A Quiet New Year

I woke up early on New Year’s Day and walked out on to the terrace. The mist was everywhere on the mountains. I felt like I was part of a Chinese woodcut. 

A couple hours later, John and I had breakfast on the porch. John was bored while waiting for his omelette to arrive, so he amused himself by taking artsy pictures of the staff.

We rather like our plantation house, but we were disappointed to learn that because of the New Year holiday all the activities that are usually available were cancelled for the day. The only thing they could offer us was bicycle rental. We took it.

We headed right at the end of the road. I have no idea whether than was west or east, north or south. It just looked less hilly in that direction. We stopped to notice a school.

The school, if you look carefully at the inscription on the arch above the gate, is for Tamil children. There are two major ethnic and language groups in Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese majority lives in the the south parts of the country and are overwhelmingly Buddhist. The Tamils, closely related to the peoples of southern India live in the north. They are historically Hindu. The civil war which ended about a decade ago was fought between these two ethnic groups. In addition to the native Tamil population, the British also imported large numbers of Tamils from southern India as workers on the tea plantations. These people see themselves as somewhat distinct from the Sri Lankan Tamils although they share a common language and religious heritage. These Indian Tamils are the people were had the chance to meet today. 

Today was being observed as some kind of a festival. I have no idea whether it was related to the civil near year or not, but it was the occasion to dress up a bit.

John and I noticed a brightly color building that looked sort of like a garage. Ever the curious one, he went  to check it out.

 

It turned out to be a local Hindu shrine. The priest seemed a bit puzzled by the visiting Americans but hospitably anointed us on our foreheads. 

All the locals wanted to be photographed by or with the visitors. 

We stopped briefly to look at a vegetable stand.

We continued down the road, not exactly knowing where we were headed, until we found ourselves in the village of Hatton. This is the place where we left the train yesterday. It is not as depressingly ugly as many Sri Lankan towns, but it would be a stretch to call it truly attractive.

We rode through it until we decided we needed a rest to take a drink of water. We noticed a small park and entered it. An older woman came by and made it clear that we had committed some kind of infraction by bringing our bikes inside the park, but several men arrived who apparently overruled her. They insisted on getting their pictures taken with us. First we used their cell phones, then our camera. 

We noticed later that there were a lot of rules in the park. What was curious, however, that most of them were written in English, a language that nobody seems to speak. 

 

 

John was taken by “No Huging.” It is rare that he notices spelling mistakes. But it does indicate how very conservative these cultures, no matter Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim, are about person conduct. 

 

We found a children’s playground in the park with some almost scary looking cement animal figures in it. The man who was the attendant there was adamant that we could not use our camera around the children, but indicated that using cell phones was fine. Go figure. This family was all too eager to pose.

 

 

It took us no time at all to get back to the hotel. It turned out we had been going gradually uphill all the way to Hatton, so we returned downhill at a satisfying clip. We had a wonderful lunch on the verandah. We indicated that we were a bit hungry, so we had the best curry and rice we have had in the entire trip. 

 

We also had a delightful surprise when we returned. Our first room at the hotel had been perfectly serviceable, but it was small and had no window to the outside, only several to the hallway. As all the French had departed, they gave us a big room for our final night. Yay!!!

 

 

In the afternoon, Thanindu took us to see a couple waterfalls in the area. 

 

 

 

We then stopped at some tea plantation whose shop was open despite the holiday. It was weirdly shaped like a castle. It seemed like something you might find in Gatlinburg instead of Sri Lanka. It had this weird thing out front. I guess it was some piece of old tea processing equipment. 

 

 

You entered the gift shop by this enormous tea pot with a fake coat of arms. Really, I am surprised they did not think to erect a moat.