Day 7

We left for Kandy, but first we visited a fruit market, where farmers were directly selling their crops to sellers, without middle men. The place is best described as a crowded, organized chaos, where many men were doing some seriously heavy lifting of big piles of fruits and vegetables.

We also visited a local family that owned a small coconut plantation and demonstrated how every part of this tree is put to good use. The juice and pulp from the nut for consumption, the fibers from the shell of the nut to make ropes an mats, the leaves are turned into roofing materials and fibers from the leaves into brooms. These brooms are widely used throughout the country as it seems that everybody is sweeping their porches and property almost every day. The dead leaves that are being swept up are put in a ditch by the road and set on fire, making the country as a whole probably slightly less ideal for people with asthma or COPD.

Lastly we also stopped to visit a herbal garden where we had a tour on the grounds and received information about the plants and herbs and their use in Ayurvedic medicine. At the end of the tour and before another lovely local lunch, we had the opportunity to get an Ayurvedic massage and I opted for a nice foot rub. Now, I don’t know if this foot rub released some bad karma or whether a week of two spicy meals a day was finally proving to be too much for me, but something did start to feel funny in my tummy.

In one of the suburbs of Kandy we witnessed our first traffic accident. A man driving his bike quite irresponsibly through heavy traffic got scooped by a truck. After this happened, the people that rushed to the scene of the accident, did not really spent time triaging or stabilizing the victim, but literally picked him of the street and dragged him to the side. When it comes to driving in Sri Lanka, I have definitely seen worse, but I’ve seen better as well. The roads are generally very good, much better than Belgium and some places in the US, but I think that the thing that saves most lives in traffic in this country is that people drive at relatively low speeds (prevented from speeding by heavy traffic) and the fact that drivers appear to be constantly aware of the potential of unexpected things that can happen, or perhaps it is not even unexpected for them anymore. For instance if two cars approach a bottle neck in traffic, it seems to be clear to everybody that the last one to get there is the one that has to break. So every situation that almost leads to an accident and us Dutch people would perceive as irresponsible, here seems to be interpreted as another perfect example of how things have the tendency to turn out well for everyone all the time.

As we arrived in Kandy early, we visited a wood shop before a show by Kandy fire-dancers started that is traditional for this region. The show was okay, but it was performed in Western-type but not very glamorous event room in a hotel, which made it look at bit cheap. The last part of the show, with the actual fire was performed outside in the parking lot of the hotel.

The hotel that we were staying at in Kandy, was much more luxurious, with stickers on the sliding doors to the balcony warning us to keep the doors closed at all times to keep the monkeys out. During dinner there was a live band again, with the same-old repertoire. It did however motivate me to make a little dance with Sammy and then they started to play this Sri Lankan song about the beauty of Sri Lanka. The lines of the chorus are just laaa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-laaa and Sammy had put some efforts into teaching us this part during the previous days, which was not as easy as it seems, as the melody is quite a bit more tricky than the lyrics. We did make him proud however by whole-heartedly singing along, more people from our group started dancing and at one point even the cooks and busboys came from the kitchen to watch the little spectacle. Also a Dutch women from Australia that reminded me of Erica Terpstra, joined the party with some of her travel mates that had initially been shyly witnessing the party from the side.