A Tooth in Kandy

The train ride to Kandy was
beautiful. Leaving the busy city of Colombo is a relief. As we head into the countryside the villages are quite run down which is to be expected but the landscape is amazing. At first it is fields growing crops like rice and dotted with banana trees and cows grazing. Some of what I thought were cows end up being water buffalo. The train never goes very fast so the journey seems to just roll along and the farms turn into rolling hills with more banana trees and coconut palms. They have eighteen kinds of banana here and they use all of them. The red ones were different looking and really good. The hills get bigger and bigger and the views begin to pop through the forest and make me scramble for my camera. People are also standing really close to the tracks working on little plots of land and just waiting for the train to pass so they can get back to work. Whenever you make eye contact they always smile and the children smile, laugh, and say 'hello'. Cows also don't seem to be bothered by the train screeching along beside them. I spot a monkey in the trees but can't point it out in time for my SO to see. Not to worry, we see lots more monkeys. I am not a huge fan. As the wife goes to sleep sitting up, I hop from side to side trying to get some photos of the views and the people. There is a Bollywood movie on really loud on the screens and then some tourism commercials and then a kids show from France, I think one of the characters looks like Gerard Deapardeu, that is dubbed over. When she wakes up she also goes side to side to see the view and soon we pull into Kandy.

It is noticeably cooler when we get off the train and we go out the station and hop into a tuk tuk for a quick ride up the road to our guesthouse. I posted a small clip of the ride in the tuk tuk. The woman who runs the guesthouse greets us as we walk in the door. The place is nice and the lobby has a homey feel about it since it also seems to double as a living room and half joins a kitchen. She quickly says hello and that our room is ready so we follow another guy that i guess is her son up to our room. It immediately looks nice and smart and the guy smiles and leaves us be. After about five minutes we notice a moldy smell in the room and the wife swiftly checks the other rooms on the floor to see if they are the same. Keys to empty rooms are hanging in the locks of the rooms. This seems to be the norm in Sri Lanka. She returns and since none of the other rooms smell we decide we will need to change rooms. I send her to deal with this. Being the tough negotiator she is she comes back with news we get a new room, this one with a third bed. The new room is good so we settle our stuff in and soon go explore the city.

There is a lake close by and a temple that supposedly has one of the buddha's teeth in it. My SO being a dentist she is curious which tooth it is. We walk around the city but never find the lake or the tooth temple. We do the next day. But we do find a market and she sees meat hanging out and understands why I don't eat meat in asia. We snap off some great pics in the market then stroll around the city some more. Feeling like we have a good bearing in the city and starting to feel the mid day drag, we go back to the guest house to rest a bit. It is not too long after we are back and I start to feel rotten. And without going into the details I quickly realize I have food poisoning or something and spend the next few hours dealing with that. That night we walk me out to get rice and pedia-care drink to replenish electrolytes. It was a horrible night. My SO was an angel. She never got sick.

The next day I feel about only half dead but surprisingly better than I did the night before. We go down for breakfast and the woman who runs the place brings us fried eggs made into a face. Cute but disgusting for me. I was hungry as a hostage so I get it down with toast and tea then hurry upstairs to lay flat. After an hour I give the ok for us to go out and have a look around the city. We decide the Royal Botanical Gardens are a good choice since I could just dive behind a bush at any moment.

The botanical gardens were really amazing. There was bamboo there that must have been a hundred feet tall and some bats flying around that were about three feet wide. It was a nice cool day and it drizzled on us from time to time but not hard and not for very long. It was a great day actually. The place was huge and had avenues lined with tall palm trees and another with pines. It seemed to be a sort of a make-out place for the locals because there were young couples on almost every bench and behind lots of the big trees. In one of the down pours we duck under a tree and snack on some veggie turnovers we bought at a stall in the morning. After that we found a fern collection and then the orchid house. The ugly orchids always smell better. Orchids might be the only thing you can say that about.

We leave the gardens after being satisfied we have read every plaque and decide to tell a tuk tuk driver to take us to the lake instead of just searching for it. I was not in an exploratory states of being. He takes us straight there and to our surprise it is up hill and I say that must be why we didn't find it the day before. The wife agrees. We have a nice stroll around Kandy Lake say hello to smiling and staring school kids in their whites dresses and white pants and shirts. Along the way we find the temple with the buddha tooth and decide to come back for the six thirty service. A troop of monkeys come down off the hills and one or two cross the street to the lake side and some local women tease them. One of the monkeys comes down off a tree and slaps the woman then scampers back into the tree. It was hilarious. We move on before the other monkeys start paying attention to us.

We map in our heads the way back to the guesthouse as we go from shop to shop through the city looking at what kinds of things they sell and we watch how the people behave as they do their daily routines. We buy popsicles and I drop half of her's on the ground trying to open it. There is a buddha statue on a hill above the city so we take a tuk tuk up there and just as we are arriving and paid entrance it starts to rain. Convincing ourselves it isnt that bad we try and get through and get some photos. When you see the photos you cam tell we just quickly get a few shots off then leave. When we get back to the guest house I am surprised I have made it out almost a whole day. After the rain stops and a short rest we go back to the temple of the tooth for the service. It is a very nice and big temple. The part were they keep the tooth is set back behind silver plated doors. We line up with worshippers and are hurried along to the tooth. It is in a box covered up and about twenty feet away so in the three seconds you get to peak through the silver doors you can't help but be suspicious that there might just be a empty box back there. This temple is where we saw the most tourist so far. After the temple of the tooth we eat pizza hut. I couldn't bear any more curry that day.

The next day the tour guy from the train station in Colombo is there as promised and we set off towards Adam's Peak!