After the caves, the safari and the great climb up the Lion Rock (all in the Sigiriya post), we cut our stay in the Cultural Triangle short by a day and drove south to Kandy — the old royal and cultural capital of Sri Lanka, set around a lake in the hills. We wanted the extra day here, and it turned out to be a good call.
A spice garden on the way
One of the things we'd most wanted to do — given how much we'd fallen for the food, and how much we like cooking it — was visit a spice garden and hear properly about all the spices Sri Lanka uses. So we stopped at one on the road to Kandy. It was, of course, fairly commercial, and everything for sale was far pricier than at a market, but the set-up was big and the tour genuinely informative, so we didn't mind. We came away with a couple of face creams made from local ingredients.
The day before, we'd also stopped at a jewellery shop — Sri Lanka has a lot of gemstones — and, after finding a place that felt trustworthy, Line picked out a couple of topaz stones to be set into earrings. They promised to have them ready and hand them over on our way out of Kandy, which, remarkably, they did.
Then it was on into Kandy itself, where we mostly just relaxed for the rest of the day. In the evening we walked the loop around Kandy Lake — an artificial lake dug back in the days of the last Kandyan king, before the British took over. It's a lovely walk, if a rather fragrant one: it smells strongly of birds, of which there are a great many roosting in the trees — one of which scored a direct hit on Jesper's trousers. We finished with an Indian meal in town, which Jesper (as ever) found a touch too spicy.
A giant Buddha, and a tea factory from 1938
Our full day in Kandy started high up: a giant Buddha sits on a hill right above the city (Bahirawakanda), and you can climb up inside the base and out behind the head, which makes for a brilliant vantage point over the whole of Kandy.
From there we went to see a tea factory — Sri Lanka grows a staggering amount of tea, and it was fascinating to hear about the different types and the processes that produce them. Best of all, much of the machinery dated from 1938 and was still running — wood-fired ovens and all, drying the tea just as they have for decades. We walked out among the tea plantations and had a go at picking a few leaves ourselves, which went about as well as you'd expect from four clumsy amateurs.
The way it works here is neat: the factory tour itself is free, and afterwards you're led into the shop, where you effectively pay for the tour by buying something. We were happy to — we had a cup, smelled our way through the different varieties, and bought a few nice tins of the ones we liked to bring home, both to support the place and because they were genuinely good.
A full moon at the Temple of the Tooth
Kandy's most famous site is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, which is said to house one of the Buddha's teeth. We chose not to go inside, but we walked around it — and, by luck, we were there on a full-moon Poya, the monthly Buddhist holy day, when the temple holds a festival. Watching the ritual and the crowds, and getting a glimpse of that side of the culture from the outside, was one of the nicest things we did in Kandy.
For dinner we went back to the same Indian restaurant as the night before. We'd scouted an alternative that offered much the same food at roughly double the price, and decided we'd rather return to the place we already knew — which was, once again, excellent. Noah, at least, had no complaints about the spice level.
The next morning we drove out of Kandy and up into the hill country — to Nuwara Eliya, "Little England," and the famous scenic train to Ella — but that's a story for the next post.
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