Day 21- Anyone for a Hopper?

Another day another early start. We wanted to beat the queues and get to the Temple of the sacred tooth in the city of Kandy. This is a world heritage site and is one of the most important Buddhist temples. This is because it houses the tooth of Buddha.

The legend goes that after Buddha was cremated his teeth were taken from the ashes. Over the years there have been attempts to the destroy the tooth, no attempt has been successful. Throughout history there were also instances of the tooth being stolen or taken. Thankfully however the tooth is now housed safely inside the temple. The tooth is guarded at all times and is only on display to the public for two days every ten years. We thought that the temple would be pretty quiet however the Buddhist worshipers were out in force bringing gifts and offerings to the temple. From the age of 3 months old babies are brought to the temple for a blessing. There was an abundance of beautiful flowers and incense sticks which were scattered throughout the temple at many different shrines.

The temple inside was absolutely gorgeous with lots of 
patterns, colour and gold.

After this we went to a local cafe which is supported by g adventures. The Sthree woman’s initiative was set up to 
empower and motivate low income and marginalised women to make a change and contribute to a sustainable economy. We were served some Hoppers to eat which are kind of like a pancake. We tried three different flavours egg, plain and Jugger  (this is a sweet hopper which is flavoured with a honey alternative). 

With full stomachs we decided to head to the royal botanical gardens. The gardens were stunning and housed thousands of different types of plants, flowers and trees. The stand out feature was the orchid house which contained orchids is shapes and colours I had never seen before.

There were also palm trees, roses and many other plants I had never seen before.

We went up to the suspension bridge which was extremely wobbly. I’m not scared of heights but even I was relieved to get off it. 

Walking around the park we found a teee which I have fondly named the whomping willow tree (Harry Potter reference).

There were also thousands of flying foxes which are a type of bat. I have never seen anything like it with them moving in the trees and flying around.

On the way back to the hotel our tuk tuk driver kindly stopped at a viewing platform where we had a stunning view of the city.

In the afternoon we left the city and headed to a local village. This village is called Tamarind. This is a village which is home to about 2500 people. The main source of income for these people is mining. The mining work however is very dangerous and the community is trying to come up with other initiatives to prevent mining. The other initiatives include making incense sticks, making jewellery and painting and recycling bags.

The making of incense sticks is hard work and includes working with petroleum and fragrances. The women working here can make 15000 sticks a day. The sticks are then sold however the market here is very saturated and profits are really low.

The hand painting of bags provides work for about 15 people in the village and business here is thriving. The business is now receiving international orders to the Netherlands and Canada and makes about 1000 bags a month.

During our village tour we spotted the local version of an ice cream van. An ice cream tuk tuk. It was pretty cool.

Back at our accommodation we received a crash course in making string hopper which was our dinner. You create the paste with rice flower and then squeeze it through a tool to make the string before it is boiled. This was served alongside some spiced coconut and curry’s. For desert we had fried banana and syrup. The food was amazing. 

We also got the opportunity to try local alcohol (obviously I did not turn it down) however at 33% it was a pretty strong drink.