Day 8. Friday

If I wasn’t going on a safari today at 5.15am, nothing would have got me out of bed. It has been full on everydayday. The 4x4s arrived and we got on 6 at a time. They have raked seating so we were sorted by height, the big boys had to sit at the front so they wouldn’t bump their heads on the roof.

  

It was a 20 minute drive to the national park and what a shock when we got there. Scores, nay, hundreds of jeeps were queued up to get in as the gates didn’t open till 6am - think Disneyland.

  

There was a bit of jockeying for position, especially those with Chinese passengers, who all had masks on. By this time it was getting light and when we went through the gates the park police counted us in. Funnily enough they didn’t count us coming out. Free meal for the leopards possibly. Anyway in Sri Lanka there is not as big a variety of big game.as in Africa and also no tigers, I was sad about that as I really wanted to see one. The tracks were very bumpy and when it started to bucket down, they soon became very muddy. The jeeps thinned output although the drivers were with each other by phone so as soon as one spotted wildlife, everyone converged causing bunching. All the drivers waited patiently for their turn except the ones with the Chinese who beeped their horns, the masked ones obviously didn’t like waiting

In a nutshell, we saw dozens of birds. My favourites were the pelican, and of course Ronnie regaled us with the poem about the pelican, his belly can, I don’t know how the hell he can., the painted stork just gorgeous, the green bee eater, the peacocks and the kingfisher. 

The painted stork

The peacock

If you are interested in twitching send me a message and I’ll give you the full list. We saw crocodiles, monkeys,deer, lizards,wild boar with piglets, hundreds of water buffalo

Land monitor

Wild boar and piglet

Cheeky monkeys

Water buffalo

Crocodile yawning

The beautiful painted stork

Crocodile after a paintedstork for breakfast

but NO ELEPHANTS and NO LEOPARDS!   Oh dear. Actually at one bunching point the guide said there was a leopard in a tree in the distance but you had to be a recent visitor to Specsavers to see it.
However one of our party, Jean, who was even shorter than me and therefore in the back seats had bought some Marks and Spencer’s rich fruit cake so we had a very nice little tiffin break. I don’t know if it was the tiffin or the fact that the sun came out but it lifted our spirits and on theway out of the park, we saw a tusker emerging from the bushes. Hurrah!

Tusker peeping out of the bushes 

Had to have a little snooze after a late breakfast back at the hotel. Then Ronnie had chosen to go on another safai, sadly it turned out to be more of the same but in the heat of the day. I have never seen a man more desperate for a Lion beer, well any beer really
At this hotel in Yala, again we had an outdoor bathroom with an open ceiling so we were not surprised to see bird poo and little droppings, turned out to be a little chipmunk which we saw on the balcony later. But what made my day was a lot of screeching outside. I looked though the window and there was a monkey on the wall and 2 seconds later her baby jumped up for a cuddle. Magic

Mum and baby on our balcony

While Ronnie was on his safari, I went for a walk on the beach. There are sand dunes and turtles lay their eggs, which are then protected by a little wooden fence. I found an old hatch site and was surprised that the egg shells were soft and rubbery, not like chicken’s egg shell.

 
The rocky end of the beach

Live turtle nest    

 Empty turtle shells

Further down the beach I came across evidence that wild elephants do roam here as well. In fact Su said he had heard one trumpeting in the night. Feral dogs are everywhere in Sri Lanka but not so much in packs. There were 10 here and one definite leader. He did all the barking and lead the way. But they don’t approach you. Except the one in Kandy which came from nowhere and bit a man in our party on the leg.

Pack of feral dogs

Dead dog pose. 

More dead dog pose 

And unluckily, and inexplicably, he had not had a rabies jab before he left the UK.That meant several hours at a local hospital and a further visit today. He’s fine though. Anyway, a word about the dogs here. They are all the same size, same pricked ears, same short coat, same straight tail and mostly have their ribs showing. The only difference is they vary in colour. They sleep on their sides so they look dead and they sleep anywhere, including in the road and in full sun
And so for our evening cocktail and dinner  . You really could not ask for a bigger selection at the buffet. Curries galore of course, lots of local dishes, not always curried but always hot, bloody hot!

