Elephants and Temples

Elephants Everywhere

Having a bite to eat on the way to work

In Sri Lanka we are lucky enough to see elephants often. Driving down the road we may meet one on its way to work with its trainer or mahout. Elephants are still used in logging because they are not as hard on the jungle as heavy machinery.









You may wonder what elephants and temples have in common and the answer is Sri Lanka has a ton of temples and the elephant is sacred, so you find it at every temple, on the walls, in the paintings and statues and sometimes even live elephants stand inside the temple grounds waiting to greet you.

Hindu temple with Ganesh in multi-color

Hindu god

Hindu Temple

Buddhist Temple with seated Buddha

Standing Buddha

Jenise, Debby and Rick at ancient dagoba

My favorite temple-wall elephants

In our travels around Sri Lanka we have seen many Buddhist, Hindu and some Muslim temples. Some of the Buddhist and Hindu temples date back to 3 BC with huge dagobas and Buddha statues.

Monk statues going to the temple

Real monks going to the temple

Dagoba all decked out

There are still elephants in the wild but not many. They live in the National Parks, in the jungles and on the ocean, and our teacher friends took us on a safari to see them. Of course they were far away and we did not get close to disturb them, but it is good to know they still have wild elephants in Sri Lanka.

Bull elephant in Yala National Park

Sunrise in National Park

Our safari friends

A stork looking for breakfast

Lotus pond in Yala National Park

When Emily and Mary Ann visited, we went to the Elephant Orphanage where they care for wounded and orphaned elephants. There we could watch them bottle feed the baby elephants and take them to the river for a bath.

Mary Ann, Margaret and Emily hang'n with the elephants

More milk please

Oh that feels so good

Tea Country

Tea  Country

One of the most beautiful parts of the country is in the mountains where the tea plantations flourish. It is not far from where we live on the coast, but it requires a 5 to 6 hour bus ride, so we have only visited a few times, and each time we are in awe of the stunning views.

Our friends took us to Lipton's Seat perched on the tip top of a mountain with a 360 view of tea plantations in every direction. The narrow little road was filled with hairpin switchbacks that were so sharp the van had to do a forward-back maneuver at every turn. This was further complicated by the other cars and vans going up and down, so there was a lot of jockeying just to reach the top where the tiny parking lot had vehicles jammed in to the point I was sure no one could get out.  But after tea and treats and several peeks at peaks through the parting clouds, we managed to squeeze though and make our way back down the mountain.

Our host family and friends

From Bundelawala we traveled with our friends in a van to Nuarwela or Little England where we spent the night before boarding the train to take my sister to the airport. This town is filled with European architecture and flowers everywhere that were in full bloom. The town bustled with vacationing families from Colombo and Galle enjoying the cool, almost cold weather.

Families enjoying the park on their holiday

Children in the park all dressed up for New Year's

Victoria Gardens

We spent most of the day in the beautiful Victoria Gardens which was such a welcome refuge from all the roads jammed with traffic and sidewalks crammed with shoppers. It was filled with vacationing families who wanted to have their pictures taken with us. Such fun to interact with the children who are sure we are from another planet.

Before we got on the train we decided to tour a tea factory that was just 3km out of town. The view of the women picking tea in the waist high bushes was great. They pick only the top two leaves of each branch and after they have gathered a handful drop it into the bag that is strapped around their head and hangs on their back. The bag is emptied every two hours and they each pick 20 to 30 kilos a day. Very hard work on very steep terrain wearing only flip flops. The tea is picked every 15 days so you can imagine how many pickers that requires... Millions!

Tea factory

The tea is processed within 24 hours to make sure the flavor and smell is retained. There are four types of tea... Orange pekoe, broken orange pekoe, broken orange pekoe fine and dust or tea bag tea. The price and the quality go down until you get to the most bitter which is the dust.

Women picking tea with bags on their heads

Sampling the good tea

250,000 to 500,000 kilos of tea is processed at each factory every year and that is after it is dry. Where does it all go?

Tea wilting process, one of many long bins.

Sri Lanka New Year

Sri Lanka New Year

April 14 is New Year's Day for the Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka and for most of Sri Lanka this means weeks of preparation and celebration. Houses are painted and cleaned,  new clothes are bought, and  holiday treats are made to be ready for a week of celebrating.

Gamini serving tea in his yard

Our hosts, Gamini and Dhammi's home

Gomini outstanding in his (tea) field

We had the great fortune of being invited to one of the University professor's home for the New Year. The family lives in the mountains, so we reveled in the cool weather and the lush surroundings of tea plantations, rice paddies and vegetable gardens. It seemed like paradise.

