We arrived to our hotel in Kandy on February 24, the Cafe Aroma Inn, $137 for 3 nights. We were a bit overwhelmed by the service, several young men eager to carry our luggage (& there was an elevator), help us with tours & one said he was at our service 24hr/day. Small but very comfortable room, everything we would need & a nice balcony over a bustling street full of gold & gem shops.
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| Kandy Lake |
Out for food, a stroll around Kandy Lake, where we saw pelicans & I checked out the “Queen’s Bath” building. Kandy is located in the central highlands, is the country’s cultural capital & a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for the Temple of the Tooth & lush tea plantations. The Temple of the Tooth is one of Buddhism’s most sacred shrines - it houses a tooth of the Buddha which is secured in a gold casket, encased in seven golden caskets within a special inner chamber. We visited during a city tour, impressive in it splendor but the golden caskets are far from view.
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| Mosque across from the restaurant |
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| Queen Hotel |
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| Queen’s Bath, lower floor of a colonial building |
Robin has been having more issues with his right leg, trouble lifting the foot & tripping easily so we went out & bought a snazzy new cane. We have never named a car but he decide that his new cane deserved a name - bought in Kandy, so it’s his Kandy Cane! And it’s proving quite helpful.
We enjoyed hanging out on the balcony & were surprised to see huge bats flying overhead at dusk - Indian Flying Foxes, wingspan of 1.5 m - there are over 24,000 living in the Royal Botanical Gardens.
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| Tiny dots are huge bats! And the White Buddha |
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| White Buddha, using the 40x zoom camera |
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| Gem & gold shops |
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| Horse patrols down our street |
The hotel offered several choices for breakfast, we chose the Sri Lankan option & we’re not disappointed. But it was a ridiculous amount of heavy food early in the day.
We had booked a city tour by tuk tuk from the brother of one of our helpful hotel staff ( “but don’t tell the manager”), great deal at $20. We followed the typical route - spice garden - tour thru a garden, explaining how they use the plants to make oils, ointments & tablets - all the while hoping that you buy something. Then on to a Ceylon tea factory to demonstrate how tea leaves are processed & the different types of tea - a bit uppity, telling us that the tea sold in supermarkets is the “dust” - leftovers & stems crushed into a powder. Didn’t even get a sample to taste. We did enjoy a visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens, well manicured, colorful & grand. And we found the roosting huge bats.
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| Spice gardens |
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| Tea processing |
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| Royal Botanical Gardens |
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| Indian Flying Foxes bats |
Another stop engineered to encourage buying souvenirs - a wood carving place with countless lovely elephants of all sizes, colorful masks & many more trinkets large & small. They are quick to point out large items wrapped & ready for delivery around the world, so my excuse of “no room in my bag” doesn’t fly.
An interesting stop, but again no purchases, was a gem place. Well done videos & displays explaining how precious gems are mined - a relatively small hole is dug, reinforced with wooden poles & ferns, side tunnels dug from that to extract gem containing gravel which is taken up in baskets & washed to expose the gemstone chunks. Many colours of sapphires, cat’s-eye chrysoberyl, rubies, garnets, tourmalines, alexandrite, topazes & moonstones. And of course a very pretty & expansive showroom of finished jewelry. I did learn that my blue star sapphire ring that Robin bought for me when we were dating, (so 51 plus years old), is quite rare as the good blue color is no longer seen.
We drove way, way up hill to reach the Bahirawakanda Temple- White Buddha - that we could see from our balcony. Bare feet, hot stones, Robin back in his “sarong”, but impressive & great views of the city. I climbed up 91 steps to the shoulder level for photos.
Another city viewpoint overlooking the lake & on to our last stop - Temple of the Sacred Tooth. The tooth was brought to Sri Lanka over 1600 years ago & the site is a world renowned place of worship. Impressive architecture, paintings & shrines.
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Overlooking the lake
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| The Tooth Casket |
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The tooth is somewhere behind this
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| The Temple around the Tooth |
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| Young monks in the new Temple |
We were quite excited to finally have a room with a TV, especially since there were a few English channels - we watched “Pretty Woman”. It seems all my careful planning & organizing has gone out the window - now it’s pretty much last minute & less being picky & reading countless reviews! A bit worried that we will run out of time in Sri Lanka before we see “everything” that was on the wish list, but it should all work out, we hope! Our last day in Kandy spent booking onward travel & hotels, relying on the Pick Me app (like Uber), vs hiring private drivers as many people do. A great proportion of tourists do book a private guide/driver who arranges all hotels & sightseeing visits but we still prefer to do our own planning.
We had lunch in a local small restaurant & my rice & curries came on a gigantic platter (perfect for potlucks), but way too much food & definitely spicier!
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| My monstrous rice & curry |
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| Robin’s huge noodles |
We took in a Kandyan Cultural Dance show, I bought tickets on their website for a fraction of what booking sites charge, & we were in the front row! Excellent show, good music, colorful costumes, captivating dances with a fire show & fire walking at the end.
Our time in Kandy was done, we used Pick Me to travel to our next destination of Newara Eliya, 73 km away on windy, hilly, narrow mountain roads. Our driver told us that one area we passed thru had received 500 mm of rain in recent months, we saw much evidence of mudslides & road blockages, even bridges that had been washed away, now replaced with temporary one lane bridges. The last hour or so of the 3 hour trip was thru tea plantations on steep hillsides. Trip cost $42.
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| Mudslide |
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| Road damage |
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| Sacks of tomatoes |
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| Typical dress |
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| Tea plantation |
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| Goats |
We chose to stay only one night in Newara Eliya, we’ve seen tea plantations, didn’t plan to do any hiking & we managed a walk to the lake to see all the horses. The town is known as “Little England” - a cool escape into the high altitude hills with colonial architecture, tea plantations, market gardens & greenhouses & a rundown horse racing oval that is used in the spring. And a lot of horses seen randomly about. Our hotel was newer but with some “old world” charm, chilly in the morning at 14C!
We opted for Pizza Hut as a change was needed, soda size of 250 mls, pizzas pretty small as well, nothing “super-sized” here.
Our reason for coming here was the train - the Kandy to Ella train is somewhat world famous for its scenic journey thru hill country, featuring tea plantations, mountains & waterfalls. Unfortunately the storms late last year damaged much of the track so the journey has been shortened - now begins in Ambewela, closest town, Newara Eliya. We were off to our next adventure in the morning, Still Living the Dream.