 

 No  more chillis thank you

Old Sri Lankan game  guess what your dinner is tonight 😆

 I fact I had a cheese toasty at lunchtime and it had chillis in that, lots of vegetables (with chillis) and the occasion sop to picky eaters - lasagne, shepherds pie but WITH CHILLIS. And lots of things which you simply didn’t know what they were.

Day 7 Thursday

Today.our guide, Su, told us we would be travelling down from the central highlands to the east coastal plain. He said that the climate would change from hot to bloody hot. He has a brilliant command of English an a sense of humour to go with it. We drove along steep winding roads like those in the Alps but I must say that the drivers are all very courteous, backing up as necessary. Full marks to our driver, Prianta, who  managed to get within an inch or so of the edge of the road next to a sheer drop although some of our party had to get off the coach and change their pants


We passed a Hindu Temple at the side of the road.

It was said to be the place where the king of Sri Lanka brought an Indian princess he had kidnapped, Sita, and kept her for 7 years. The monkey god brought her a message from her husband who then came and rescued her. The monkey god statue has a nice string of lemons round his neck, which is odd as lemons and oranges don’t grow in Sri Lanka but do in India

The villages we passed through all had a Hindu feeling about them - the womens’ saris were different, there were lots of little Hindu temples and cows roamed freelyin thestreets

Eventually we arrived in Udevaliva at a baby elephant transit camp. It’s not an orphanage although there are orphanages do exist but the elephants get used to mixing with humans and can’t be released into the wild. Here the baby elephants which are orphans mix freely with wild jungle elephants. There are 6000 wild elephants in Sri Lanka and 450 domesticated ones. They can live for 70 to 80 years. They live in a matriarchal herd, that is the females and the babies. The babies are fed by their mothers till they are 7 years old. When they reach maturity at 14 years, the young males leave the herd and live solitarily until it is mating time when they briefly return to the herd.  Only 7% of males grow tusks, they are called tuskers, and none of the females. So the Ivory is very rare and precious. Punishment for killing an elephant is rightly very harsh. Elephants have 6 sets of grinding teeth over their lifetime which fall out and are replaced as they wear down. Towards the end of their life, their last set of teeth become worn and they have to seek easier food to chew so they often migrate to marshy ground. Eventually they die of old age and so a lot of elephant bones are found in these areas. It has long been a misconception that they come to these so called elephant graveyardsto die. They don’t, they’re just looking for softer food.  There are usually 10 to 15 elephants in a herd but in times of drought they join up with others to form a larger herd to drink from reservoirs, where of course there is more competition.
Anyway the transit camp. The babies are fed 4 times a day on formula milk which is poured down a funnel and tube straight into their mouth

As soon as it’s over they trot off to where we were waiting and chew some grass laid out for them.

Except a couple of cheeky ones who tried to sneak up for seconds. The keeper stood at the river and let them come up to the feeding station 2 by 2 as aelephants should do according to nursery rhymes.  Their ages ranged from 2 weeks (ahhhh) to 7 I think.

There are over 40 young elephants currently at the centre

Only 2 weeks old!

A couple of them were tuskers.  There was also an older one who had had her leg amputated after treading on a mine.  They had fitted her with a prosthetic leg and she seemed quite happy but she could of course never be released. She would probably only live for 25 to 30 years as her leg would not be able to support her adult weight for much longer

You can see the prosthetic on the back left leg

And so on to Yala where tomorrow we will be up at the crack of dawn for a 5.30am start to our safari. This time we are hoping to see elephants in the wild.  

