Screeching monkeys awoke me this morning. They were running around on tree outside our room, and all over the outside of nearby hotels. The run up drain pipes, swing along cables and balance on hand rails. Occasionally there would be a fight between different bands, so there was aggressive charging at each other and louder screeches.
We ate a typical Sri Lankan hotel breakfast this morning:
- A plate of prepared fruit; banana, papaya, pineapple and melon
- An omelette with diced onions and chillis, Sri Lankan style
- Pancakes with honey
- Toast with butter and jam
- A pot of excellent tea
The breakfasts are so substantial they keep us going all day. They also keep you “going”, no worries in that department.
After breakfast we had to decide where to go tomorrow. We are making this trip up as we go along, which can be time consuming making decisions about the next hotel, there are plenty to choose from. Our strategy is to look for hotels and guest houses in a price range, about £25 to £35, in the right part of town. Since we haven’t been to any of them before, that location is a bit of a stab in the dark!
I just love my iPad Mini! To find hotels I connect to t’internet and use Trivago/Booking.com/Expedia/Agoda/Tripadvisor, and so far Expedia has proved most useful. If I look up a place on Google Maps, I keep the app open as I travel around. the map can show me where I am with a blue dot, without being connected to the internet. it’s magic! If I get bored I can read the books I have downloaded on Kindle, or listen to BBC podcasts I have saved on Radio iPlayer. I am writing my blog on it now, and incorporate photos I have taken on the camera. Because it’s small and light, I can carry it around everywhere. Right now I’m sat on a bench in the serene botanical gardens in Kandy. Once I get back to the hotel I can edit this and post it.
A tuk tuk brought us to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, a few miles out of the city centre. Our driver dropped us at a side entrance and we crossed a narrow suspension bridge to get in. It became a Royal garden in 1780, at about the same time Kew Gardens was being established in London. After the last King of Kandy, Sri Rajhadi Rajasinhe, was deposed by the British, they set up a garden on the Kew model in 1821. There are pictures of these gardens in the Marianne North gallery at Kew, painted when she visited here in 1876.
The tropical trees are very impressive, some are well over a hundred feet high with mighty buttressed roots. I expected to see David Attenborough dangling from a rope at the top. There are groves of giant bamboo eighty feet high, but only twenty centimetres in diameter. There are huge collections of palms from all over the tropical world. I didn’t spot a specimen of my own Chusan palm, I had it chopped down in the summer because it was too big for my little London garden. My favourite was the mighty Queensland Kauri tree, a massive podocarp pine.
In the tree beside the river, thousands of fruit bats were roosting, hung upside down from branches. They truly live up to their other name “flying foxes”, with wingspans up to a metre across. They make an unpleasant squeal that sounds like a pig, not the squeak from British bats.
One of the major benefits of travelling in Ceylon is that you can get a good cup of tea. It comes in a proper pot, and they serve it with hot milk, it’s delicious and just what you want on a scorching hot afternoon. If they had a tea room inside the palm house at Kew, it would feel just like this.
We got a local bus back to Kandy which cost us fifteen rupees each, which is about eight pence. The three wheeler that took us to the gardens cost five hundred rupees. Our laundry needed collecting, so using Google maps magic we located the laundry and walked up a lane to find it. I heard a bang on a corrugated iron fence which I thought was a dog, then I saw a yard long yellow snake slither rapidly into the undergrowth. The walk back to the hotel was along the main road into Kandy, and it was jammed with traffic. There aren’t many proper wide pavements, so you walk down the road and keep looking carefully!
Our next accommodation in Dambulla is now booked, and we are planning a trip to the hill country at after that.
timharnesstravels 