Singapore

Flowers in the Singapore botanical garden. The colors and tranquility of the garden are perfect for a 5:00AM jetlagged walk.

Sri Lanka

Woman in a rice field

People working in tea fields. The women pick the green tea leaves and take it to the tea factory. The tea leaves are then placed in a machine that twists the leaves for a few hours and are then dried for another 4-6 hours. After that, the tea is usually taken to another factory that will put it in tea bags and package it for export. The tea picked here is often branded as “Ceylon Tea”, which was the former name of Sri Lanka. 

I took a train from Galle to Colombo and spent the entire 3 hours hanging off the side of the entrance (It was great!). I took this photo of a child and sleeping woman through the window of the compartment in front of me.

Owner of a small roadside restaurant, the food was very good.

Stairs leading up the top of Sigirya

Monkey

Kandyan Dancing performance, dancer wearing a mask

A 1 day old (right) and a 3 day old (left) turtle at a Turtle hatchery in Kosgoda. The hatchery buys turtle eggs from local fishermen for around $0.11-$0.20 a piece (a couple of cents higher then the market value, which ensures the eggs don’t get sold for food), keeps them until they hatch (around 5 weeks, depending on the species), waits 3 days, and releases the turtles into the sea after sunset so that birds don’t eat too many of them. Below that is a picture of turtle eggs (they are very soft), and newborn turtles

Painted cave in Dambula. There are 5 caves, each very carefully painted. Their use as a place of worship started around the 1^st century B.C. when King Valagamba took refuge here after being kicked out of Anuradhapura.

Man fishing in a mangrove forest, near Ambalangoda

Trail leading down from the top of the palace in Sigirya

Woman praying at a Buddhist temple

Inside of the Sacred Tooth Temple in Kandy. Sri Lanka’s most important Buddhist temple, this is the place where a tooth of Buddha was taken after being extracted from his funeral pyre in 543 B.C., and smuggled into Sri Lanka in the 4^th century A.D. hidden in the hair of a princess. The temple was bombed in 1998 by Tamil Tigers, but has since been repaired.

Oil lamps burning outside of a Buddhist temple

Man sleeping in a doorway, Galle

A wall painting depicting slim-waisted, well-endowed women halfway up the Sigiriya rock. They are believed to be either asparas (celestial nymphs) or the concubines of King Kassapa. Out of a total of 500 original portraits, only about 22 remain today. Nobody knows exactly how old they are, but it is very unlikely they are from the time of King Kassapa (who ruled in the 5^th century).

Mist in the forest around the tea plantations

The first photo shows the lit up trail to the top of Adam’s Peak, the second shows Arvo and me eating breakfast at the top around 5:00 A.M. The next photo shows monks making tea before sunrise, and the rest are on the way down. Adam’s Peak is the highest point in Sri Lanka at 2243 meters above sea level. It is believed to be the place where Adam first set foot on earth after being kicked out of heaven. Others believe that this is the place where Buddha took a last step on earth when he was on his way to paradise. It is also known as “butterfly mountain”, a place where butterflies go to die. There is a giant footprint at the top (although it was locked, inside a Buddhist temple so I was not able to see it) which supports these theories. Yet another belief is that the footprint belongs to an early apostle of India, St. Thomas or even that of Lord Shiva.

 After going to sleep around 22:30, we woke up at 1:30 and started hiking around 2:30. The hike up to the top is very painful as it is almost completely vertical in some parts (In addition to the incline, there are around 5,200 steps to the top). It took Arvo and I about 2:40 to get to the top with plenty of stops and some chai. We got there a bit too early and had to wait for the sunrise inside a shelter area built for pilgrims. Coming down was nice as we were able to see the beautiful views of the surrounding areas and didn’t need a flashlight for the steps.