Day 6 Wednesday

We were off to see the Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy. It is a very holy site where the tooth of Buddha is kept in 7 increasingly small caskets, a bit like a Russian doll. No one except VIPs is allowed to view it. In fact for those of you who like a bit of dentristy, it is the upper left cranium tooth. It was removed by psychic powers at Buddha’s cremation. Apparently he had 40 teeth. Buddha is not his name, it means “all wisdom attained”. In fact he was born a prince in Nepal. He grew up, married and had a son but felt that his life was not good enough so he left to become a philosopher and after 6 years he became Buddha. This was over 2000 years ago
The Temple is approached up an avenue of formal gardens which are kept free of leaves by the latest technology in leaf blowers

The Outer building has been extensively repaired after a bomb was set off at the entrance by the Tamil Tigers in the civil unrest,

 

But the actual Temple containing the tooth is a very old wooden structures  

It is very ornately decorated with carved wood and the ceiling are gorgeously painted

Devotion is obvious. Here the altars are decorated with the tusks of Royal elephants removed after their death

Every year the Royal elephant which is a tusker, is brought to the Temple with a golden statue on its back for the special tooth ceremony.  Vendors outside the Temple sell flowers to lay on the altars, purple water lilies, fragrant frangipani, white jasmine. They are arranged on paper plates and I admired one a lady was carrying. She took a water lilly and gave it to me to lay on the altar

A monk guards the entrance to the golden statue of Buddha

There is also a museum attached where the walls are devoted with paintings of the story of how the tooth came to be in Kandy

This painting shows the death of Buddha. See how the right foot is slightly in front of the lefl

On the way out we saw the statue of a young boy killed by a wicked king because the boy’s father had been disloyal. And another on of a monk who tore down the Union Jack flag because it had been raised by the Brisish one minute early after the Sri Lanka became a British colony. However I have to say there is little resentment of colonial rule here. In fact the Sri Lankans seem quite fond of us. 

The flag is in his left hand and he is pointing one finger with his right

Well we had to do a bit of posing

Back on the coach for a fairly long climb up to the Central Highlands where the tea plantations are. Many of the plantations were founded by Scottish owners and the tea estate we went to visit was called Glenloch. Tea bushes can live for 100 years and because of the favourable climate, lots of rain and sun, the leaves can be picked every 3 to 4 weeks. The very top tips go to make white tea, the most expensive, the next couple of leaves make green tea and the next leaves make black tea, the cheapest. Only pale new leaves are picked. The leaves are dried for 9 hours, rolled to break into particles, fermented for 90 minutes to make black tea only and finally dried.

Pria at the drying table

Su showing us the tea tips 

In the case of Lidl’s economy teabags, they sweep up bits from the floor 😆

We had a tea tasting of 4 teas. Black ( Broken Orange Pekoe. This means the leaves are broken up roughly for a stronger flavour, orange stands for the national colour of Holland and Pekoe is the name of the bush variety). it is also called BOP and is what makes English breakfast tea. Then we had white tea so delicate you couldn’t taste it, then green tea and finally Golden tea which is eye watering lay expensive. No sorry, I did not find my perfect cup of tea here either. Interestingly, the Sri Lankan trade unions are lobbying for better pay for tea pickers. Young people don’t want to do this sort of work any more as it is back breaking and very badly paid. So they foresee a labour shortage in the coming years so stock up on your teabags now

The wa ages are so low, you just can’t get the staff these days 

   

 Lunch at Rambulla Falls. Well guarde by trafficpolice 

Seem like nice boys. 

 Beautiful view over green hills which are bare because the Tsunami washed away all the tea bushes.    We continued on to our hotel. The St Andrews Hoetel. Ronnie was very emotional as he was born there, St Andrews not the hotel!  Originally it had been the Scottish plantation owners’ club

  It was like stepping back in time to the colonial era, dark wood panelling, verandas where you could have your tiffin, a snooker room. All very pukka. We were served with a cup of hot soup, vchicken vegetable with the inevitable chilli flavour.

 We had a game of snooker after dinner but I got fed up with keep missing so I left Ronnie to play with a young hotel worker, Kamal. All the hotel staff had thick jumpers on while we sweltered although it was a bit cooler in the Highlands than down in Kandy. However when we left that day and passed through the town of Neuwalia I saw a man in an anorak, bobble hat and gloves, no lie.

