful of me they were. As the only foreigners Rich and stood out but I was also one of the very few women. Despite the crowding the men all made sure they gave me a lot of personal space and standing for the first two hours was no where near as bad as it sounds. To add to all the excitement Rich got to live his childhood dream of hanging out of a railway carriage! We have now had our rice and curry, our staple diet it seems, and were looking forward to exploring Kandy for the next few days. 



After a night of dogs barking, insects crawling and water dripping onto the bed, we groggily awoke on Saturday morning realising that we'd been blagged and needed to find somewhere else to stay. We nipped out of the hostel before anyone tried to usher us to breakfast, and marched down to the town to find somewhere nicer to stay. A young lad bounced up to us and started chatting - didn't appear to be selling anything so we chatted away and he showed us the orphanage he worked at, and a guesthouse nearby. Both seemed lovely so we bought some tickets to a show supporting the orphanage and settled on the guesthouse to stay at.

Having haggled with a tuk tuk driver to take us to Rodney's (should have seen it coming really!) guesthouse to speedily collect our gear, we took his card and settled into the pleasant family home of S. As we walked to head out to get some food, we were accosted by a nice little man with funny teeth who wanted to show us the monastery next door. He gave us a little tour, and then took us up to the main Buddha hall introduce us to the monk who then gave us a blessing and told me not to drive on Jan 10th and Rachel not to eat pork! I was quite mesmerised by the experience, about good nature of the people here and the lack of desire for payment for this quality- ok, so the little guy suggested I left some money for the Buddha's, but hey, they don't earn anything do they?
We were both buzzing after the experience, a little trance like as it all seemed a little too good to be true...

Sadly, it may well have been the case. Chatting with S and her husband that evening, it turned out that there wasn't an orphanage, it was a paying school. The place we bought the tickets from wasn't even connected with it. The young fella takes a 25% commission for introducing tourists to the guesthouses. And the little guy was a regular tourist trapper - so the money I'd left for the Buddhist monk probably got split 50-50. It felt like we'd just found out that Father Christmas didn't exist; cheated, hurt and embarrassed. Or stupid as Rach put it.

Well whatever the truth, I think this is definitely a case of ignorance is bliss. If we'd not found out, we'd have gone to bed on a high after a magical day. In the end we went to bed feel like scammed tourists. Won't be so naive in future, we almost believed that there may have been people out there that aren't just in it for the money.

So we did a few cultural things to. We went to the show, which saw lots of drum banging and dancing, followed by fire eating, body burning and coal walking - a bit like a night at Chunky's. We then went joyfully off through another monsoon to the Temple of the Tooth, and walked around like drowned (yet enlightened!) rats. I tell you what, that Buddha would have thought twice about having his wisdom tooth out if he'd realised it would have resulted in having 5 or 6 golden temples built just to preserve one of his gammy chompers...


The next morning we decided to strive out and splash some cash, so gave Sunil a call and went to the Elephant Orphanage by tuk tuk. It was about an hour away, these things ain't built for long distance :-s But Sunil made it fun, we stopped to eat random fruits and when the numb bums started to set in, a big mustached grin from Sunil got us back on track.

The orphanage was amazing. We were the only visitors there, and within minutes were in the lake scrubbing down Lakshmi the lady elephant with coconut shells. Lakshmi decided that we both needed washes to so proceeded to periodically hose us with her trunk. Rachel squeeled and ran for cover, I got down into my undies. My ploy to belittle the elephant with a demonstration of who had the biggest package had limited success, and I conceded to what was more like a bath!
After this, we were taken for a 45 minute bareback safari, which was in a word, amazing. I also got to see two things that I had never understood - rubber from a tree and rice from a paddy field. To top it off, Sunil took us to a tea factory on our way home, now I can answer any darn question you may possibly have about tea production! On our way back to Kandi, we were given a glimmer of hope again about when people say they just want to be your friend - Sunil took us back to his home, introduced us to his very sweet young daughters and cooked us a very tasty three course meal - to which he refused to accept payment for.


By our 7th night travelling, we have started to realise that we are missing one very fundamental thing that I particularly need - good social interaction. We'd still not met a single westerner that we could enjoy a good banter with and our priorities of what we are looking for were starting to change - not necessarily full swing, but with a mix of culture AND fun!

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Photos

Hanging out on the train
Imagine a four hour journey on the Friday rush hour First Capital train back to Brighton.... without doors!

Tuk tuk!
What a better way to see the country?

Bareback Elephant Riding
Who needs a seat anyway?

Taking a shower
I need a wash anyway...

Tea picking
The workers just don't put the effort in here...

Comments

[Adonica]

wow
Sounds great you two! Well, that's the thing about being in another country sometimes one really just has to be taken for a ride to learn the truth. Welcome to my world everyday heehehe..... well, when I first moved to England and every country I have lived, I was naive at first re: the people..... heehee.... x