Sri Lanka

 

The jungle welcomed us warmly. As in hot and humidly. But we didn’t even care, because it was green, lush and awesome. We stopped for lunch here during a downpour.

We stayed the first two nights at Thilanka Resort and Spa. It was very cool. We made friends from Belgium and went for night time swims.

Golden Temple in Dambullah. The kids are with our tour guide extraordinaire Chanaka. Whom Bode called Chonkala the whole time.

The first day we went by ox, boat and tuk tuk to see village life in Sri Lanka. Many Sri Lankan’s have moved to the city or to larger townships, but many still live in small villages, thatched roofs and work the land.

I couldn’t quit taking photos of all the green open space.

My two W’s on a jungle trail. Whitt was such a trooper. This trip had no semblance of a schedule and it was so flippin’ hot. We were sweating buckets the whole time.

This woman cooked us a traditional Sri Lankan meal over fire and cast iron pots, in her mud hut. She also showed us how to separate rice from their kernels and how to thatch a roof. Tessa asked me of I could “do that thing with the rice” and I replied that if I had to cook like this woman and thatch a roof, that my children would starve and get rained on at night. As for the meal…it was delicious enough that I only thought about diarrhea potential once.

This half naked happy Sri Lankan charmed me near to death (he owned the small plantation). And then Whitt turned around and charmed him near to death. But Whitt does that to everyone.

The tree house was a hit with the kids. The farmers sleep in them during growing season to keep a watch on their fields. When they see or hear an unwanted visitor, they fire a gun in the air to scare them off. Elephants can eat a lot of produce…

View from the top.

We all ate our weight in bananas those few days.

Our ride out of the jungle started with a boat and ended with a tuk tuk. The Sri Lankan equivalent of a taxi. These cute little rides are everywhere, village to jungle road to city. Their drivers maneuver them like maniacs and climbing in one can be a death wish. The fact we never saw an accident still stuns me.

After emerging from the jungle village, we hopped on an elephant. Wade and I decided about 4 minutes in, that this 45 minute elephant ride was going to be about 35 minutes too long. It is actually more confortable to hop on a camel. I also decided that if something happened and we fell off that elephant and into the swamp where she was pooping and where water monitors (lizards the size of small children) were swimming, that would be it. The end of Katelyn Banks Hunt as you know her. The old girl did keep throwing up her trunk a top her head though requesting more banana’s. It made Tessie giggle every time, and therefore Wade and I as well. It was pretty darling.

I was a bit skiddish…

That one time someone told me to get on the elephant first and then they’d had me my baby…

A few places we went, T and I were made these necklaces out of water lilies, the national flower of Sri Lanka.

Check out the elephant going for Tessa’s hat and her face! Cracks me up!

Later that evening we went into Minneriya National Park for a jeep safari. It was a trip highlight. The weather had cooled down, temps were perfect. Bode was in a jeep and couldn’t have been happier. Whitt was sleeping dreamily in his car seat. Tessa taken with the wild animals with in arms reach. And Wade and I, marveling at our good fortune and vistas on every side that warranted taking your breath away.

These baby elephants and their mama’s stole my mama heart. The one below on the left our guide told us was just two or three days old.

We got really close to this guy. Close enough, that we were apparently encroaching on his personal space. Seconds after this photo was taken, he turned toward our jeep and started charging. Fortunately, our driver knew just what to do. We all screamed like school girls and bolted away. It was an exciting little moment! Male elephants we learned live alone. They leave their mothers and the herd, around the age of 14 and venture out on their own, around 18 they’ll start mating. ‘Like humans’, our guide said. Hilarious.

Whitty, taking in the world.

A windblown beauty and a labrador. Bode had his head stuck out the window of the jeep the entire 4 hours we were in the park.

The W’s.

Day three we had a three hour drive to Kandy, but made a few stops along the way. The first at a spice garden, where we sampled cinnamon trees and got suckered into buying skin cream guaranteed to permanently remove body hair. Read: Wade’s back hair. Stay tuned…if it works, it will be the best money we’ve ever spent.

Bode sniffin’ vanilla bean. Moments later, I cleaned off the shelves of the bottled form. You can’t buy vanilla anywhere in the Muslim world, due to trace alcohol content. So I bought 5 bottles and smuggled the contraband in. It’s remarkably fragrant.

The 7 spices and process that make up the spice you and I call curry. Coriander, cumin, anise, rampe, cloves, cardamom and turmeric. This stop was actually an eye opening moment for me. When I want a spice, or a cinnamon stick or some aloe vera, I just go to the store and buy it off the shelf. What I don’t do is think for 2 seconds about how it got on that shelf and the process that went in to making it for me to buy. I was really taken a back at how lengthy and tedious some of it is. A cinnamon stick for instance, is actually about 8 shavings, cut off the bark of a cinnamon tree, wrapped and laid to dry for 6 months.

Our next stop was the Hindu Temple.

I love this picture. Wade saw this photo, laughed and said, “Yep, that pretty much sums it up.” It was taken right before Bode busted a move…

Right behind the temple was a small nursery school. It was letting out just as we were walking by. We stopped and were talking with some of the children when the head mistress invited us in. It was another highlight. I love these moments when we can step out of tourist and step into real local life. I also loved that my children can see what school looks like in those areas of the world that are less fortunate. This little school was a far cry from the $10,000 private education Tessa gets in Dubai and I’m glad she saw it. Education is what will heal the world I’m convinced and it’s so valuable no matter where in the world you are, or what it looks like.

This little girl and her big smile stole my heart.

