Our schedule was a bit lighter for this day, so we started a little later for our trip up the mountains to Nuwara Eliya.
We started with finishing our visit in Kandy by heading to the Holy Tooth Temple located near/on the palace grounds of the last Singhalese king. It also happened to be a national holiday, so there were numerous visitors to the temple – lucky us! The temple was interesting though with the inside holding a very Chinese-style temple, but then combining Hindu/Buddhist decor and methods. It was quite an experience, but somehow not as disturbing to me as some of my trips to Japanese temples.
Sri Lanka – Kandy's Holy Tooth Temple17-Jun-2010 21:25, 6.6, 6.3mm, 0.004 sec, ISO 100
From there we stopped at the botanical garden, which was lovely. Sadly my camera battery died in the temple, so I was left to take photos with my iPhone, which did a decent job, but wasn’t the same. It didn’t seem to be high flowering season, but it was nice to see so much lush green, trees and some blooming flowers. π
We continued on, but stopped briefly at a silk shop. They were very eager to sell us something, but neither of us were much in the mood for silk products. Unfortunately, they were a bit too keen for me and immediately caused me to put up a wall – besides the fact that I’m a very slow shopper! So, we didn’t buy anything and why go to Sri Lanka to buy silk, I mean really?
Our drive up to the Bluefield Tea plantation was a climb passing numerous tea fields and factories. The view of the valley and mountains was spectacular, but it got cloudy in mid-afternoon and since my camera was dead we had to wait to take photos. Still, our visit to the plantation was quite interesting. Families are paid a minimal salary to pick tea leaves, though they are provided with housing and transportation. The factory puts out about 1 ton of tea a day and the pickers must meet a 20kg quota per day. The process for drying and packaging the tea leaves seemed quite simple, but it is the second-largest export for the country, so I imagine it requires much more than we saw. I hadn’t realized that most Lipton or commercial black teas are just packaged Sri Lankan tea!
We, of course, bought tea. Also, I had been wanting some good green tea for a while, so I bought some of theirs after a taste test and deciding it was almost as good as the tea I might find in Japan. π
Our night was spent at a mountain-high old-style British hotel called St. Andrew’s. It reminded me a bit of British Hills in Japan, though not nearly as traditional or conservative in maintaining “tradition”. Our room was cute with a space heater, which was actually needed! Thus ends our last night in Sri Lanka. One more day….
More to come…
-T
