Botanicals

About seven kilometers South of Kandy lie the Royal Botanical Gardens.  Now open to us common folk, the gardens were a former Royal hangout.  

Our wee urban train blocks our walk to town. 

We walked our now familiar route on the narrow road from St Bridget's guesthouse to Kandy Town.  Although the walk is interesting and at times pretty, there is also the Tuk-Tuk dodging and the seemingly ubiquitous Kandyan clouds of exhaust fumes. There is something about the shape of this valley or some weird pressure inversion that holds the diesel and two-stroke smoke close to the ground. It can be pretty powerful.  

We skirted the busy market, dodged a few Tuk-Tuk touts and found our local bus.  In heavy, smelly traffic and packed elbow to jowl, we made the run to the gardens.  Freed of traffic and the human scrum, the gardens were an idyll of calm, with lovely strolls past young local couple and families. 

Ah, the green and fecund air. 

There were sculpted English gardens, tangles of jungle plants, and an orchid house. The air was delicious, heavy and fragrant. 

Myriad orchids of all colours and varieties. 

And trees.  Really really big tropical trees. This one rose to the sky in an almost perfect column.   

The ficus section was one of my favorite parts of the gardens.  This is a ficus benjemina, that most notorious of house plants which will drop all its leaves in a plant pout if you move it to the other side of the room.  Oh, how I have struggled with these.  And yet here was the grandfather ficus, crossed branches growing together in an impossible tangle of a tree, branches dipping to the ground, rooting, and shooting off another forty feet horizontally. It was amazing. 

My One, she does not like heights so much.  Yet there she is on the tiny and very wiggly suspension bridge. 

A local guy advised me against jumping from the bridge.  "Crocodiles" sez he, pointing.  Otherwise I guess a thirty foot plunge into a murky Sri Lankan River would be an A-number-one-good-idea.  

Aside from the wonders of the plant kingdom, there were our primate friends. Everywhere.  Lots o' Monkeys.  Many barrels worth.  

And fantastic jewel-like beetles.  

We walked the garden for several hours.  I shot some cool videos which I will try to post when I have wifi again.  Tired and hungry, we swung onto a Kandy-bound bus with hopes of a well deserved dinner, but that is the stuff of the next post.