Kandy Town

Kandy is supposedly the cultural center of Sri Lanka.  I'm not sure.  I know that it is a busy town with the worst vehicle exhaust we have experienced. Kandy is also a happening spot for food, shopping and even sports a hidden yet very modern shopping mall. 

Kandy is famous for a few things.   It is the repository of the Sacred Tooth Relic, a tooth salvaged from the Buddha's funereal pyre. This relic makes Kandy the most important Buddhist site in Sri Lanka. The tooth has been in the cistody of many folks over the years. Even the British, knowing the tooth's importance, kept it safe from harm. 

The Kandayans held off the British longer than the lowland folks and they are pretty proud of that, but the finally succumbed about 1815. So it goes. 

The other thing about Kandy is the big artificial lake in the center of town. The last local ruler had the lake dug in the early 1800's.  Apparently there were a few protests over the required digging so the head honcho had the reluctant diggers impaled on stakes placed in the bottom of lake bed.  It seems production increased as a result. 

My Baby in the scrum of merit makers. 

We walked to the Temple of the Tooth, checked out shoes, and entered the fray. It was literally a scrum to get up the stairs and near the doorway to the chamber where the tooth is kept. The chamber is rarely open and when it is the tooth is still inside six nesting gold caskets. So, no seeing the tooth. 

This site is so important that when the Tamil Tigers wanted to strike hard against the government, they planted a truck bomb here at the temple.  The 1998 blast did extensive damage to the temple buildings.   The bombing is depicted in a fairly heavy-handed way in one of the museum exhibits on the temple grounds. 

Making merit with clouds of incense and oil lamps. 

The juxtaposition of faith.  Oil lamps inside the temple and a colonial era steeple outside the grounds.  

Templed out, we circumnavigated the lake and traipsed through the busy market. The butcher section was sort of a study from one of Bosch's medieval horror paintings.  A man toasting the hair off a cow leg over an open burner, another man holding a section of flayed skin, bloody bits here and large meaty chunks there.  No nice tidy shrink-wrapped meat here thank-you-very-much. 

After bloody bits it's time for some finger food. A damn fine plate of fish and chicken biriyani to tide us over until....

Oops.  Forgot about the big feast back at the guesthouse. We put out a gallant effort on everything but the kilo of rice. Chicken, papadam, curried pineapple, roast taters, eggplant and okra. 

It was coma time after second dinner so we gave the night over the the symphony and let the day go.