Hiking the very steep tea plantation above the house

 Dhammi, our host, had spent weeks making treats including a Sri Lankan version of the caramels that we make. The dodol requires 10 coconuts that require splitting open, grating by hand and squeezing the milk out of the coconut to be used in the candy. The milk gets put into a huge pot over a wood fire and 4 kilos of jaggery, a palm sugar, is added, and then it gets stirred for an hour and a half with the coconut oil being skimmed off as it cooks. The dark brown liquid is poured into a flat pan and after cooling is cut into small squares and makes 8 kilos of bars. This is just one of many time intensive treats that were offered again and again with tea at everyone's home.

New Year's treats of every kind

At New Years everyone visits each other and tea is served at every visit with a huge tray of sweets. Sri Lankan hospitality in spades. One day we visited friends and relations of the family and had tea 7 times. Needless to say between the very sugared tea and the sweets we had quite the buzz on.

Time to eat with the whole family

New Year has an inauspicious and auspicious time that require certain traditions to be performed. The inauspicious time started at exactly at 7pm on New Year's Eve, and at that time all activity stops including eating, working, driving, and  cooking. We were entertained by the daughter and sons of the family playing guitar and singing. Lovely.

Dhammi's kitchen

Dhammi stirring the milk rice over the wood fire

At the auspicious time all over Sri Lanka, exactly 4:06am, fireworks went off, and everyone lit a fire in the clay wood-fired stove in the kitchen and the kiribath, or milk rice, was put on. This required more coconuts to be grated and squeezed to make coconut milk that was then cooked with rice. At 7am more fireworks went off and we were allowed to eat, but before we did this Gamini, our host, made a ball out of the milk rice which he hand fed to each of his kids and then gave them money wrapped in a leaf. To show their respect to their father they got down on their knees,  bowed and touched his feet.

Dishing up the milk rice

Gomini giving his son the first bite of milk rice at the auspicious time

Windows Into Nepal

View of the Himalayas from our Hotel

Windows into Nepal
February 2013

Our amazing trip to Kathmandu gave us a glimpse through the Nepal window of time. It was like traveling back through the centuries to see how people lived their everyday lives.

Rickshaw Drivers Waiting for Customers

Selling Clementines in the Street

Although Kathmandu is  a very dusty polluted city, it is filled with living history, the streets lined with ancient buildings busy with markets, school kids, motorbikes zooming by, laundry hanging out windows, bicycles carrying huge loads of wood, carts laden with bricks, women carrying large baskets of sand, and chickens running about.

The Pots and Pans Traveling Salesmen

Chickens in the Streets

We were in Kathmandu to attend an English Language Fellow summit and present at the Nepal English Language Teachers Association Conference. It was great fun to meet the other Fellows and teachers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal.

Jenise and Her Fellow ELFs

While we were there, we got to do a bit of sight seeing and saw several World Heritage Sites. The Hindu Temples and deities were amazing, one of them houses the living Goddess Kumari, who is a 7 year old girl held in the temple until she becomes a woman. The belief is that this Goddess is reincarnated every 13 to 15 years and is taken to live in the palace/temple. Seeing her is very lucky, but alas, she was not a the window when we were there.

Women Glazing Pots in the Square

We also got to see a Maoist parade celebrating the government transition to the Mao Party.

The Palace of 55 Windows

After the conference, we spent two days in Bhaktapur, an ancient city just outside Khatmandu which was the capitol of Nepal in the 12th to 15th centuries.
Amazingly the buildings with hand-carved window grates and doorways have survived.

Carved Door to Place

Religion and everyday life go hand-in-hand with a shrine in every courtyard and on every corner, and a huge Durbar Square filled with multi-roofed temples and giant lions, elephants and bulls guarding the stairs that lead up to the deities at the top.

Five Roofed Temple in Bhaktapur

Riding the Winged Lion that Guards the Temple Door

One of our favorite sites were the wells where the women gather water in big metal pots from alligator spouts at the bottom of the walled structure.

Woman Getting Water in the Well

Girls at the Well

In this city the ancient crafts are kept alive, so you see hundreds of clay pots laid out to dry, women winding long, long warps on the streets, men carving masks and clusters of women knitting on doorsteps.

Winding a very long warp and threading a reed in the street

Pots waiting to be fired

Namaste