Another busy day today!

We started a little later than usual, enjoying a wonderful buffet breakfast on the 4th floor over looking Kandy. There were four Chef stations – one cooking eggs any way, one slicing freshly baked bread, another with an omelette station and lastly a pancake station. Happy days! The view from the breakfast room included a cricket ground:

After packing – and using the hair dryer to dry the clothes we washed overnight that weren’t quite dry, we hopped back on the coach and headed back into Kandy city.

First stop this morning was our last temple visit for the trip – Kandy’s famous Tooth Relic Temple. Next stop was the most beautiful Kandy Royal Botanical Gardens – so many amazing colourful flowers, orchids, trees and other plants.

 We had lunch in the garden grounds. Dave had ice-cream!

Can you spot the mistake here: Then back on the bus for the trip further up into the mountains of Sri Lanka. The views along the way were wonderful. The surroundings and climate changed the further we travelled with roads studded with busy towns changing into pine and eucalypt covered narrow roads that snaked their way through many lush green tea plantations.

At one stage a young boy approached the bus as we came towards a narrow hairpin bend, holding a bunch of flowers he wanted us to buy and waving madly. As we came around the other end of the bend he appeared again, with more waving and showing of flowers. As we wound our way up the hill, he scaled the mountainside between the roads a little like a mountain goat and kept appearing on the roadside, flowers still in hand, smiling broadly. Finally the bus stopped and we gave him some money for the flowers, a fair reward for running nearly straight up the steep hill! We stopped at the Glenloch Tea Plantation (note the Scottish name) for a tour and explanation of tea farming. This included a turn at tea plucking. For $5 a day I’m not sure it’s a job I would want to take up. We then tasted the varieties of tea produced, which was fascinating. I didn’t realise green tea, black tea and white tea all came from the same plant… just different leaves of the plant. (First picture: left leaf = black, right leaf = green, tip = white)

Another hour or so on winding roads saw us reach our final destination for the day – Nuwara Eliya – one of the highest spots in Sri Lanka. At nearly 2000m above sea level it is actually quite cool at night here… it got down to 9 degrees overnight tonight!

Dinner was a buffet in the hotel then off to bed to prepare for another busy day tomorrow.