Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Kandy

Traveling south in the more mountainous interior, we have spent a couple of days in Kandy.

All roads leading to Kandy are curving and swooping (I could see myself coming back here with a road bike and spending a week just riding hills - supercharged by Tuktuk exhaust). The city centre is nestled around a narrow lake, but the rest of the town sprawls across the steep surrounding jungle slopes like a Japanese landscape painting. I can only infer the lake is man-made as the main street leading to the train station and impressive rugby green is *downhill* from the lake.

This is tea country. The hills surrounding Kandy are where the tea that made Ceylon a household name in England is grown and processed. Appropriately enough, we visited a historic tea factory not far from our guest house.

The factory demonstrates how tea was processed in the late 1800s at the peak of the British empire. From winnowing the leaf to grinding, fermenting, drying, sorting and grading, featuring all the cool archaic 1880's machine technology and an actual working 1:100 scale model of the process.

Of course, there was much discussion about how all tea in the world comes from a single species of plant, but the terroir imparts important and distinctive characteristics which can be enhanced or modified with various processing techniques. I am reminded and impressed, once again, the endless human capacity for geeking out about the details of something as simple as boiling leaves in water to make it taste better.

The other claim to fame in Kandy is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. This shrine houses what has been interpreted to be a "left tooth" of the Buddah himself. Apparently scavenged from his funeral pyre, this dental totem was spirited off to Sri Lanka 800 years later, and has historically been known to take a somewhat interventionist attitude toward royalty in Sri Lanka, amongst other miracles.

The temple grounds where the tooth is preserved (in a series of protective cases, covered with a gilded roof, behind the opulent curtain above) are an important pilgimage for Sri Lankan Bhuddists, and is located on the picturesque lakeshore in the centre of Kandy.

We also found beer in Kandy (there was no beer to be had in Sigiriya, it being Sunday and Christmas and all) which helped with the humid heat. Memorable meal #3 came from the Moslem Hotel, which was curiously out of most menu items in the middle of the day, but made a killer biryani and spicy samosas, all washed down with a fresh lime juice!

We enjoyed the afternoon just walking around the lake, seeing some of the local wildlife hanging around the trees...

... and enjoyed some of the unique architecture and sights of a pretty little city, completely mired by noisy, stinky traffic. Progress.

Then saw an evening performance of traditional dance and drumming, which is what tourists do. The drummers were excellent, and the dancers were athletic / graceful as per their assigned gender roles. There were some remarkable acrobatics, and even some expert plate spinning. A well-spent hour!

 

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