John arranged a bike ride through out hotel yesterday. This is one of their many prearranged tours. They promised to take us through the countryside on bicycle and then to put us on a boat through a lagoon to an island where we would have a picnic. It sounded fun!
We met our guides around nine in the morning. There were only the two of us on the tour and there were two guides to accompany us and a tuk tuk driver who would be following us. This seemed a little ridiculous, but we have learned to simply accept the attention as if we were one of the Granthams on Downton Abbey. After all, these folks need jobs.
We had not gone far when John remembered that he had not brought along some important medication. The tuk tuk driver took him back to the hotel. I waited right by the wonderful gates of this Buddhist temple.
John soon joined us
but we had not gone far when the gears on his bike began to malfunction. He sat down and waited while the men tried to fix it.
They finally adjusted it so that he was perpetually in low gear. Not the best solution possible, but it allowed us to continue on.
Our guides brought us first to a small farm where they were processing coconut shells. The fiber from the shells, called coir, is extracted first. This is later woven into strands that are made into things like rugs.
The remainder of the shell is ground up and used as soil amendment.
Our guides proudly told us that absolutely no part of the coconut palm is wasted.
We rode on a bit more and stopped amid a group of cinnamon trees. John sat down by this odd bit of the American Southwest in South Asia.
We have some fully grown cinnamon trees near us in Los Angeles. They are large and handsome specimens. But the trees we were shown looked like badly potted ficus trees from an office building. They seemed more like bushes than trees, each with half a dozen tiny trunks. Our guides led through the fields to a small cement building that looked something like a garage. Inside a half dozen people were working.
The guides explained that each year one of the small trunks of the tree is cut off. The rest are allowed to grow. The leaves are set aside to dry. They will be pressed and turned into cinnamon oil. The bark is stripped off the branch. It is all done by hand.
This bark is what we call cinnamon.
We walked a little further and came to the plantation owner’s home. It was quite deserted. We were told that he lives in Columbo now and rarely comes here.
John had fun exploring the almost empty home.
In a little bit our boat was ready.
They insisted we wear life jackets which make me look even fatter than I am.
Mr. Pratt looks fabulous in anything.
Our boatman was friendly.
We landed the boat on the island. Our main guide motioned us to walk a bit up a hill to what looked from a distance to be a Portuguese church.
But as the iconography reveals it is a Buddhist temple. And absolutely one of the most amazing ones I have ever seen. A resident monk who spoke passable English was our guide.
The interior of the temple is dominated by a particularly beautiful image of the Buddha.
Around this inner sanctuary is a kind of ambulatory with other pictures of the Buddha and devotees
and scenes from the Buddha’s life. This one recounts a time when he nursed a monk who was ill with smallpox.
We still do not quite understand the hand decoration iconography but it is certainly striking.
Possibly the most curious thing about the temple is the fact that it is dedicated to the god of revenge.
Outside is the usual stupa and Bodhi tree.
We had our lunch — not that different from the breakfast that the hotel had packed yesterday — seated on the shore by our boat.
It was pretty hot by the time we were to leave, but John found a way to stay cool.
Returning to the hotel, we just lounged around for the rest of the day. We walked down the beach and splashed in the warm Indian Ocean water.
And we lounged by the pool.
It has been a wonderful time here in Sri Lanka. Tomorrow we will be starting our journey home.
