Savouring some Kandy
Khaled
and Katleen gaze as far as the eye can tea and visit the centre of Sinhalese
national pride, Kandy.
January 2005
The journey from Nuweriliya to Kandy is not so long but it winds endlessly along narrow mountain roads (which were being widened by Chinese contractors during our visit).
On our way, Raja asked if we wanted to stop off
for a drink. We had tea on a hilltop terrace café with an impressive view of
the surrounding hills and tea plantations. The establishment had an eerie
British Raj gentleman’s club feel to it. As we slouched in our practical travel
gear, the waiter approached us dressed in an exquisite white suite complete
with a bow tie.
Our tea arrived in a classic white china tea
set. Katleen’s and mine were black and Raja’s was white. Although the Sri Lankans
had borrowed this custom from the British, they had adapted it for local
conditions by adding cardomine and other spices to the milky tea.
We sipped our tea and surveyed the beautiful
landscape. From our comfortable vantage point, we could see the effects of the
massive British relandscaping of these fertile hills. Sri Lanka is linked in
the popular imagination with tea and I tried to imagine what the Hill Country
looked like before the British arrived.
Our eyes strayed on the occasional figure of a
tea plucker whose entire day’s earnings would just about pay for the round of
tea we were now enjoying. Raja suggested we could visit a tea factory on our
way to Kandy and see how the precious leaves were processed into the endless
varieties of chay.
Shortly after we resumed our journey, we began
to smell a funny burning smell. When I looked out of my window to investigate,
I found that one of the back wheels was letting off a large amount of smoke. We
kicked our heels while Raja tried to cool down the brake discs which had
apparently overheated from overuse.
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©2004 K.
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Sri Lanka’s lost highway
We finally managed to roll a little further
downhill to the nearest garage where we were stranded for another couple of hours
while the mechanic attended to the minibus. Our immediate surroundings were
made up of this small and greasy garage, a police checkpoint manned by two
skinny and harmless looking young men, and a storage area for the Chinese
roadworkers. This sparse community was the upper appendage of an unseen village
somewhere off the road in the trees below.
The mechanic was a fit middle-aged man who cut
quite Guru-like figure with his grey hair, glasses on the tip of his nose,
sarong and bare torso. His young children/grandchildren milled about making
merry with what little there was at hand. The two boys and the girl played with
filthy ribbons of packaging paper which they threw at one another and stuffed
under their shirts to construct a belly.
The little girl then took to monitoring Katleen
from a safe distance. Strange creatures like us didn’t often land in her world.
After a while, she disappeared into the back of the workshop and came out
carrying a chair that was almost as big as her. She placed it in front of
Katleen and offered her a seat. Katleen was touched by this gesture of
hospitality from her new friend. We produced a packet of biscuits for the girl
from our bag and the way her face lit up when she saw it was priceless. She
took it and went off skipping and dancing to her brothers with whom she shared
her new treasure.
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©2004 K.
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As far as the
eye can tea
We finally arrived at the tea factory at the
end of the working day. Most of the workers – mainly women – were packing up and
cleaning their machines. An ingratiating male supervisor showed us around and
some of the women stuck their hands out for money when they thought our guide
wasn’t looking, some even pointed at their mouths.
They obviously weren’t sharing in the profits
of the Sri Lankan tea stocked in supermarkets around the globe. It was
interesting to see the laborious processes tea went through before it landed in
our teapots and it was frustrating to see the appalling conditions these women
worked and lived under. While multinationals, such as Lipton, and rich
landowners get the choicest cuts of the profits, the workers receive the dust
leftovers.
We finally arrived in Kandy at Mr Lindon’s Blue
Haven guesthouse. We sat out on the terrace late into the evening having
dinner, drinking, talking. We ran into the two Australians we’d met earlier at
Lindon’s office in Colomba. Just as cricket mad as the Sri Lankans, their trip
had been planned around the Australian cricket team, who were in the country to
play a test series.
Although it was a pleasant place with friendly
staff, we found Lindon’s better half to be as unscrupulous as her husband and,
the next morning, we left after a minor argument.
A taste of
Kandy
With the mountains behind us, we could now
continue our journey as free agents. We booked into a guesthouse near Kandy
Lake called the Lake Inn which the proprietor insisted had a lake view – which
it did, if you stood on tiptoe on the top floor and exercised a certain amount
of imagination!
During European colonial times, Kandy was the
capital of the last independent Sinhalese kingdom which resisted European
expansion for 300 years. It managed to live alongside the Portuguese and beat
back the Dutch but was finally broken by the British. And Kandians, as we found
out from the locals, are proud of this history of resistance, and the Sinhalese
cultural stronghold that Kandy represents.
The city’s very name evokes images of sugar and
spice and all things nice. I wondered if the English word ‘candy’ might
actually be a reference – like ‘ceramics’, ‘duffel’ or ‘cashmere’ – to the
birthplace of the stuff. The Oxford Dictionary tells me that the word is
derived from archaic Arabic for crystallised sugar ‘sukkar kandi’. There goes
my Hansel-and-Gretel fantasy of a city made of sweets! That said, Kandy is a
much more pleasant city than Colombo but there are hustlers galore on its
streets.
Taking a walk along the lakeside is a pleasant
experience. The beautiful lake, which is lined with temples and monasteries,
lies at the heart of the city. It was constructed in the 19th
century by the last independent ruler of Kandy but is a rather modest affair in
comparison with the massive artificial lakes, known as tanks, that were
constructed further north for irrigation purposes centuries earlier.
