Tea plantations

After a good buffet breakfast we drove up to a viewpoint to get a panorama of Kandy Lake, the Temple and the town.

We continued to a gem museum. The place wasn’t as flash or polished as in Chiang Mai but they were very informative about different stones. As we emerged from the museum a band from Muslim school marched past. The girls in hijab were playing “Oh when the saints go marching in”!

At the Botanical Gardens we had a walk around. The more notable trees for me were the very big and spread-out banyan tree and the African Sea coconut. The latter is actually a land-based plant from Seychelles which westerners first saw at sea.

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Leaving Kandy for Nuwara Eliya, we stopped at an Ayurvedic massage place next to yesterday’s lunch stop. We were given small loincloths to wear and lay on very oily wooden massage tables. Ayurvedic herbal oils were drizzled on us while given a light massage. The experience was consistent with a previous Ayurvedic massage I’ve had in Kerala and it was enough for me to conclude that I don’t like this form of massage. I prefer strong heavy massages.

Also, with today’s massage, the staff seem to go “everywhere” with their fingers and I was rather wary. The massage was followed by a herbal steaming treatment.

The highlight of the day was probably Glen Tea Estate and its factory.  We were given a tour of the factory with a good explanation of the process. The biggest take-out for us was that western tea and green tea comes from the same plant; it is basically fermented vs unfermented. Outside of the factory building, the estates were very picturesque. The countryside was dotted with similar multi-storey (three or more) factories.

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We stopped at a restaurant by a waterfall for a lunch of club sandwiches as we continued to Nuwara Eliya. It was a very windy drive. We were given a little tour of some of the town’s historic buildings such as the English Tudor style lodges and the post office.

Our hotel, the Windsor, looked like a rundown modern building from the outside. Fortunately it was very nice inside. We ate in-house for dinner. It was a choice of chicken or a four-egg omelette, the latter being a little strange in my mind for dinner.