Kandy to Dambulla

8:00 a.m. start—our driver was so funny. He drove like a maniac to get us to the Pinnela Elephant Orphanage for the 9:15 baby elephant feeding. The place was filled with school kids and tourists. It was, however, wonderful to see all of the elephants being taken care of. There were about 50 of them wandering around. After feeding, they all headed to the river for bathing. What a site!

The driver had some definite views on both Muslims and Indians: “Southern Indians don’t like to be clean…they chatter like monkeys”, “I don’t like Muslims- I don’t know why. They eat like dogs and make noises with their mouth”.

We drove back through Kandy on our way to Dambulla. We stopped at Aluvihara- a rock monastery. We got a demonstration of inscribing the Buddhist scriptures on palm leaves (and bought a piece of a 500-year-old (??) Buddhist manuscript).

The caves were bizarre---they were filled with murals of the “price of sinning” (people being impaled by devils, having their heads cut open and their brains scooped out, having to climb on trees of thorns). It was quite a horrifying site (hard to imagine the effect on the buses of school kids being paraded through the caves!)

A stop at a batik factory- the process was fascinating, the results were awful—tacky clothing and tablecloths at outrageous prices.

Our last stop was at a spice garden. This was actually interesting- to see the source of curry, cardamom, cocoa, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon. After the “tour”, we sat down for “Sushi’s Revenge”—we were on the receiving end of “What’s that Smell”.

We’d had enough factory tours and it was time to head for our hotel in Dambulla— a lovely guest house- complete with 8 rooms, a restaurant and bar, a pool, and rooms with A/C and mosquito nets. Time to catch up on the journal and relax.
Well, the guesthouse might have been lovely- but the restaurant sucked! We got a bottle of local wine- and discovered that it was made with passion fruit- not grapes…and wasn’t the best. We followed that with a two hour wait for our dinner- vegetables and rice with stale bread….