Kandian dancers and baby elephants

Lanka Medical Wine City? What is that?
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We arrived to Kandy and hitched a ride to a great guest-house overlooking the Knuckles range and the Mahaweli river. We enjoyed breakfasts in the open air restaurant at the top of the building, looking onto the tropical landscape.

We were caught a few times in the monsoons though, huddling under a tree and umbrella and yet still getting 50% wet from the sheer volume of the down pour. In our walks we stopped at a diner and had 4 egg hoppers and coffee for 60 cents total. Great deal! That evening we saw a performance of the Kandian traditional dancing and music. They dress in spectacular colors with silver chest plates and hats, colorful painted masks, and dance very energetically. There were a total of 8 dances, including the Cobra Dance, not unlike the crazy one in the Bollywood movie Bride and Prejudice. After the dances, some of the male performers walked across hot coals and rolled flaming torches up and down their tongues and arms. It was exciting to watch, but also nerve-wracking. What did they do to prepare themselves for this? And why were there only young men that did this? Were women smart enough to not try it? Where were the old performers - maybe they did not have a good life expectancy?

Kandian dancers and drummers.
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They next day we took a car to the Peradeniya Botanic Gardens. They were fantastic, with long avenues lined with various trees: the well named Cannonball tree, twist pine trees, huge double coconut palms, palmyra palms, cabbage palms… We saw lots of spice trees, including nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves. Some of the other exotic trees were the sausage tree, calabash, almond, mahogany, ironwood, breadfruit, sandalwood, giant bamboo, and a great huge giant Javan fig tree. The double coconut palm tree has coconuts that reach up to 20 kg! Amongst the trees were thousands of fruit bats, Very Large Fruit Bats. Perhaps as big as 3 foot wingspans. In the orchid house we found some great samples of the Kandian dancer orchid, a fanciful flower that shakes when blown and resembles a Kandian dancer.

Kandian dancers in masks.
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Following the gardens, we drove to the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage. This is not as sad a place as you might expect of an orphanage. There is a large herd and the females are very protective of the young, Some of the tuskers are put to work, raking and then picking up palms leaves on their tusks and carting them around. Each day they cross the street (woe be the driver whose car stalls in their path!) and go down to the river for a bath and can gambol around. We saw a couple having sex, and one guy made a half-hearted prison break across the river. First he went upstream, but a mahout chased him down and on his way back to the herd, he ran right by and made it out of sight down stream while chased by 3 mahouts. He was gone only half an hour before coming back and trying to mingle nonchalantly with the rest of the herd. The mahouts gave him a poke in his thigh for their trouble though. The elephants were quite at home with us around, and did not mind posing for pictures. They did not seem to want for anything, even a 3 legged one joined in the fun in the water. Some of the very young were fed milk by bottle, and one 2.5 year old was nursing from his mother in a separate shed.