Day 5 Tuesday

A more civilised start this morning so I could enjoy my egg hopper and chilli pickle at leisure. We were off fairly early before it got too hot to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens in the centre of Kandy. Kandy’s ambience is definitely colonial although between 1592 and 1850 it was the seat of the kings of Sri Lanka. It is in a bowl surrounded by mountains and the word Lanka actually means mountainous region. It is a world heritage site with its Temple of the Tooth Relic. Earl Mountbatten was Governor here during the Second World War and had his bungalow and offices in the Botanical Gardens. Several films have been shot here - Bridge over the River Kwai, the Temple of Doom and another one I forget. The route through the town was very congested because everyone in a vehicle had to stop at a particular temple and put a small amount of money in a dragon’s mouth on the wall for a safe journey.

Small dragon’s mouth for prayer money

While waiting for our driver to do that I noticed another interesting shop name “The Clapped Store”.

No idea what they sold. 

The gardens were extensive, well laid out in named areas  and beautiful. Some groups of primary school children were having a picnic and were sitting so nicely eating their breakfast on the lawns in their pristine white dresses. Girls must always wear a tie but boys don’t have to

 Lots of macaque monkeys trouping about, not to mention the enormous giant bats with a wing span oef up to 1.5 metres which were roosting in the trees near the river and still flying about in the light. And they stank!

 Bat in flight

Roosting and very smelly giant bats

 Anyway the interesting trees we saw were the cannon ball tree, fruits like cannon balls,the jack fruit tree which is very trendy at the moment with vegans, as the flesh of the unripe fruit is very fibrous and can be made into something which tastes like pulled pork. A very tall tree which in the past was used to poison the tips of arrows but you had to climb to the top to get the poison. I would think you would have got a bit fed up and called the fight off.

A tree which has a male and a female variety. The male has got dangly bits  and the female has rounded bosom like bits. It’s called the Coco de Mer. Tree. So that’s where the sex shop got its name from!  Cook’s Pine grows tall but wonky because termites or something attack its root.

Cook’s   Pine

Su told us that the national tree is the Iron Wood tree, the national flower is the blue water lily, the national bird is the jungle fowl and the national animal is a giant squirrel. Ronnie said it would have been better to be a sleeping dog as they were everywhere.  

Around the perimeter of a lawned area was a ring of trees planted by foreign dignitaries.  But do you know that apart from the British ones, the Queen, Harold McMillan and Princess Anne, the rest were all assassinated thereafter. So the moral is, don’t plant a tree in Sri Lankan gardens it’s the kiss of death . On we went across a narrow suspension bride where a policeman only allowed 6 people at a time with strict instructions not to rock it. If you stopped to pose for a selfie, he blew his whistle and waved his arms

. Time to leave but first we passed some huge bamboos which got us all reminiscing about the time we planted a bamboo in our gardens.  Don’t they grow big and fast?  Mine came up in the neighbour’s garden. Bill had to dig ours up in the end and he did his back in etc etc etc. 

Giant bamboo

After lunch and a short rest, we decided to take an optional excursion of a short boat ride along the longest river in Sri Lanka called the Mahaweli.

Our hotel on the banks of the Magnificent Mahaweli River

We saw so many birds most of which I had not heard of before but we also saw some basking monitor lizards

Sunbathing monitor lizard

and a and a farmer bringing his water buffalo down to the river to drink and cool off.

We also a serpent eagle in aa tree, eating a little snake. Several crows hopped around him hoping for some left overs. Sadly the photo didn’t come out too well. ,

The eagle is central and the snake is a yellow loop dangling down

 Rush rush rush. After a quick cup of tea, only about meh, we were off to see a show of drumming and dancing at the local cultural centre. I think possibly the drumming was an acquired taste. The dancing consisted of girls doing graceful dancing like peacocks and the boys jumping about with big hats on with long tails attached.

A bit of conch blowing was followed by fire eating and, gobsmackingly, walking on hot coals.

There was no trickery or sleight of hand, they definitely walked on burning coals.
Back at the hotel for dinner. For those of you worried that I will not be eating much due to my resistance to curry, don’t.  There are so many choices. It is always a buffet and always at least 6 different curries.  But there are other choices, fish, beef, eggy things, sometimes pasta. But what they all have in common is that they are bloody hot. I don’t mind that but it does mean that my intake of Lion beer has shot up.
Early night as we have another outrageously early departure time tomorrow. But at least Ronnie made a new friend