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The Dali Lama cometh
Where the pavement narrowed beside a small
outbuilding, our path was blocked by a man bowing in reverence towards the famous
Temple of the Tooth on the other bank of the lake. A little annoyed that he
should obstruct a public thoroughfare at its narrowest point, we waited
patiently for him to finish so we could move on. After he mumbled the last
breaths of his prayer, he turned to us apologetically: “Sorry, I was just
praying because today is a very important day for us Buddhists.”
“It’s okay,” we said as we tried to pass him.
“Do you know why it is an important day for
us?” he asked.
“No, why?” I responded.
“Today, the Dali Lama has come to visit Kandy,”
he enthused. “And we are all very happy,” he added as he bowed in reverence
towards the Temple and kissed his hands.
He continued that the Dali Lama, after visiting
their Malwatta Monastery and the Temple of the Tooth, would attend the folk
dance show that evening. He said that he was a dancing teacher and helped train
the troupe of dancers who would be performing for the great spiritual leader
that night. He said that, if we wanted to go, it would be best to get tickets
well in advance and he could help us because they had some in the monastery.
By this stage, we were beginning to smell a rat
and, after exchanging glance, Katleen and I wanted to extricate ourselves from
this man’s clutches. We’d read in one of our guide books that the school of
Buddhism practiced here was at odds with the Tibetan variety, so we found it
odd that the Dali Lama would want to visit Sri Lanka, even if he wasn’t busy
rubbing shoulder with the international jet-set class.
He led us through the monastery and some kind
of school for orphan girls, through some winding passages, and into a dimly lit
book and souvenir store. By this point, loud alarm bells were ringing and we
exchanged a few discrete remarks about beating a hasty retreat. He showed us a
book of tickets which looked dodgy and asked us if we wanted a couple. We said
we weren’t sure what we were going to do that evening and would come back later
when we decided. His protestations that it would be too late were to no avail.
We decided to find the official office selling the tickets and buy them from
there.
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©2004 K.
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Holy molars
The Temple of the Tooth is surrounded by
mean-looking police barricades and, at night, it is a big lake-side black hole because
the authorities switch off all the street lights around it to deter attacks. I
wonder how effective a measure that is since a would-be assailant could simply
fire a rocket into the darkness and there’s a good chance he’ll hit something.
Although the civil war is officially over,
political tensions are still quite high. One manifestation of this are the
fortifications set up around Buddhist religious sites – a favourite target of
Tamil separatists.
While we were in Sri Lanka last year, the
election campaign was in full swing and Sinhalese nationalist forces managed to
make important gains. This setback triggered a wave of violence soon after we
left. Now, in the wake of the Tsumani, there are reports that the army has not
been letting enough aid through to Tamil areas and has been using relief
supplies as a political weapon.
But, aside from the barricades, conflict seemed
to be the furthest thing away from people’s minds as Buddhists, Hindus and
Muslims swarmed past us on this bright sunny day.
Buddha’s molars are reputed to be buried on the
site of the temple. Worship at the temple is a family affair and, inside, is a
scene of pure chaos. Although there are some impressive shrines inside the
temple, the ranks of plastic Buddha statues strike my non-Buddhist eyes as
something of a kitsch eye sore. One shrine was exclusively for children. This
is perhaps where they receive the little black dot, similar to the Hindu bindi,
on their foreheads.
In Buddhist temples, there is a strict
injunction against posing in front of statues for photographs. This is because
it is seen as sign of disrespect to give Buddha your back. Out of respect for
local customs, we made certain to stick to the rules. However, we felt annoyed
by a family that struck ridiculous poses in front of the statues when they
thought the guards weren’t looking. Speaking a mixture of Hebrew and French,
they found their escapades hilarious. We found this display of ignorant and
arrogant tourism embarrassing and, after pointing out the signs to them, we
rushed ahead so as not to be associated with them.
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©2004 K.
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Being a Muslim, I am accustomed to taking my
shoes off in mosques. The trouble with walking around barefoot in a Buddhist temple
is that you have to make your way outside across baking tiles which, while not
exactly in the same league as walking across hot coals, is fairly
uncomfortable. Knowing that pain resides in the mind, I tried to reach into
that part of my soul that would distract me from my sizzling soles. Failing
miserably, I started walking on tiptoe to reduce the contact surface.
Outside, there was a sanctuary for older women
– all of whom are dressed in white – and a platform where you can light an oil
lamp. It reminded me of a Belgian beginhof and Katleen thought that the
women were probably widows. There was also a sacred bodhi tree under whose
shade Buddha is said to have sat meditating. This is surrounded by a
purpose-built, multilevel shrine on which the faithful offered up their
prayers.
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©2004 K.
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Myth and folk
lore
In the evening, we went to see the Kandy dance
show which is put on by the city council and, judging by the audience, seemed to
be targeted exclusively at foreigners in the city’s crumbling theatre. All the
dancers were elaborately done up and some of the traditional dances were quite
acrobatic; one included plate spinning, another was reminiscent of twirling
dervishes.
The fully ornamental master dancers, in all
their regalia, were fascinating if for nothing more than their clanking
costumes. After the Sri Lankan national anthem was played, the real touristy
fun began, with fire swallowing and walking over hot coals. After the show
ended, we walked out into the dying city, even though it was still pretty
early.
After a lacklustre dinner at a South Indian
restaurant, we went for a walk round the city’s almost deserted streets. The
main activity seemed to be around dodgy-looking alcohol dispensaries with
uninviting barred windows which seemed to bear the implicit message:
‘Alcoholics welcome’. Since we would be rising very early to visit the elephant
orphanage, we decided to head back to our guesthouse to get some shuteye.
Next time: The elephant orphanage, the Buddhist
cultural triangle and Galle.
Part I – Serendipity and the city
Part II
– Where Buddha
meets Adam
ã2007 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.