Sri Lanka has but one high speed highway or toll road. The infrastructure is still pretty primitive. As a result, we spent a lot of time in the car getting from place to place, but it allowed us to get pretty up close and personal with everyday life in Sri Lanka. I loved watching their world go by outside the car window. It just amazes me how differently we all live.

Everyday in Kandy we drove in front of the local fire station. We went ahead and made Bode’s day and stopped in one morning. The firemen could not have been more kind.

Our third night in Kandy, we stayed in at the Rhandholee Resort. I loved this place and wish we could have stayed one more night. It was up high on the mountain with amazing views of the valley and city of Kandy. We had the best afternoon swimming and jumping in the pool. The staff was so nice and accommodating.

I could die.

That evening in Kandy we stopped by a batik factory, quite the involved process…caught a cultural dance show, the kids were most impressed with the swallowing and walking on fire…and visited the Temple of the Tooth Relic, an old Sri Lankan palace converted into a Buddist Temple, and where I understood about 4 of the 4,678 words our Singhalese speaking, stroke victim tour guide spoke to us. So don’t ask me anything about it, I don’t know, other than it’s very holy and there is an actual tooth in that golden vase.

See that golden vase towards the back? That’s where the tooth (which belonged to a Buddha) is…I did understand that much. They only open the door to view said tooth in golden vase three times daily. And once a year take it out and put in on an elephant and walk it around Kandy Lake. Buddhists come from all over the world for this festival.

Offerings to Buddha.

The next morning we stopped in at the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage on our way back down to the coast. Wade and I decided shortly after arriving that orphanage was just a much nicer way of saying ‘ a zoo for injured or sick elephants’. There was an awful lot of shouting and prodding with a spikey stick to be called an orphanage in my book.

Twice a day they walk the elephants about 1 km down to the river to bathe and cool off. They were pretty cute to watch, spraying each other and lounging about.

Chonkala and I are having  a good laugh, we’d just had the following interaction: Hi! I Japanese! I take shutter of family! He was nodding so eagerly, it was all we could do to just stand there and smile. Then we got a picture of our real family.

They really are HUGE animals. And Whitty, a huge happy baby.

This elephant was the victim of a landmine about a decade ago when Sri Lanka was embroiled in a civil war. His leg was blown off and he was brought to the orphanage in Pinnewala. I had never thought about animals being affected by landmines, but they too take great risks when crossing a field to look for food.

The Sri Lankans are resourceful if nothing else. This woman is making paper from elephant dung. Which there is loads of in this country. I went ahead and bought a few notebooks.

Another favorite was the turtle sanctuary in Bentota. This stretch of beach in Bentota has for years been a hotspot for sea turtles coming in from the sea to lay eggs, hatch and then return to the ocean. A turtles instinct is very strong and the moment they come out of their eggs, they start walking directly to the ocean.  They will also swim thousands of miles to return to the SAME stretch of beach where they were hatched to lay their own eggs years later. Isn’t that amazing? In recent years, poaching of the eggs has become a problem, so this turtle sanctuary set up shop on the beach and ‘rescues’ the eggs once they’re laid. They bring them inside the sanctuary, re-bury them and when they hatch put them in large tanks for three days, allowing their eyes to open, their belly buttons to close, let them get a little stronger and then they release them into the ocean. They’re the cutest little things you ever did see. They also have a few large turtles they’re nursing back to health that have been injured, caught in fishing nets etc.

Our last night in Sri Lanka we dined al fresco on the beach. The kids ran around in the sand and came to the table for a bite now and then. The weather was dreamy. It was a pretty perfect way to end a pretty perfect week.

The last day on the way to the airport we hit a few Columbo hot spots…like the Parliament Building.

Whitt…this trip was rough on this dude. And as a result tough on mom. He was just old enough that he couldn’t fall asleep anywhere at anytime but not yet old enough to power through. We were on the go non-stop, there were so many occasions where we would FINALLY get him to sleep, only to stop the car 20 minutes later to have him wake up. Not sleeping during the day translated to not really sleeping at night, so Whitt and I would find ourselves pacing the jungle at 2 in the morning while the others slept in the hotel room. The jungle isn’t a bad place to pace at 2 AM if you’ve got to, however. I was wasted at trips end, but will of course go ahead and say it was well worth it. We came home and got Whitty back into a routine. He was a trooper. Aside from being exhausted, he was also sweaty 99% of the time. Poor little lamb.

Presidential Monument. Look at Whitty Bear looking up at his daddy,

And if there’s one thing I will take away from that great 6 days in Sri Lanka, it will be memory of watching these fisherman. We stopped by the side of the road one morning to watch them bring in their nets. They start at first light, laying the nets, after waiting a spell for them to fill and with the help of spotters in the water ensuring the nets don’t tear, they will start the process of slowly, carefully bringing them in. Spanning an area the size of a football field and dropping 200 feet deep, it will take them nearly 3 hours. They’ll coil the huge nets on the beach with each heave-ho. It was fascinating. And just amazing to me this world we all live in, and that we all belong to the same one. We all live so differently. The clothes we wear, how we source and eat our food, what we fear and what we enjoy, what we believe and what we value. And yet at the same time, are alike in the most fundamental of ways. We all wake up every morning all over the world with the objective of doing our level best to create a good life for ourselves and those we love and take great care in creating a space we call home. Common threads in the tapestry of life. It’s the most remarkable, beautiful thing this human race. And I feel in debt to the warm, kind people of Sri Lanka for calling attention to this life truth that I’m usually too busy to embrace.