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Kandy and Nuware Eliya
center of Sinhalese culture, where we visited an elephant orphanage, the botanical
gardens, and the Temple of the Tooth (a sacred Buddhist site supposedly housing one
of the Buddha’s teeth).
On the way, we stopped at some waterfalls, visited a tea factory, bought some bananas, saw
an old woman with a puppy, and fed some monkeys.
photo (left), we felt obligated to give them some money.
According to Asanka, these particular tealeaf pickers
spend more time posing for photos than picking tealeaves.
and with its cool weather and cloudy mountains, it
was a welcome change. There, we played golf
and took in a Sri Lankan New Year’s festival.
spectacle.
this was only because young Sri Lankan females are
expected to avoid such parties and instead “take
dates” exclusively in their parents’ homes. To me that
didn’t fully explain the man-on-man dancing, hand-
holding, embracing and cuddling I witnessed--not just
at this festival, but all over Sri Lanka. Apparently,
there are significant cultural differences here
regarding acceptable physical contact between two
guys. Believe it or not, if two guys here are holding
hands while walking down the street, they are most
likely straight. At least that's what I was told, and I
believe it, because the only alternative is that every
single guy on this island is gay. Not that there's
anything wrong with that . . .
Note: We actually spent one full day in Colombo before fleeing to Kandy. Colombo was unbearably hot and humid,
crowded, polluted, smelly, noisy, and had remarkably little to see or do, so it deserves no more acknowledgment
than the following two photos:
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